Will Graham and the death kink of it all.

To die is to be released is to surrender.

Will Graham often hid behind his gun, proposing empty threats or nervous impulses, removing his instincts and true self from the bullet comminating to shoot.

With my hands, he said. Intimate. To kill is to make love. It’s to dominate and feel surrender between your fingers.

Will’s emotional entangling of sex, love and violence is depicted in the undertone of scenes where he points his gun, the symbolic phallus, in moments where he wants to disconnect himself from the person on the other end.

When he wants to assert dominance without truly earning it. When he feels vulnerable and submissive against his will.

When he opens himself up to his true self by indulging in fantasies he once feared, he begins to explore the intersection of violence and intimacy.

He kills Randall with his bare hands as he imagines Hannibal, I’ve never felt more alive, he says, making the emotional connection between pleasure and death.

When he points the gun to Clark Ingram, he had been correlating the case with his and Hannibal’s dynamic, but from a subdued, deluded perspective, that didn’t take into account his true self.

The gun to Will is the fallacious attempt at dominance. His hands are the truthful, genuine earning of that dominance, where he isn’t running from himself, but rather accepting his self, making love to his darkness, allowing it to enjoy the act of violence, thus truly and effectively asserting dominance.

Same line, different motives.

Interesting how they chose the exact same line and context to show the difference between Hannibal and Will, and the journey of their dynamic.

Whereas Hannibal called to stirr the pot, out of curiosity, to play, Will called to warn, out of love, to save.

Hannigram and the animus and anima of it all.

The soulmate, different from what is popularly known as, isn’t the perfect match in terms of a benevolent relationship filled with care and respect. Esoterically, it is the concept that one’s unconscious is manifested in another body.

Being the part of the self that became separated, was casted out so that one could experience oneself directly, it represents the shadow that once integrated, holds the potential for enlightenment.

In order for the consciousness to reach that enlightenment, it undergoes tremendous amounts of pressure, triggered by the soulmate, who comes to shed light upon all the lies we tell ourselves, and the illusions we hold about who we are and how we see the world.

If Adam was one, and he took a part of his flesh so that his beloved could be born, then Hannibal aborted himself from Will, the moment he felt Will would cast him out. Hence the stag dying on the floor at the final scene in Mizumono.

As Lilith, the New Moon, Will resides in the darkness until Hannibal begins orbiting his life, and starts transitioning into Eve, the Full Moon, reflecting the light of the the brightest star. The Full Moon 🌕 is very prominent symbol towards the end of the show.

Will knew. He knew it all. And he fooled you.

On Will Graham’s active role in the scheme from season one.

I don’t believe Will was truly mourning Abigail’s death. There, I said it. I think he believed that was the source of his grief, sure. But in reality, he barely knew her. Their dynamic was fraught with discomfort; she was wary of him, and he was largely awkward around her. They didn’t see eye to eye, and more than anything, he projected onto her relentlessly.

From the very beginning, I think Will clung to the idea of Abigail because of Hannibal. “Feeling paternal?”, and Will responded, “Aren’t you?”, only to dramatically nod in agreement when Hannibal said yes. Both of them felt a pull toward each other. Hannibal more consciously so, but both used Abigail as a tether, a justification, a way to hold onto one another. The fandom often frames this dynamic as Hannibal using Abigail to baby trap Will, but the truth is, Will was just as complicit. They were both using her as a baby trap.

The evidence is there: Will lets Hannibal into his home, allows him to care for his dogs, despite barely knowing him and, more importantly, despite his instinctive wariness of him. Logically, it makes no sense for Will to be so trusting of Hannibal that early on. He even calls Hannibal out for subtly trying to isolate him from Jack, only to dismiss far worse and more overtly suspicious behavior later. The argument that Will’s illness clouded his judgment is flimsy at best: he was still solving complex cases, demonstrating sharp deductive reasoning throughout season one. His blind spot for Hannibal wasn’t due to sickness; it was due to something else.

Will was feeding into several illusions during that period. The illusion that he could maintain a normal relationship with someone like Alana. The illusion that he could bond with someone genuinely good and benevolent—someone who would accept him for who he was. The illusion that Abigail could be redeemed through guilt and coercion, and that if she could be saved, perhaps he could be too.

So, he ignored everything that contradicted these fantasies.

When Hannibal “killed” Abigail, he severed the one excuse Will thought had for maintaining their bond. And, crucially, he did so after Will felt betrayed by him, not by being a killer, but by lying to him personally. That was the real betrayal. It wasn’t about murder, or even morality; it was personal. And while Hannibal understood the depth of their connection beyond Abigail, Will needed the illusion of her to justify it to himself. That’s why, when Will mourned her, he wasn’t mourning Abigail, he was mourning what she represented.

Hannibal, on the other hand, had no such illusions. He might have used Abigail as a means to draw Will closer, but he never saw her as the glue holding them together. He believed in their bond beyond her, which is why he was visibly hurt, even teary-eyed, when Will turned on him both before and after prison.

Will Graham might play the victim well, and Hugh Dancy may have an achingly beautiful face, but let’s be honest: Will is worse than Hannibal. Hannibal is, at the very least, honest about who he is. Will is a hypocrite, a killer masquerading as a reluctant bystander. A borderline, sociopath draped in the skin of an awkward, introverted, misunderstood man. And yet, he fooled most of you, just as he fooled the other characters. Just as he intended.

Hannibal and the submission kink of it all.

Why is it that Hannibal didn’t yield to Will’s “please don’t lie to me,” yet folded so easily for “I need you, Hannibal, please”? What kind of submission truly excites him?

As someone who is, objectively, more dominant than most people around him, Hannibal rarely finds anyone genuinely enticing. Submission born from weakness bores him. Franklyn is a prime example of this, and even Tobias, to an extent. There is no thrill in dominating someone who was never a challenge to dominate in the first place.

Will, of course, is the opposite. Had Alana been more intelligent, she might have been as well, Hannibal admires those who are not easily controlled. This is precisely why he likes Bedelia. And Will knows this, which is why he hates her. Both Will and Bedelia are dominant individuals who submit selectively, of their own volition. For Hannibal, the pleasure lies not in forcing submission but in earning it, making a dominant individual choose to yield.

This is where Will distinguishes himself from Bedelia. While she is dominant and an active agent in her fate, her submission leans toward subtle coercion, as she relishes the role of the beast’s chosen one. There is a degree of arrogance in that. Will, on the other hand, actively resists Hannibal, challenges him outright, yet still allows himself to submit, gradually, deliberately. And after season one, those moments of submission come freely, no longer from fear or what Hannibal would perceive as weakness.

Which raises the question: is Hannibal truly the dominant one?

In any power dynamic, is the dom truly in control when it is the sub who decides to trust, to open, to place the weight of choice into the dom’s hands? Will constantly manipulates situations to make it appear as though he has no agency, as though Hannibal is the one pulling the strings, tossing him around like a helpless pawn. But the truth is, Will is always choosing. He saw the red flags and still chose to trust Hannibal. He chose to lead him on, despite knowing how unnatural the dynamic was. He chose to lure him in, then to switch sides. He chose to go after him, to betray him, to leave, and then, to return…again and again.

No one calls the shots more than Will.

And Hannibal loves to see it.

Will Graham’s psyche: what’s true and what’s false.

Empathy disorder? More like killer-empathy disorder, since Will only ever connects with killers, or, in rare cases, with victims who stir something personal in him (like Peter). The show presents Will as highly empathetic, yet this remains one of its greatest deceptions.

Will never truly empathizes with anyone who hasn’t killed or doesn’t possess the latent capacity for it. His empathy is entirely selective, drawn only to those he already perceives as reflections of himself.

What Will actually engages in, more than anything, is Verdrängung (repression in the psychoanalytic sense). He does not lack awareness of his own violent urges; rather, he buries them under layers of moral justification, allowing himself to indulge in them under the guise of righteousness. His role as an investigator grants him a socially sanctioned outlet for his fantasies, transforming them into something not just acceptable but *honorable*. This is why, when Hannibal suggests he quit, Will so forcefully asserts, “I save people!” He clings to that rationale, not because it’s true, but because it keeps his self-image intact.

And yet, why didn’t he quit? He had more than enough reasons—moral, emotional, even physical…but he never did. How much of the blame can we really place on Jack Crawford? At what point does Jack stop being a selfish manipulator and become just another one of Will’s scapegoats? Will doesn’t leave because he lives for this. He is obsessed with the euphoric sensation that his overactive imagination provides when he immerses himself in the mind of a killer.

For those unfamiliar, what Will is actually doing is a form of self-hypnosis. He’s not gifted with it (he is with an active imagination) he has trained himself, evidenced by his use of an induction method (the pendulum). This isn’t some innate ability; it’s a learned skill. He explicitly states that he is well-versed in psychology and “knows all the tricks,” so it’s not surprising that hypnosis is the one thing he allows Hannibal to perform on him. Unlike traditional talk therapy, which he resists, hypnosis is effective in his concept.

Will had likely been fantasizing about killing for a long time, which explains his career choices. Becoming a cop offered him the opportunity to kill while maintaining moral superiority. When he claims he was “unable to shoot” and subsequently quit, the question arises: was he truly incapable because he’s a good guy, or was it something else? A failure to act not out of moral hesitation, but out of something more physiological, as a man who cannot perform sexually when too overwhelmed by the anticipation of actualizing his fantasies?

Observe his expressions as he emerges from his crime scene inductions: rapture, exhilaration. He is high on the experience. His repression is so severe that his desires manifest in his dreams, yet even there, his reactions betray him—he doesn’t wake in terror, but in euphoria. “I’ve never felt more alive,” he confesses after killing Randall Tier. That wasn’t fear or disgust speaking…it was pleasure.

This is why he becomes obsessed with killing Hannibal. Who else could he kill with his bare hands and still be perceived as the hero? The slayer of monsters? But Hannibal is not just any killer, he is the embodiment of Will’s own pleasure in causeless violence, the mirror of his most unthinkable desires.

Will represses (Verdrängt) Hannibal because to acknowledge what Hannibal represents, the raw, uninhibited joy of destruction, would be “too ugly a thought”: that beneath the mask of righteousness, Will Graham does not simply understand monsters.

He is one.

When someone embodies a repressed individual’s unconscious desires, their presence can trigger a crisis within the repressed person, forcing those buried impulses toward the surface. Freud describes repression (Verdrängung) as a process that doesn’t eliminate desires but merely pushes them out of conscious awareness. However, when an external figure appears who openly embodies what the repressed person has spent their life denying, this creates a destabilizing effect.

The repressed individual may react in several ways:

Fascination and Obsession: They may feel inexplicably drawn to this person, seeing them as magnetic, intoxicating, or even fated. The unconscious recognizes a mirror of its own buried desires.

Rationalization and Projection: Instead of admitting their attraction, they might intellectualize their feelings, attributing their obsession to external factors (“I need to stop them,” “I want to help them”, in Will’s case Abigail) or projecting onto the other person the very desires they refuse to own (“They’re trying to manipulate me”).

Moral Struggle and Hypocrisy: They may position themselves as morally superior or in opposition to the person, as if their role is to tame, punish, or save them. This dynamic allows them to engage with the repressed content while maintaining a socially acceptable self-image.

Compulsion to Destroy or Merge: In extreme cases, the person may oscillate between wanting to destroy the “other” and wanting to become them. The embodiment of the repressed can be seen as both a threat (because they expose the truth) and an object of desire (because they represent a forbidden completeness).

Will’s relationship with Hannibal is a textbook case of this. Hannibal embodies Will’s repressed desires: violence without guilt, freedom from moral constraints, indulgence in his own darker nature. Rather than directly acknowledging this, Will frames his obsession as a battle between good and evil, between law and chaos. But his actions betray him: every choice he makes pulls him closer to Hannibal rather than away. His repression ensures that he cannot admit his true motives, even to himself, so he continually recasts his pursuit of Hannibal in socially acceptable terms—justice, survival, necessity—when in reality, he is drawn to him because Hannibal is his repressed self made flesh.

So did he ache for Hannibal, after all?

This iconic line originates from Dante’s La Vita Nuova:

“He woke her then, and trembling and obedient, she ate that burning heart out of his hand. Weeping, I saw him then depart from me. Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for her? Find nourishment in the very sight of her? I think so. But would she see through the bars of his plight, and ache for him?”

Bedelia paraphrases this passage in the show, but its origins trace back to the Hannibal novel and film, where Hannibal himself quotes it in reference to Clarice. The show repurposes this to textualize his love for Will, drawing a direct parallel between his relationship with Will and his relationship with Clarice in the books.

Hannibal explicitly recites the original Dante passage in the first episode of season three:

“Allegro mi sembrava Amor tenendo meo core in mano, e ne le braccia avea madonna involta in un drappo dormendo. Poi la svegliava, e d’esto core ardendo lei paventosa umilmente pascea: appresso gir lo ne vedea piangendo.”

Roughly translated:

“He seemed happy, but carrying my heart in his hand; on his arm I saw my lady wrapped in a veil, sleeping. He woke her, and trembling, she humbly and fearfully ate the burning heart. Then Love departed, weeping.”

In the poem, the he is *Amor* (Love) personified, holding Dante’s heart in one hand and Beatrice, veiled and sleeping, in the other. Love wakes Beatrice, and she consumes Dante’s burning heart before Love departs in sorrow.

This perfectly mirrors Hannibal’s situation: he fell in love with Will at first sight, and when he “awoke” Will to his own darkness, Will metaphorically consumed his heart. The episode reinforces this imagery when Hannibal murders a man that looks like Will and transforms his body into a visual representation of his own shattered heart.

The rest of the season hinges on the question in Bedelia’s line: Can Will see through the bars of Hannibal’s plight?

“Plight” refers to a miserable, inescapable condition…an interesting choice of words to remove from the adaptation, especially since Bedelia, who is delivering the line, would never openly admit to Will that Hannibal is suffering.

But why include “ache”? Why not simply ask if Will was in love?

Because in the poem, the heart is consumed, Love weeps, and what remains is hunger. “Ache” here means to feel intense desire for, aligning with the show’s (and the line) recurring themes of hunger and nourishment. Bedelia is not asking if Will loves Hannibal in a traditional sense, she is asking if he craves him.

When Will is sailing toward Hannibal, the script describes his expression as “almost hungry.” Later, when he and Jack track Hannibal across Europe, he stands in a way that creates an optical illusion for the camera, and the script refers to this effect as him standing in a “starvation cage.”

So, does Will ache for Hannibal?

Yes. Canon explicitly confirms it. And to ache, to crave, is visceral, carnal. It cannot be downplayed as something else. Will craves Hannibal so intensely that, after three years of “starvation,” he barely resists finding an excuse to see him the moment he rejoins Jack’s team. And I think his face says it all:

Will Graham and the bride of death of it all.

Standing before me was Death, but I’ve never been happier.

Gothic romance has long been defined by the trope of the bride of the monster, a typically female character who is lured, seduced, or ensnared by an inhuman or dangerous figure. Hannibal is steeped in gothic romanticism, but here, the dynamic shifts, and the bride is not a woman, but Will.

We often say that Will is “feminized” in the fandom, but that’s not quite accurate. Rather, he puts himself as the damsel in distress: vulnerable, haunted, pursued, and we instinctively associate this with femininity. But if we strip away gendered expectations, what remains is a more primordial dynamic: the interplay, the dance of Yin and Yang, two forces seducing, devouring, and merging into a third, greater creation.

The act of creation is an attempt at immortality, at eternal union. To create, one must first fragment, externalizing a piece of oneself. Yin is not inherently female, nor wholly passive; it is the unconscious, the darkness, the unknown. Eve is Adam’s missing piece, separated from him so that he might truly see himself. Yin is the veil of the Madonna, the mystery, the underworld. And Will Graham is that Madonna. He is Proserpina (Persephone), wandering between realms, dwelling in shadows and dreams, a bride of the monster.

But Will and Hannibal’s initial attempt at creation is false. They force a child into being (Abigail), who was never truly theirs. She is their illusion, their projection. Will never saw her for who she was, and Hannibal, though he did, used her as a test (not telling Will she was alive). Their failure to earn her love leads to her inevitable loss, the spiritual abortion of their illusion. And when she dies, the Monster slays her, and the Bride stands over her body, clinging to the idea of her…a veil obscuring the truth he cannot yet face.

That truth is that Hannibal loves him.

Will speaks of us when there is no us. He left us his broken heart. He misses us. But there is no us…only him. Abigail was the illusion that allowed Will to avoid the unbearable reality of his bond with Hannibal. Letting go of her is his first step toward seeing clearly.

But he is not yet ready to merge. He resists, tries again to destroy Hannibal. And so the bride is maimed, shot by Chiyoh, who acts as Hannibal’s unconscious defense. Will is still running, still refusing.

Why does he finally accept the truth in the last scene of the show? Because he has destroyed the illusion embodied by the Dragon.

Dolarhyde is their dark mirror: a being who cannot accept love, who cannot bear to be seen as he truly is. His relationship with Reba mirrors Will and Hannibal, but distorted: love, poisoned by fear and self-loathing. From the very first episode, Will tells us: “He showed me a negative so I could see the positive.” And this goes on throughout the entirety of the show.

Will has spent his life running from his desire. And so, it manifested as a man. A man he fell in love with. A man he resisted. Until, bloodied and exhausted, he saw the truth:

Love was beautiful.

Il Rapimento de Proserpina - Ulpiano Checa

Hannibal carrying Will in Digestivo.

On Hannibal Lecter’s Frozen Heart.
Tell me when you hear my heart stop, you’re the only one that knows.

Is it fair to say that Hannibal loved Mischa? A child’s affection may be pure, but it is immature, untested, lacking the depth of experience. It is often conditional, fluctuating with the small emotional scale of youth. What makes more sense is to say that Hannibal loved the imago of Mischa, the idea he created of her. It is easy to love something that died before it could hurt you, before it could break your heart and test the true limits of your unconditionality. Mischa was the one thing in his life that required no struggle to love, no effort to understand. As her older brother, she likely idolized him, and in that, he found comfort. But Mischa is not Hannibal’s true first love. Love, as he describes it, is a force of nature, an entity beyond rationalization or control.

Hannibal claims that he ate Mischa to forgive her for making him betray himself. But this is not an act of divine absolution, nor an assertion of dominance. It is delusion. It is a fragile narrative constructed to hold his fractured psyche together. The truth is simpler, more human: he ate her out of shock, out of trauma. He was a child who had just experienced an unimaginable horror, and in that abyss of grief and hunger, he consumed the last remnant of what he had lost. The idea that he could, at such a young age, rationalize this act as a philosophical exercise, “I love you, and your existence made me vulnerable, therefore I will consume you to absolve us both” is absurd (unless he came to that conclusion later*). This is not the mind of a god, but the defense mechanism of a broken boy.

Hannibal does this often, twisting reality into something more palatable, more controllable. His mind, though dazzling, is held together by little more than spit, not even glue. For all its intricacy, it is fragile. And what is fragility if not the unwillingness to face truth? He can endure physical torture without screaming, but at the first taste of true emotional pain, he collapses inward. He tried to kill Will not because Will betrayed him, but because Hannibal felt affection for him. He risked everything for Will, long before he ever had to. That is not the reaction of a man in control. That is the reaction of someone shattered at their core, a child who never healed, who buried his heart so deep within his own mind that even he cannot reach it.

But love, as he puts it, is a force. And that force came in the shape of Will Graham. Will, without realizing, reached into the frozen well of Hannibal’s heart with a sharp blade and left a gaping wound, a hand-shaped burn engraved upon it. Hannibal is capable of love, but only in the way that a starving man is capable of devouring a meal. He does not love with gentleness, but with desperation. His heart, abandoned after Mischa’s death, was left to wither. Starving, yearning, ravenous. Only someone with an emptiness just as vast, a hunger just as profound, could awaken in him the capacity to love again. Will Graham, who embodies a lack of love so deep it is almost a void, became the only vessel worthy of receiving Hannibal’s devotion. Hannibal needed to fill him, to pour into him every starving impulse he had suppressed for decades, not out of malice, but out of sheer, visceral starvation.

Hannibal is capable of care and affection, as we’ve seen. And he is capable of loving. But is Will?

* If that was never his thought process in the moment, but a later construction, an intellectualization born from the need to shape his own history into something he could live with, Hannibal is still a master of self-mythologizing, and this is perhaps his grandest illusion. The truth, raw, unfiltered truth, would be much harder to accept. Because to admit that it was not a conscious decision, not a deliberate act of absolution, but rather the response of a terrified, grief-stricken, and starving child, would shatter his carefully curated sense of self.

To say, I ate her to forgive her is poetic, grandiose…it transforms an act of desperation into an act of power. But to say, I ate her because I didn’t know what else to do, because I was afraid, because I was lost, because I was just a child who couldn’t comprehend the enormity of what had happened, that is something Hannibal Lecter could never allow himself to believe. It would mean admitting that something did happen to him, that he is not the godlike, self-created entity he claims to be. And so, as with all the wounds he refuses to acknowledge, he seals this one with a story, one where he was not weak, not helpless, but merely enacting some grand metaphysical truth.

But beneath the myth, the reality lingers. Mischa was not consumed as a philosophical statement. She was consumed in fear, in grief, in an unbearable solitude that Hannibal has spent his entire life trying to outrun.

By blood and by me, I’ll follow your lead.

Will Graham aches for Hannibal Lecter. His hunger for him is undeniable, a marrow-deep craving that eclipses reason. But can he love him?

We know little of his past. He is motherless, raised in poverty. These sparse details serve as the only signposts of his history; beyond them, he remains a mystery. If Hannibal’s heart is a frozen well, sealed until a vast enough void summons its waters, then Will’s is a black hole. It does not overflow; it only takes in, swallowing light, swallowing feeling, endlessly consuming. If Hannibal has an excess of nectar, awaiting the perfect chalice to hold it, then Will is the abyss that ensures it will never stop flowing. He is not the receiver of love…he is its devourer.

Unlike Hannibal, whose affections extend to art, cuisine, philosophy, and the aesthetics of violence, Will is curiously bereft of passion. He does not love people; he does not even try. He cares for his dogs, but he belongs to them as much as they belong to him. He is drawn to Alana yet does not pursue her beyond what serves his own narrative. His colleagues orbit him, but he keeps them at arm’s length. Beverly sees him as a tool. Jack values his utility. And Alana pities him, plays at saving him. But no one, not a single soul, is truly his.

Hannibal, by contrast, cultivates a social life, a network of admirers, colleagues, and so-called friends. He is an artist of experience, capable of relishing beauty despite his wounds. But Will? Will does not live. He seemingly rots in his home, fishes, works, and in the spaces in between, just exists as if waiting for something. And then there is his fascination with murder. Not justice. Not retribution. His empathy stretches only toward the grotesque, to killers and the bloody fingerprints they leave on the world. He has no patience for the dullness of normal minds, but he delights in the labyrinthine corridors of the violent ones. They alone are worthy of his attention, his passion.

Abigail Hobbs was never truly seen by him. He fashioned an idea of her, an innocent he could redeem, an emblem rather than a person. He sought to mold her into something that suited his own reflection, never once stopping to ask what she desired. In this, he was not unlike Hannibal, but he was less honest about his intentions. He did not love her, not in the way Hannibal did, with full recognition of who and what she was. No wonder she preferred Hannibal.

Will sees himself as a stray, one of his dogs. Not their owner, not their friend, not their father, but one of them. This view of himself bleeds into his understanding of others. He sees Hannibal as a stray too, something wild and wounded, something that calls to him. He is drawn to beasts because taming them is the only way he knows to grapple with his own monstrosity. To control the external is to impose order upon the internal. And yet, he fails. He fails because he is not, at heart, a tamer.

He is hunger.

Others on the periphery recognize Hannibal’s danger and step away. But not Will. He follows, chases, again and again. Every decision, no matter how self-destructive, leads him back to Hannibal.

He cloaks himself in morality, in duty, in obligation, but it is a flimsy disguise. He does not pursue justice. There are many ways to save lives, many avenues to do good in the world, and yet Will chooses only the path soaked in blood. He merges with brutality because it is the only thing that stirs his soul. His supposed righteousness is a mask, and his masks are legion.

So can Will Graham love? He sees through people, sees their fears, their desires, their wounds…and he is bored by most of them. But Hannibal is different. Hannibal elevates violence into beauty, makes death into art. Will fears his own love for darkness, while Hannibal worships his without shame. That, more than anything, is what ensnares him. Not the mystery of Hannibal’s mind, but the freedom in it. The freedom to love the grotesque without fear or shame.

Will was always attuned to the Ripper. He spoke of him not with detachment, not as a scholar, but as a lover speaks of a distant beloved: admiring, mesmerized. When he discovered the Ripper was Hannibal, he recoiled, not out of moral horror, but out of personal shame. He had already loved him. He had already desired him. But to admit that desire, to acknowledge that the only man he ever trusted was the monster in the shadows, was too much. It was, as he would say, “too ugly a thought.”

He ran to Alana, to normalcy, to tradition, in a desperate attempt to convince himself he could belong in a world that did not smell of blood. But he could not. He never could. Because Hannibal was the only one who had ever made him feel anything at all. And when he finally understood that, he surrendered.

So what is Will’s heart? It is not like Hannibal’s. It does not overflow. It does not yearn to give. It is a void, an absence, a hunger. Will is the abyss waiting to consume love. As Hannibal connected in Dante’s poem, mentioned in my previous essay. He does not love in the way others do, he reflects, he absorbs, he mirrors. He is nothing until he is filled. Like Maha Maya, the Grand Ilusion.

And Hannibal, with his boundless, inexhaustible love, is the only thing that can fill him. The only thing he will ever crave.

Is Will Graham capable of love? If love is something that binds, that consumes, that reshapes the self in the image of another, then he has never done anything but love Hannibal Lecter.