fatalism-and-villainy

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I'm still stuck on Doctor Bashir, I Presume. The scene where Bashir goes off on his dad about him "designing a better son" and then says "your design has a built-in flaw... it's illegal" really fucks me up because given the focus and progression of that conversation, Bashir going on and on about himself as his father's "gift to the world," I keep expecting the "built-in flaw" to be something about Bashir being an autonomous individual with his own motivations and interiority that don't revolve around being a status symbol for his parents. And yet, no. Just "it's illegal." Conceding to the idea that he shouldn't exist, that what his parents did to him was wrong not because of the ableism, the violation of his body and mind, the aforementioned conception of him as a status symbol and not his own person, and literally all the other myriad reasons why it's fucked up, but because, well, his state of being is unnatural. "It's illegal." Jesus fucking christ.

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at a certain level of fan popularity you realize that more fan content and world recognition means nothing because all the people who understand what the source material is actually about are like 36 people on tumblr.com posting aggressively about meta analysis and 1/3 of them hates another 1/3 and the final 1/3 disappeared off the face of the earth 8 years ago.

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This is a bigger problem in the fanfic realm as well, because I have recently frequently been running into the problem of being drawn in by shippy fanfics that involve things like captivity, enslavement, and other scenarios that inherently constitute reduced autonomy and thus dubious (at best) consent, but actively refuse to engage with those implications.

And it's frustrating, because these are scenarios that I find compelling, and that have the potential for very rich emotional work. I like the juxtaposition of physical pleasure or emotional fulfillment with feelings of fear and violation, and the shame and self-blame that those feelings bring about. And I like digging into an experience of love and desire that is frighteningly selfish in its negligence towards the personhood of its object.

But I see so many of these fics that are explicitly framed as seeking to avoid these story elements - they'll have an author's note or something at the beginning with something like "I know this is problematic, but I've tried to mitigate the dubcon elements as much as I can!" And I find this... deeply frustrating! Because it's seeking to ameliorate the very dynamics that make this sort of story interesting to me!

And by the refusal to engage with the inherently nonconsensual aspects of these premises, I'm not necessarily referring to fantasy romance plot scenarios in which the characters overcome the violence of their initial dynamic to live happily ever after in a more egalitarian relationship. I can understand that these plots are living inside a sort of non-diegetic BDSM fantasy bubble, and they are still engaging with and deriving their initial eroticism and intimacy from violence implicit in their premises, while using the fantasy aspect to mitigate the actual "realistic" consequences of that violence. (I read some danmei novels that did this in ways I found really enjoyable; I think Hannigram also arguably fits into this mold in certain ways, especially considering that it is a fantasy about the parts of abuse that can feel intensely thrilling and that can make you feel recognized and known in ways no one else can.) What I'm referring to is, well, a refusal to engage at all with that violence and violation; an implementation of these premises that feels like just another pretext for introducing the characters and getting them into a relationship, without attentiveness to the implications of the specific pretext in play.

And there's something worth probing at with these kinds of authors' notes in the sense that... there's a lot of concern in fandom nowadays about "romanticizing" rape and abuse, and the seeming necessity of portraying perfect negotiation and consent in fanfic. And yet these sorts of paratextual framings seem to me to be dangerously mistaken about what consent even is - to be conceiving of it as a magic script with no interpersonal or situational antecedents, one that intrinsically smooths over systemic power differentials or lack of personal trust.

I wonder also if that's actually related to the simplistic approach to textual criticism that I sometimes call "checklist criticism" - the idea that a text can be deemed harmful or not, problematic or not, -ist or not, simply by going through a list of "is x present? check yes or no" bullet points, rather than taking a more holistic approach to the relationship between textual production and broader systems of power, being attentive to the specific premises and genre/stylistic aims of a text, etc. Possibly that's too much of a reach for what is ultimately a complaint about the difficulty of finding really juicy darkfic, but it's worth considering.

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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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Janna Watson The Cardinal’s Song, 2021 Mixed Media on Birch Panel 60 × 60 × 1 ¾ in

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Ugh. Chiyoh. I do get frustrated sometimes with the way she’s relegated to nothing more than a helpmeet to Will and Hannibal, because I think even the meagre arc she gets in canon still offers more potential than is generally acknowledged in the fandom. But I do think the question of how she might aid Will and Hannibal’s escape and be something of an accomplice to the shady stuff they get up to, and what kind of dynamics that might bring up with both of them, is genuinely interesting!

And the thing that lingers on my mind is her presence at the end of Digestivo, where she watches Hannibal get taken away through her rifle scope but doesn’t interfere. Which makes me think she must have had some sort of conversation with Hannibal after their conversation clearing the air about Mischa, and after Hannibal leaves the house post-Will Breakup #2, because he must have informed her of what he was going to do. And he must have reassured her that he had faith that Will would eventually come around and break him out.

Which is really fascinating, because we see her get Will’s side of the story re: his relationship with Hannibal onscreen - she learns, broadly speaking, that Will accessed a part of himself with Hannibal that he’d never been able to understand before, and that he feels that he must resist the pull of that identification. And I can only imagine that what Hannibal tells her of his relationship with Will, in this context, is similar to the tack that Hannibal’s leaning on throughout Wrath of the Lamb - that Will can’t live without him, that he can trying to walk away but he will give in eventually.

And because Chiyoh is wavering on what to do throughout her arc but repeatedly settles on saving and protecting Hannibal, on honouring her bond with him, it stands to reason that she believes him about that. @menciemeer and I have discussed in the past the fact that Chiyoh seems very drawn in by the narratives Hannibal weaves, as evidenced by her devotion to Mischa’s memory despite never having met her in life. My assumption is that she’s drawn in by Hannibal’s narrative of who and what Will is in the same way. Mencie also raised the possibility in this thread that Chiyoh is very invested in stability and very wary of chaos and uncertainty - and with that in mind, imo it’s possible that she’s invested in Will giving in to Hannibal’s influence because she believes that Hannibal might steady him and keep his more impulsive side in check. (And it also means that more emphasis within their group dynamic is on Will accepting the parts of himself that Hannibal brings out in him, so that she doesn’t have to think about the parts of herself that Will forcefully drew out.)

The last part is why I can’t really buy the post-canon dynamic of Chiyoh being antagonistic towards Will specifically because she still thinks he’s a threat to Hannibal’s safety. If Will has joined Hannibal, then that threat has been more or less neutralized. She’s got plenty of reasons to be wary of or outright antagonistic towards Will, but I’m convinced those would be much more related to Will destabilizing the little environment she’d built with the prisoner and coercing her into violating her most stringently held rule about taking a life.

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Hannibal S03E03 "Secondo"

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My entry for @/ vivikenz's (instagram) DTIYS!!

Had a lot of fun with this, unfortunate that insta ruined the quality sm hoping Tumblr is better

Corel Painter and Photoshop

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The problem with this episode is that it should be an ensemble piece with Bashir at the centre and it is not. (Even though that's sort of set up at the beginning with the interviews.) Part of this can be attributed to that appalling Rom/Leeta subplot (see OP tags) sucking up all the screentime, but part of it stems from the fact that the episode seems to be constructed in such a way as to almost reproduce the contempt for Bashir that his dad and Dr. Zimmerman express in-story. The fact that only Miles is the only character on the station to even get to react to the augmentation reveal, let alone be supportive of Bashir, is a bizarre failure at balancing the cast. It reflects broader frustrations I have with how much the later seasons lean on that friendship as the only meaningful relationship Bashir has, but it's especially frustrating in this context given that there are plenty of other characters who would be much richer options to play him against in this context.

And I don't just mean Garak - although the fact that Bashir saying that his father was his "architect" comes almost right on the heels of Garak bitterly complaining about how he let Tain "mold" him into another version of himself is soooo filled with possibilities that were never explored. But also.... JADZIA??? Who also has weird identity stuff going on, and also has a clear point in her life at which she effectively became a new person, and who might have been able to provide a counterpoint to Bashir's belief that he's a "fraud". (I think failing to probe at shared identity confusion and complicated feelings about having non-natal skills and abilities is also something the show dropped the ball on in its execution of the Bashir/Ezri relationship). And Sisko? Who doesn't even get to be angry at Bashir lying to him or really defend him much, even though it's very easy to imagine both responses from him? Not to mention Kira, who had fraught beginning with Bashir but who by the time of Rejoined is casually hanging out with him - this reveal might put his earlier arrogance in a different context for her. Not to mention the fact that she's not a Federation citizen, so she'd have a whole different perspective on the augmentation thing.

Like... it is just so deeply frustrating that this show, which gives us such fantastic supportive ensemble friendships, fails to deliver in this context. I don't dislike the friendship with O'Brien, but I do resent the way it drowns out all other potential character dynamics that could be developed involving Bashir.

We watched Doctor Bashir I Presume the other night and jesus christ I forgot how much this episode makes me want to rip things apart with my teeth on Bashir's behalf

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We watched Doctor Bashir I Presume the other night and jesus christ I forgot how much this episode makes me want to rip things apart with my teeth on Bashir's behalf

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i got up to the (first) duplicated voyager episode and can i just say: what the fuck

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i'm always saying this

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Gods Favorite Sacrificial Lamb

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this homestuck discourse shit is easy

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he could've just named the horse. seems like they weren't doing a whole lot in that desert. he had time