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C'mon boys, we're cannibals, not can'tnibals

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living with a needy, socially awkward, shapeshifting holy beast is always So Much Fun and not at all wild and scary ever

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types of guns rated by their names

machine gun- 0/10. all guns are

shotgun- 0/10. all guns do

revolver- 10/10 fuck it sure is

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This is gonna sound like a morality cop sentiment without the context that I am a person who is deeply enthusiastic about the aestheticized, eroticized violence of NBC Hannibal. But with that context in mind… I often find myself deeply put off by how violence is handled in fanfic, particularly post-canon fanfic.

Because Hannibal is a very dark show. It is thematically centered on the darkness that resides in all human beings, as embodied by the irresistible black hole that is Hannibal Lecter - a theme that most obviously manifests in Will Graham’s corruption arc, but also in subtler, more mundane ways with characters like Alana Bloom and Jack Crawford, who keep repeating their mistakes despite their self-awareness. And it’s a very nihilistic show, concerned not with ethics but aesthetics, with the pursuit of beauty in the absence of moral scruples.

And yet, violence and death always feel significant on this show. Despite (or perhaps because of) the frequent surrealism and black comedy in their presentation, they feel as if they have gravitas. And that’s precisely because of the show’s aestheticism. The corpses we see are so exquisitely mounted, and presented with such deliberation and intention, both in-universe and in the show’s cinematography. And thus these deaths feel as though they have weight, as though they mean something - even if the only meaning we derive from them is that they look beautiful, if ghastly, or that they convey cinematic symbolism.

But there is so much Hannibal fanfic where the violence feels so… disturbingly banal to me. Where the deaths don’t have any narrative weight and are completely trivial to our main characters. And this is imo completely out of keeping with even Hannibal Lecter’s own philosophy on the show, when he says that life is precious - not because he places particular value on life’s preservation for its own sake, but because he fully understands the gravity of what he is doing. His arrogance and sense of superiority is contingent on the understanding that the taking of a life is a serious thing, and a transcendent thing. Not flesh and blood, but light and air and colour. And I don’t see much light and air and colour in the kinds of fics that I’m talking about.

This is all very much entwined with the fact that a lot of these representations of violence seem to be bound up in the understanding that the show, and Will’s arc, is subtextually queer. And it absolutely is. But I often get the sense that these representations of violence, and the relationship between Will and Hannibal, are trying to overlay them with a very 2020s Positive Queer Representation approach, wherein Will and Hannibal’s love is misunderstood by the world, and thus their violence, as the symbol of their transgression, has to be portrayed and received by the audience an unalloyed good.

And this feels hard to explain, because of course this is a show that is very much about the pleasures of transgression. And it invites the viewer to share in that pleasure, in all the aforementioned ways. It’s drawing from a very 19th century Wildean mode in that regard - a sensibility that irreverently collapses all transgressions into one, and deliberately refuses to differentiate between the morally repugnant and the merely socially unacceptable. And that is very powerful as an engine for queer subtext, as it takes the very real feeling of being corrupt and tainted and wrong and leans into the seductive glamor of that corruption, rather than attempting to counteract that narrative (in ways that can feel, when in the throes of internalized homophobia, shallow and artificial).

But, within Hannibal, that thrill of transgression is inextricably bound up in horror. The pull of violence - and the bond it engenders between Will and Hannibal - is irresistible, but it is also a source of deep seated pain and terror. And those things are fundamentally not separable. There’s a sublimity to violence, and to desire, on this show - pleasure and pain, wonder and horror, are intertwined.

And a lot of the portrayals of violence-as-transgression as symbolic of queerness in fanfic just don’t grasp this. There’s an attempt to paper over the horror and the sublimity of the violence, and how it serves the queer symbolism. It always strikes me as though writers grasp that symbolism, but are trying to fit it into the mold of representation-as-a-means-of-social-advancement. It never lands for me and it leads to the aforementioned callous disregard for life that I just find distasteful. Which is not to say that I think portraying violence and murder in a manner that strikes a similar note to the show is an easy needle to thread - certainly not. (Not the least because it’s hard to translate the show’s visual language to writing.) But it is something I notice and that breaks immersion for me very quickly.

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My fave genre of images

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when i saw your fanart for this fandom i got so excited hsghghsfhsdj

idk if you allow requests but could i perhaps ask for some doodles of my boy blue...

YESS THANK YOU SO MUCH!! pokespe was my VERY FIRST FANDOM mind you. its nice to revisit it...

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edgy ass sketch i never posted, I have a lot of drawings that are just anime person holding or standing next to a big intimidating dragon looking creature now that i think about it probably because that is the thing of all time

Feraligatr is fun to draw lol

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oh~ i see, it's e̵͖͓͌̉m̷̫̜͐̽ỏ̴̬t̴̗͚̄i̶̤̓o̸̼̲̿̑ṇ̵͆͑ą̷̈́l̷̢̂ ̶͕̎d̴̮̅e̸̯͌ṽ̵̟ȧ̵̛̫̣s̷̟̀t̴̥̬̋͑ȃ̶̳t̴̜̐̇i̶̘̓o̴͈̊n̶̲̋̄ o'clock~

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

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cool cool, you like iphone games with anime bikini girls? awesome. and your room is dirty as shit? that fuckin rocks man, hope you find a girlfriend soon, that like, looks like one of the girls. from the game.

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first drawings in a while

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i don’t have the attention span to watch the world cup

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[まったゃおれ コミティア150 う31b@matcha__ore_p]