I'm curious to hear your thoughts on trauma bonding and how it relates to the different characters in Hannibal? Abigails storyline in particular makes me so sad!
So a lot of people don’t know what actual trauma bonding is and confuse that with “bonding through trauma”. I’m unsure which one you mean, but I’ll talk about trauma bonding, which is when an individual bonds with their aggressor. This happens in relationships where affection and abuse (or neglect) alternate unpredictably. This creates a cycle of intermittent reinforcement, which is the same mechanism that makes gambling so addictive. When rewards (love, approval) are unpredictable, the brain clings to them even more.
Instead of recognizing the abuser as a source of pain, the victim sees them as a source of relief from pain…because the abuser is also the one who provides moments of comfort.
Trauma bonding is one of the show’s most pervasive psychological dynamics, shaping the relationships between characters but also the show’s exploration of power, control, and devotion. Hannibal, as a master manipulator, excels in forging trauma bonds with those around him, binding them to him through a calculated mix of protection, intimacy, and destruction. But, his approach varies depending on the person. While his trauma bonds with Bedelia and Abigail are deliberate and controlled, his relationship with Will is far more chaotic, mutual, and ultimately self-destructive.
With Bedelia and Abigail, Hannibal enacts a textbook trauma-bonding strategy. He ensures that both experience intense psychological distress while positioning himself as their protector, creating a cycle of dependency. He forces himself into their vulnerabilities and secrets.
Hannibal orchestrates these relationships meticulously, knowing exactly how to push his victims toward dependence. He makes himself indispensable to them, ensuring they feel both indebted and trapped, thus securing their loyalty.
With Will, the dynamic is different. While Hannibal undoubtedly trauma bonds Will to him, inflicting suffering, ensuring his emotional isolation, and making himself the only person who truly understands him, he does so in a way that spirals beyond his control. Unlike with Bedelia or Abigail, Hannibal does not want Will’s loyalty to stem from coercion or manipulation alone. He wants Will to choose him.
This is why Hannibal does not use the same explicit tactics on Will as he does with others. He does not force Will into submission in the way he does Abigail or Bedelia because, on some level, he respects Will as an equal. More importantly, he wants Will’s love, not just his devotion or fear. While Hannibal undoubtedly orchestrates much of Will’s suffering in the first season, their bond becomes something beyond Hannibal’s initial “design”.
Whereas Hannibal carefully crafts his trauma bonds with others, with Will, the bond is mutual, volatile, and unpredictable. They both become aggressors and victims, binding each other through pain, understanding, and a shared inability to let go. Hannibal’s methods of manipulation may have initiated the cycle, but by the end, Will is just as much a participant. The line between who is controlling whom blurs, making their relationship a perfect example of how trauma bonding can evolve into something neither party can entirely dominate.
For both Will and Hannibal, their bond is simultaneously soothing and destructive. They are each other’s greatest relief and deepest wound, unable to exist apart but suffering when together. Attachment persists even in the face of undeniable harm.
Will makes the same choice as Hannibal: to sacrifice everything for the bond they share. Even when he could have walked away, he chose to stay, to become an aggressor rather than sever the connection. This is what separates Will from Bedelia or Abigail: he was not simply manipulated into dependence; he reciprocated, ensuring the bond became a two-way tether neither could escape.
Abigail’s situation is more complex due to the gaps in our knowledge about her father’s relationship with her. However, if her bond with Garret Jacob Hobbs mirrored the one she developed with Hannibal, then she is perhaps the most textbook example of trauma bonding in the show. Her survival was dependent on submission, compliance, and the internalization of her captor’s worldview. This pattern repeated itself with Hannibal, reinforcing the idea that, for Abigail, safety and danger were inextricable.
Hello! I got my friend to watch Hannibal with me. They commented that they were uncomfortable because they felt that the show pushed the notion that people with mental health issues are dangerous. I was wondering if you would like to discuss how mental health is handled in the show?
Criticism of media portrayals of mental illness comes from a misunderstanding of what representation actually means. When a TV show or film depicts a character with mental health issues as dangerous, it is not making a blanket statement that all mentally ill people are dangerous…it is simply exploring a real aspect of human psychology. While it is true that the majority of individuals with mental illnesses are not violent, it is also true that a significant number of violent crimes have been committed by individuals with untreated or severe mental disorders. To deny this reality is to ignore a crucial and often tragic aspect of mental health discourse.
The argument that showing mentally ill characters as dangerous reinforces stigma assumes that the media is creating this association out of nowhere. However, violent or erratic behavior caused by certain mental conditions is not a fictional construct, it is a well-documented reality. Disorders like schizophrenia with psychosis, untreated bipolar disorder in manic states, severe personality disorders, and dissociative disorders with aggressive alters have, in specific cases, contributed to acts of violence. This does not mean that every person with these disorders is violent, but it also does not mean that depicting the real cases where mental illness plays a role in crime is inherently harmful.
Is your friend also criticizing all shows who depict something negative?!
If a show portrays a serial killer with psychotic delusions, it is not saying that all people with psychosis are killers, it is portraying one possible outcome in an extreme case. Just as a show might depict a corrupt cop without implying that all cops are corrupt, or an abusive parent without implying that all parents are abusive, mental illness as a narrative element should not be seen as an accusation against every person who suffers from one.
Stigma does not come from representation, it comes from a lack of nuance in understanding that representation that your friend is a part of. A person who watches one depiction of a mentally ill criminal and assumes all mentally ill people are criminals is someone who already lacks critical thinking. The responsibility for that ignorance does not lie with the show: it lies with the individual who refuses to differentiate between fiction and general reality.
In fact, suppressing certain depictions of mental illness in media may actually do more harm than good. If stories only show mentally ill people as victims, misunderstood heroes, or entirely harmless individuals, it creates an incomplete and dishonest portrayal of reality. Some people do suffer from extreme cases of mental illness that lead to dangerous behavior, and pretending otherwise does a disservice to both mental health discourse and public safety.
It is not the job of media to sanitize reality to make people comfortable, it is the job of viewers to engage with media critically. A nuanced show does not simply present a mentally ill villain, it explores the complexities of their condition, the factors that led them there, and the impact of their actions. The presence of a dangerous mentally ill character in a story does not mean the work itself is stigmatizing, it is the way the audience interprets it that determines whether stigma is reinforced.
The stigma is perpetuated by those who refuse to think beyond surface-level portrayals. A well-written show that presents a mentally ill character who commits violence is not spreading misinformation, it is depicting one real possibility among many. The danger lies not in acknowledging that some mentally ill individuals can be dangerous, but in allowing ignorance to dictate how we interpret these portrayals.
The kind of love that blots out the sun, that hushes the noise of the world until there is only them. A love so all-consuming it ceases to be love in the soft, mortal sense and becomes a sickness, a fever, a religion.
This is the love that fandoms return to again and again, that they etch into timeworn stories, endless iterations of two souls drawn together not by choice but by fate, or something crueller. The love that does not leave room for worry, errands or bills or the dull weight of daily existence. The love that, in its overwhelming totality, is an escape, from the world, from the self, from the unbearable burden of being.
To be relieved of individuality, to dissolve into someone else’s gravity until there is no “I,” only us, only this. It is annihilation disguised as devotion. It is salvation with teeth. It is the reason we write and rewrite the same stories, analysis, metas, essays, musings, this post right here, not because we want to see love, but because we want to feel it take over, to remember, for a moment, what it is to forget everything else.
Overwhelming love, take me. Wash me clean of the dull edges of reality. Make me disappear into the blissful darkness of you.
Will does not possess a conventional form of empathy. His relationship to killers is not rooted in emotional resonance or moral concern, but in psychic permeability: a structural openness that allows external identities to inhabit him. However, this permeability is not universal; it is specific. He does not absorb just any identity, he absorbs those that reflect a latent structure within himself. In this sense, his ability is not methodical nor voluntary. It is not emotional empathy, nor is it rational profiling. It is an involuntary resonance…a deep, structural identification with acts of violence that mirror something pre-existing in his psyche.
This is why Will only “empathizes” with killers. The violent act serves as a key that unlocks his inner architecture. He does not become possessed by killers in the supernatural sense, but rather, he temporarily dissolves the boundary between himself and the killer, allowing their psychology to animate his own body. The result is not compassion, it is identification. He does not simulate their actions analytically; he experiences their intentions as if they were his own. He embodies the logic of the crime because its logic echoes something in him that was already unspoken.
When he occasionally empathizes with victims, it is never spontaneous, it only happens when the victim reflects an identity Will already contains: isolation, fragility, misunderstood innocence. But his natural point of entry is not vulnerability…it is violence. This doesn’t make him violent, necessarily (but it can) but it does mean that violence has a language that his psyche understands.
In this light, his permeability is not passive openness, it is selective attunement. The killers don’t impose themselves on him; they are invited in by the haunted architecture of his own self. He doesn’t “catch” their consciousness like a virus. He reflects it, because it was already latent.
Thus, Will Graham is not empathic: he is a mirror. But only to the shadow.
If you think Bedelia told Will that Hannibal was in love with him, you’re wrong.
When Will asks her plainly, “Is Hannibal in love with me?”, Bedelia does not offer the comfort or constraint of a simple “yes.” Instead, she replies: “He daily feels a stab of hunger and finds nourishment at the very sight of you.”
This is no evasion, but precision. Bedelia is the consummate observer, the only one perhaps capable of reading Hannibal accurately not through empathy but through pure intellect, refrains deliberately from naming the feeling as love. Because she knows better.
To say Hannibal is “in love” would be to reduce him to the category of the ordinary. It would be to align his experience of desire with that of humans, those who love and pine, who miss and regret, who fall and suffer. But Hannibal does not fall. He devours. He consumes. His longing is not sentimental but carnivorous. He is not wounded by love but sharpened by appetite.
Hannibal and Will both occupy a liminal space beyond the structures that define conventional emotion. They are not simply men, but something Other. Beasts, Fallen Angels, mirrors of each other’s darkness. For Bedelia to claim that Hannibal loved Will would not only be false, it would betray her own intelligence, and her understanding of what Hannibal is. Hannibal does not love in human terms. He feels hunger, fascination, aesthetic rapture, a sublime compulsion that transcends the human vocabulary of affection.
And that is precisely why Bedelia’s choice of words matters. He finds nourishment at the very sight of you.That is not love. That is need on a mythic scale. So, no, Bedelia did not tell Will that Hannibal was in love with him. She told him something much worse.
Do you envision a post-canon future where Hannibal stops hurting Will?
I think Hannibal would do anything to keep Will around. I think canon sort of proved this, in a way. So if hurting Will became unfunny to Will, then yes. But the problem is that Will enjoys that aspect of the dynamic and keeps circling back to it. I don’t think he’d enjoy it as much without getting marked by Hannibal. So Hannibal would only stop if Will genuinely wanted him to. Because Hannibal doesn’t actually need violence, but Will does, he’s the one who craves it so intensely he repressed it. Hannibal craves something else, not violence itself. Like Will, like Francis.
Could Will and Hannibal still fall in love without the violence?
The short answer is: no. Not truly. Not completely.
Perhaps Hannibal maybe, just maybe, could have. His love, though monstrous, is contemplative. He knows there are other means of influence. He understands tenderness, charm, seduction, patience. He knows how to be still and let another unravel themselves before him. But Will understands violence. And not just in the physical sense, but in its existential form. Love, for Will, is not real unless it wounds.
Molly offered him love, the kind that is soft, steady, human. And it was not enough. It wasn’t that he didn’t care for her, but that her love asked nothing of him beyond presence. It didn’t consume or threaten him. It didn’t make him feel unique.
Because for Will, love is only meaningful when it comes from someone whose affection is rare, impossible, unreachable. He wants to be chosen by the one who cannot be swayed. He needs the attention of the one who pays attention to no one. And that’s Hannibal.
Will doesn’t enjoy being looked at. He shrinks from attention…except Hannibal’s. Hannibal’s gaze is his drug. Bedelia says it clearly: Will becomes so addicted to Hannibal’s attention that he stops thinking rationally. After the end of season one, everything Will does becomes an orbit around Hannibal’s gravity. It’s not logic. It’s hunger.
He wants to be the one who changed the monster. That’s what distinguishes Hannibal’s love. Not its purity, but its cost. Its impossibility.
And that’s why he hates Bedelia. Not overtly, but deeply. Because Bedelia was left untouched by Hannibal. She slipped past his teeth. Will mistakenly interprets that as softness, as vulnerability. Something Will thought he alone provoked in Hannibal. Bedelia’s existence challenges Will’s uniqueness. And Will’s love is possessive. He needs to be the one.
When Hannibal kills Abigail, it is not cruelty, it is retaliation. She was the symbol of Will’s power over him. Her survival meant Hannibal had changed, had bent. When Will saw that she was alive, he told Hannibal, “I already did (change you).” He believed he had changed the unchangeable. That Hannibal was no longer the monster. And that shattered Hannibal’s carefully preserved self-image.
So he made a choice. He destroyed Abigail, not to punish Will, but to remind him: You didn’t win. You don’t own my heart. I am still the monster. I choose who I am. Remember who I am.
But the tragedy is, Will had already accepted him. In that moment, Will might have run away with him. If he had known Abigail was alive sooner, if he had known there was hope, he would’ve gone. Because Hannibal wasn’t the monster anymore, not to Will. But it was too late.
Could they love without violence?
Maybe Hannibal could.
But Will cannot.
He doesn’t recognize love in its gentler forms. He rationally knows it exists. But he does not feel it. Not when it is safe. Not when it is soft.
For Will, love must undo him. It must destroy. It must leave something broken in its wake because only then does he believe it is real. And Hannibal knows this. He has always known this. That is why, of all the means at his disposal, he chooses violence.
Because that is what Will understands.
That is what opens his heart.
Not in spite of the violence, but because of it.
But why does Will only seem to recognize love when it ruins him?
Perhaps the answer lies in his deepest, most hidden places, the ones he keeps even from himself. Will is not whole. He is repressed, folded inward, suffocating beneath layers of self-restraint and ambiguity. His own mind is a cage, and though he keeps the door closed, something inside him longs to be undone. Maybe he doesn’t want to be himself, not the self he performs, not the self that pleases, not the quiet man with the dogs and the pain he never names.
He wants to be taken apart.
Because he believes, deep down, that the truth of him is buried beneath the rubble of everything he was taught to be.
And only destruction can dig that deep.
This is why he was drawn to his work…because, without realizing it, it broke him. It wore away his boundaries, cracked open his empathy until it spilled everywhere. His sanity frayed not by accident, but by unconscious desire. He walked into the fire without knowing he wanted to burn.
And then there was Hannibal. Hannibal, who did not flinch.
Hannibal, who watched Will unravel with interest, not pity.
Hannibal, who understood that love is not just affection…it is force.
To Hannibal, love is not kind. It is not tender. It is not soft music and easy mornings.
It is gravity. A law of the cosmos. A magnet drawing opposites into union. A force.
But union is not peace.
Union, true union, is violent. Because when two become one, both must be destroyed. The ego, the fear, the separation, everything that says I must dissolve so that we can be born.
This is not romance. This is alchemy.
Will only recognizes love as destruction because, in its truest form, that’s what love is. It dismantles. It tears open. It annihilates everything false.
And he wants that.
Not just to be loved, but to be unmade.
To find what lies beneath the performance of humanity. To reach the raw core.
And he knows he cannot do it alone. So he seeks the one who is willing to ruin him, who sees his ruin not as a tragedy, but as a revelation.
That is why he does not run. That is why he cannot stay with Molly.
That is why he will always come back to Hannibal.
Because the love he believes in, the only love he feels, is the one that makes him disappear, and through that, he can finally see himself.
Watching Hannibal and picking up on the foreshadowing that Will was meant to die at the end
sacrificing himself for Hannibal
“he became Achilles on the field of war, he died for him there, wearing his armour”
not that Will was wearing Hannibal’s armour in TWOTL but be finally accepted himself and shed his own ‘shield’
I see that and I raise you: the opposite.
We are often thrown between roles while watching the show, just as Will and Hannibal are. And in the moment where Hannibal is drawing Patroclus and Achilles, him and Will are bonding, but are still victims of their own inability to fully see themselves. They are lying to themselves about what they feel, and who they are. Will, not accepting the part of himself that wants to run away with Hannibal, and Hannibal, not accepting that Will changed him.
But who steps in front of the bullet, taking Will’s place and is shot? Hannibal does. Who, despite all of his life being extremely egocentric and individualistic, accepted to die at Will’s hands/choice? Hannibal did. Who truly shedded his previous self to become empathetic? “My compassion for you is inconvenient”. Hannibal did.
Who really became the other on the field of war and died for and with the other? Hannibal did. He wore Will’s armor, fighting wildly, which wasn’t Hannibal’s style but Will’s. Hannibal could’ve run and left Will to die with Francis, but he became Will (compassion/empathy) and sacrificed himself to save him, knowing he planned to kill them both.
“People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden.”
So begins Fight Club.
Not with a name, but with a question—already casting doubt on the speaker’s existence.
It begins not with answers, but with the dissolution of the questioner.
You have been told you are someone.
You have a name, a voice, a history.
You believe your thoughts come from you.
That the story you tell yourself, about yourself, is real.
Stable. Whole. Linear.
But what if “I” is just a narrative device—
a convenient illusion sewn together from fragments, masks, and echoes of others?
When we begin to open the mirror, we find that it opens back.
I. Ego, Persona, and Shadow: The Inner Theater
Let’s start with the basic triad from Jungian psychology:
- The Ego is the conscious “I” you believe in—the narrator, the one who organizes the story.
- The Persona is the mask worn for others—crafted to meet expectation, to protect, to seduce.
- The Shadow is what remains repressed—instincts, desires, truths too raw or wild for polite exposure.
None of these are “false.”
They are roles. Filters. Distortions.
Each one reveals by concealing.
Imagine your identity as a stage:
The Ego is the actor,
The Persona is the costume,
The Shadow is what waits in the wings, watching.
You think you are the actor.
But often, the mask speaks louder.
And sometimes, the shadow takes the stage.
II. Identity as Performance
Erving Goffman described life as a series of performances. You adjust your posture, your laugh, your gaze depending on who’s watching. There is no “authentic” self waiting behind the mask—only more masks. You are always becoming someone in relation to someone else.
Judith Butler extends this:
Gender is not something we are, but something we do, a repetition of gestures, roles, codes that feel natural only because they’ve been rehearsed.
To perform is not to lie.
To perform is to exist.
But the performance is not you.
It is the surface of something deeper, or more empty.
III. Case Study: Fight Club and the Dissociated Narrator
The narrator of Fight Club doesn’t have a name. Or, more accurately, his name keeps changing. He introduces himself to support groups with fake ones: Rupert, Travis, Cornelius. He is searching for meaning—through insomnia, through consumerism, through identity theft.
Enter Tyler Durden:
The manifestation of what was repressed.
Masculinity without compromise.
Violence without consequence.
Freedom from the dullness of being one thing.
Tyler is not a hallucination.
He is a mask—peeled from the narrator’s own face. The shadow given voice. The persona taken too far.
Eventually, the narrator realizes:
He is Tyler. But also, he isn’t. He is the one who needed Tyler.
This fragmentation isn’t madness.
It’s revelation. The self as story—written in third person, re-narrated, redacted.
IV. The Mirror as a Portal
What is a mirror, truly? A tool of reflection? Or of distortion?
Mirrors show us what we wish to see—
And also what we fear: That nothing is behind the eyes, only a performance perfected by repetition.
In ancient rites, mirrors were portals—not to the self, but to the other side. To look too long was dangerous. You might see yourself split. Or worse—someone else staring back.
V. Final Question: The I as Fiction
So we end where we began:
What if “I” is just a narrative device?
Not a soul. Not a core.
But a sentence in motion.
A lie that believes in itself.
You are not being asked to abandon the self. Only to loosen its grip.
To wonder: What if I am not who I think I am? What if the real me is a shifting stage of masks, mirrors, and desire?
-
Suggested Assignment:
1. Write a two-paragraph monologue from the point of view of your Persona.
We don’t want them to kiss/have sex because we’ve been conditioned to validate love through physicality. We want it because their desire for one another could only be quenched in totality. Soul, mind and body. It’s too much, it transcends humanity. They become animals when facing the availability of fully having one another.
Trauma is the soul’s version of a tectonic shift, an internal landscape so deeply altered that even time flows differently afterward. It’s like a rift in ontological alignment. And the world never earned your affection again. Until him.
Who is your least favorite character on the show (Mason doesn't count), and both in personality but also in writing terms? love this blog 💕
Thank you 💗. My least favorite character in terms of bad writing is Alana. Poorly developed, confusing purpose besides being “the girlfriend”, then had an obvious attempt at making her a little worse but ended up making it forced.
My least favorite in terms of them as a character (after, of course, Mason) is Molly. I just cannot with a woman of her age thinking it’s okay to let her own child near Will Graham. He wasn’t some random guy. He was on literal news, all over the world, he had an extremely questionable past, and regardless if he was “innocent” or not, that’s not the point. You do not just drag a child into the life of a man like Will. Do what you want, but be responsible and leave the kid out of it. And this is simply non-debatable because the show proves my point: she and her child almost died.
How do you think Alana could've been better as a character?
First of all by not being connected to Will in a romantic way. It was forced, looked like something the network made them do for the sake of following criteria for heterosexuality on television.
Then, making her more keen on Will’s symptoms, directly posing a threat to Hannibal’s plans. Making her an actual intelligent person and genuinely purposeful. Maybe Will was attracted because she seemed normal or as normal as he could ever get, but she wasn’t. Maybe she already had her own thing going on outside of that.
She could’ve genuinely bonded with Abigail, making Mizumono’s betrayal much more painful. As well as making Abigail’s arc more interesting by her actually having a choice between Hannibal and someone safer, but choosing Hannibal still, instead of her choice being more based on having no other choice.
The Margot thing was so flat, I wish they’d at least show the development of that couple. The chemistry was terrible and they looked like strangers. Could’ve actually shown her arc as becoming gradually okay with murder, instead of it being out of nowhere or just vengeful. And this isn’t about screen time, specially since they chose thirteen episodes which was a rarity at the time, and shortened the time for depth of side characters, but then they had useless scenes with her character that could’ve been better overall.
To the separated mind, the gods appear terrifying: they arrive as fate, as obsession, as punishment. They move beyond the reach of the will, acting through dream, through compulsion, through suffering. We fear them because they seem other, and so we name them: war god, love goddess, underworld keeper. We build temples not to worship, but to negotiate. Please, don’t destroy me. Please, don’t possess me.
But when the inner world begins to open through self-inquiry, rupture, or devotion, we realize the gods were never separate. They are not outside of us. They were the unacceptable desires, the unbearable instincts, the divine chaos we refused to integrate. The moment we turn inward and name them as our own, yes, I am the god of wrath, of lust, of sacrifice, they lose their threat. They become allies. They become organs of the psyche. And the fear dissolves into power.
Hannibal as the god of death, of manipulation, seduction, the forbidden, moves in the shadows of Will’s mind, shaping him, haunting him, violating his moral structure. And Will resists not because he doesn’t desire, but because the desire terrifies him. To love Hannibal would be to surrender to a part of himself he has never claimed. A part that kills, that craves, that knows.
But Hannibal is no more external than the gods of old. He is a mirror. A calling. The ritual madness that forces Will to confront the violence, the eros, the omniscience within himself. And as Will stops resisting, as he lets go of his human moralism and steps into the myth, they merge. Not as a couple, but as a single intelligence, a godform, indivisible. The hunter and the hunted, the empath and the predator, the sacrificial lamb and the priest. The line between them ceases to exist.
What once was feared as separate is now understood as the self. And the punishment was never real…it was the resistance. The horror of becoming what we already are.
Do you think show Hannibal was in love with Mischa?
If we go by what was said on the show, yes, very likely. Particularly because of Bedelia’s line “the standard psychological and sociological explanations about how one grows up and where don’t apply here. What your sister made you feel was beyond your conscious ability to control(…)”. She’s saying that the background is irrelevant (siblings/family) when it comes to this situation because what he felt for her was not something he could predict or control. She equates that to his feelings for Will, after suggesting he was in love with him. So, yes, everything in canon points to him being in love with her which makes the whole thing make much more sense, “she influenced me to betray myself” + him eating her to “forgive” her. It would make more sense for him to feel betrayed by his own mind to be in love with his sister. But then again…How Hannibal loves is beyond the normal realm.
That Bedelia was in love with Hannibal. And that Hobbs was weird towards Abigail but Will couldn’t see it because he was empathizing with Hobbs and he obviously did not perceive what he was doing as weird or incestuous, hence why Will said “he would never dishonor them like that”. That Will did not love Molly (he could not verbalize it) but he tried.
I love the idea of Chiyoh, not so much the execution…She ended being yet another plot device for the male characters. A pretty flat one at that, too. Her sole purpose was to be a storytelling shortcut for Will to find Hannibal then have a reason for Hannibal to drug him, etc. She had no actual backstory or even an identity aside from Hannibal. Fuller managed to make her worse than Alana in these terms and the only thing that saved her was that the actress made the role less obnoxious than Alana, so no one dislikes her as much. She had a more “strong female” costume so she got away from the hate, but haha…Pretty awfully developed character. Awesome concept, though.
Hello, hello! I dunno if you have already made an analysis on that topic but I would love to hear your thoughts on what kind of police officer was Will <33
Sorry for taking forever to reply! Great question. I think Will was a very reasonable yet skeptical cop. Definitely not the typical American cop who will target minorities for no reason, and I honestly don’t think he’d even bat an eye or waste time with anyone who didn’t pose an actual threat to themselves or others. I can see him as the type that would gently escort a homeless drug addicted woman into the vehicle to get her somewhere where she could get help, or would grumpily take a minor home after they tried to steal food. He would mostly be paying attention to actual criminals. But erratically so. He’d get his hunches and tremble as he brings the radio to his lips to ask for backup. Hands shaky on his gun, not because he was nervous but because he was scared of how eager he was to see blood.
Worst parallel to Will and Hannibal was definitely horse guy and Peter. Peter was genuinely good. Will was so eager to think they were the same, to empathize, feel less alone in his pain, yet…In the end, what matters most is exactly what he told Peter himself, “I envy your hate”. As much as Will wanted to relate to Peter, he still chooses to let his killer live. He would always choose his killer. And he knows. It’s why, when Hannibal suggests that Peter is in the same darkness as him, Will says “I’m alone in that darkness”.
