I like to think that part of the reason why Will makes eye-contact with Hannibal is curiosity. At first meeting, Hannibal reads Will almost indecently. Second meeting, he tells Will that he doesn’t thinks Will is fragile; rather he is dangerous — not implying it in the way a domesticated dog gone rabid is dangerous, but instead the way a viscious, poked at, wild animal is dangerous. Throughout s1, Hannibal keeps chanting, “Tell me, Will.” And while he claims they are having conversations, Hannibal barely tells Will anything about himself. No evidence for Will Graham to piece together, never getting to see past the person-suit. I think unconsciously, Will must have known something was off, and importantly, he was curious about Hannibal. He must have wanted to know what made the person who could know him so well tick. The only thing he could do was follow the trail of clues Hannibal’s murders left behind to the person behind the veil. I really like to think of Will as this fascinated, childishly curious person staring at Hannibal unabashedly, trying to solve his mystery like how a kid works at toy trains or a rubix cube.
In retrospect, who the fuck is Will Graham even?? Like this guy right... He goes to crime scenes and he’s kind of, all in the criminal’s headspace like, ohhh, i shot you as you rushed down the stairs, i shot your wife but the bullet lodged in her spine without instantly killing her and she watched you as u hit rigor mortis this is my design mwahahah, ohhh i hacked your home security give me the call logs... And then he goes to this dystopian sci-fi classroom for baby fbi agents and he’s regaling the whole i shot you story that he has the right to fail you on if you aren’t paying attention!!! Btw!!! And he won’t take questions from students who are giving him infatuated glances anyway… and then he’s asking panicked parents of a victim if they have aspirin, and here, hold the cat if you’re fidgety, yea? Just pls don’t touch the doorknob… And then he’s going home and he sees a stray dog and he endeavors to take him in and you’re like, oh, that’s nice of him, and in the next scene he has SIX OTHER DOGS….. AND he HISSES at one to make him stay down and the dog listens obediently!!!!! And then he’s beefing with a 40 something psychiatrist for a moment, gets night terrors, is pranked ;) into eating some human lung sausage while being flirted with by that 40 something psychiatrist, and then gets traumatised in a blood shower and the episode ends!!!!! And you’re like… What the fuck??? What the fuck is even Will Graham??? What is this man’s life???????
It’s not even that Will betrayed Hannibal, it’s that Will “Tom” Graham colluded with Freddie “Jerry” Lounds to betray Hannibal. The fact that mortal enemies would shake hands over Hannibal Lecter’s dead body????????? bro I would have been livid if that was me
GASP in s1ep3, Abigail dreams of substituting the stag with the minnesota shrike’s latest victim, but if she was innocent, she wouldn’t have been privy to this detail… it was right in my face? 😭
Given how mistrustful Will is at the start of the series it feels like a miracle that the person he falls for is Dr. Hannibal *he was a flounder ;)* Lecter
Aaaa the line I love the MOST from Hannibal’s script – the line which I think philosophises the intimacy with which Hannibal loves people, and just, capsulates the eroticity between Will and Hannibal – is from s1e4, “Ouef”. Hannibal is in Will’s house to feed the dogs and he messes with Will’s fishing lures. At first he admires them, before tying off an incomplete fly expertly. THEN the script reads:
“Having completed his work … He presses his thumb gently against the pointed barb, and keeps the pressure on until he draws a drop of blood. Without lingering on his act, Hannibal sucks the lone drop from his thumb-tip. The sound is not unlike a quick kiss.”
There is the aspect of violence – blood is drawn – but it’s not aggressive, it’s gentle, it’s coerced. And the weapon – is the sharp hook on Will’s fishing lure. Unafraid of Will, shameless, when Hannibal sucks away the remnant of this brutality, lips where the hook pierced him open, it sounds like a kiss. How utterly romantic.
And in the actual scene!!! It SOUNDS like a kiss!!!! And oml, they really have me fainting here like a distressed maiden in a Shakespearean play.
I wonder why we use “empathy” to describe Will’s hyperactive imagination so much?? To my knowledge, they’ve only ever mentioned it once in the shape of an empathy disorder, which was later scrubbed when they realised Will was fake claiming neurodivergency to camaflouge himself? I perceive it more as him being a very creative guy who’s able to conjure up the multiple paths a person can take, both morbid and happy, just that, his capacity to naturally accept the strange, disordered rationales (despite his own distaste for where his mind can go) is off the charts. So to speak, Will’s mind can consider there is a man who is so obsessed with his kid that he’s killing her pseudo dopplegangers, as long as there is evidence to support his hypothesis, while a less imaginative person’s mind just won’t ever go there. They can’t imagine that someone can do that.
I think Will is a very artistic person. And also, he has a very high aptitude for the psychological.
He can think like anyone because he can imagine anything. Add to that his instinct for how the human mind works, he’s certainly a very dangerous person. The mongoose under my house, as Hannibal says. Of course, we can consider this empathy, as empathy requires a high ability of imagination, but personally I don’t think it is so superpower-like, although it is a superpower in terms of what the human mind can achieve.
This man Hannibal was really out here taking Abigail out of the hospital, drugging her up and making them a meal in expectation of Will’s arrival just so he could provide Will the satisfaction of “giving back” a child her family. What if your hot psychiatrist was clinically insane and constantly acted on his girlish whimsies? 😭
“You must understand that blood and breath are only elements undergoing change to fuel your radiance… Just as the source of light is burning.”
Something so extremely lovely about Hannibal relating Will to a star; brilliant in its light and at its core a burning ball of fire, mass exhausted as it needs, to persist bright. Just, just, incredible. So lovely. So so powerful. Hannibal interacts with the world in such an unashamed, poetic way. Of course those words haunt Will, echoing around the bone arena of his skull. I’m crying out here really.
My favourite Hannibal thing is that he holds wine glasses by their stems and never by the body
Aaaaaaaa geez, s1e7 “Sorbet” is so brutal. Hannibal goes to Bedelia and she’s like, “Oh your human veil is so nice but it must be lonely” and Hannibal is all smiles because of course, he loves being acknowledged just like everybody else so then he’s like “I have friends, we’re friendly” and she’s like “you’re my patient and colleague, we aren’t friends” and to soothe that burn, she gives him some champagne? wine? Anyway he asks for something pink.
Then Will comes to see him and Hannibal’s indirectly poking around asking, “Am I your therapist or are we having conversations?” and it’s so embarrassing, but then Will’s like “Yes, is the answer to that” all vague, and you’re like phew. Okay, fine. THEN they get to discussing the Chesapeake Ripper and Hannibal alludes to maybe the Ripper not being a solo criminal and, Will, BRUTALLY, goes “Oh now HE has a friend?” And then he LAUGHS. And it’s infuriating too because where does Will freaking Graham get off laughing at the Ripper being friendless, the only vague friendship he has IS with the Ripper!
Even prison didn’t do Hannibal this dirty. Having his toilet taken away? If this was me, this day alone would give me pre-sleep anxiety for the next 2 decades
GASP in Fromage, when Will says he can still hear Tobias’ melody, and Hannibal asks him “What do you see behind closed eyes?” a muted version of a melody starts to play – the same melody from the previous scene where Will plays the victim personifying Tobias and sees Hobbs in the audience … the attention to detail is so??? wow
Will was really cooking in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane for someone who resisted that one place like it was death. He got Hannibal off-guard. If Abel Gideon had kept out of it, Hannibal would be dead. In the throes of revenge, he was most brilliant
I really like that while Alana is intellectually capable of understanding both Hannibal and Will as they understand each other, she is fundamentally incapable of accepting them. Hannibal and Will both accept each other and thrive on blurring the lines. They’re parasytic in that way as much as it is almost perverse. They are too intimate with each other. Alana, however, understands and perhaps it speaks to her sanity that she adamantly draws boundaries between them and herself once she finds out, while Hannibal and Will continue to stubbornly blend into one another. All three of them survive, but Alana’s survival is the least self-destructive.
I want to see Amy Dunne from Gone Girl have a therapy session with nbc’s Hannibal Lecter… oh what a dumpster fire that would be.
Will is never powerless. He’s helpless, but never incapable. He’s just… It’s like, he’s a very capable carpenter who built this cupboard, right? And it’s making creaking noises now and it’s driving him crazy because he can’t figure out what’s wrong with it; just that he’s sure he was very aware of every single splinter that went into building it, but now he can’t source the problem and he’s so fucking capable and he knows this thing so intimately but then why the fuck can’t he find whatever’s making it creak?? Unable to accept this and scared out of his wits about the fact that he can’t figure this out despite his creed, he lies to everyone that he isn’t hearing the creaking even when it’s constantly stuck inside his head, but he tells Hannibal because Hannibal is an equally skilled carpenter and he must understand the working of this cupboard just like him so he can help him give a second opinion right? But Hannibal here is gradually replacing the screws in the cupboard every night while Will is asleep and then telling him it’s all in his head.
It’s just so?? Hannibal was conning another master at the game. Of course he needed 1.5 hours time between his penultimate client and Will. And the fact that it worked! Speaks so much about Hannibal’s manipulation skills. If Will didn’t have Encephalitis, he might have come up with something else nefarious, but looking back, it’s so ugly and admirable he was able to get Will incarcerated in the first place.
cowboyposts-deactivated20231217:
Hannibal cast with their funko pops
I wonder if Hannibal watches Masterchef US. I want to see him react to Gordon… like would he relate to Gordon murmuring, “Yes, he is a fucking donkey” with a wine glass in his hand, or would he add Gordon’s name to his rolodex
They really gave Will a haircut, took off his glasses, his jeans and put him in office slacks like they did to Anne Hathaway in the Princess Diaries and then they said here he is: sexy. And we all collectively fell for it. They romcom-ised him and we still fell for it like it wasn’t Hugh Dancy all along—as if we weren’t captivated by his beauty in every single close-up scene in s1 anyway. Really, whoever invented the romcom makeover trope had some otherworldly brain hardwiring. A genius amongst men.
divinetheatre:
winston looking for will/ will looking for hannibal
edits by: @lectercunt
My favourite Hannibal moments are where he laughs; when Will confronts him in his kitchen with a gun and Hannibal comments on the smell of his aftershave, and when he has detective Pazzi tied up and about to drop and tells him how he called Mason’s number, far from here, just for fun. Hannibal must find most things funny and so when he outwardly, blatantly and jovially laughs at something, I find that it’s like a peek inside his secretive mind. I love it so much that Hannibal isn’t compulsive like Hobbs or suffering within like Dolarhyde. Rather he’s an artist, an observer and a creator. He’s just high on life, full of laughter and petulance.
Sick of the socially anxious, shy Will Graham retoric: This guy’s anti-social and is a mistrustful prick. He sucks. He’s rude on purpose. He barks. He bites. He spreads rabies.
“How does that make you feel?”
*scoff, “How does that make you feel?”
?????
“Tell me about your mother.”
“Some lazy psychiatry, Dr. Lecter.”
???????????
“Let’s keep it professional.” “I don’t find you that interesting.” “You could wreck some foster homes and torment some children…” “The light of friendship won’t reach us for a million years, that’s how faraway from friendship we are” “There will be a reckoning.” “You didn’t die enough.” “Soup isn’t very good.”
Brother is so soft-spoken to his doggie children. Then he meets a human being and cringes like he can’t wait to go home and wash his eyes with soap.
Bro the fire under Hannibal’s ass when Will connects all the dots in his office after Georgia Madchen’s murder is just comedy. He just sits there with his hands twitching on the armrests while Will catches on more the more Hannibal tries to dissuade him. And then,
“You believe this is personal.”
“If it wasn’t before – it is now.”
That’s just Will issuing a challenge. It’s a warning. He’s all amped up! No matter how many traps Hannibal lay, perhaps he’s laid too many traps, in the end Will is unstoppable. He will catch the copycat and Hannibal needs to act pronto! He’s breathless. It’s unbelievably hilarious. Behind his regal face must have been cogs turning urgently and with a heavy noise.
