#DOESN'T HANNIBAL GO AFTER PEOPLE WHO HURT OTHERS FOR NO REASON. Yeah he.

[euclydya]

i am surw we've said this before but hannibal would absolutely kill me for food crimes and that's hilarious. love that 4 me

[fatalism-and-villainy]

choose violence! 2, 8, (is there any specific one you're really hoping for the chance to grumble about)?

a compelling argument for why your fave would never top or bottom

I'll answer a variation on this one. I might be more compelled by sub!Hannibal if he actually behaved the way he does when restrained or overpowered or captive in canon, i.e. continuing to be cool and collected and trying to influence the situation to his advantage, rather than turning into a puddle of goo. And if it were Will tying him up and hurting him? Someone he loves and knows can't bring himself to really hurt him and someone whose aggressive side he's been trying to tease out since day one? He'd be DELIGHTED. He'd be UNBEARABLY smug. He wouldn't be able to resist egging Will on and asking him if it felt good to torture him and have him at his mercy. He is immune to subspace.

Which is to say I think he can bottom in stuff like rope or painplay (I think he actively enjoys a good invigorating beating) but he can't submit to save his life.

common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

You've seen me talk about this in your vicinity before, I think, but the idea of Will as being ~so jealous and possessive~ towards Hannibal, and this being a primary element in how he relates to Hannibal.

Yeah, you can pinpoint contexts in which that arguably bubbles up, particularly with Bedelia, but she's also a person he's got plenty of other moral reasons to dislike - it's not as if jealousy is the sum total of why he hates her. And most of the other attributions of his behaviour around/about Hannibal to "jealousy" are nonsense imo.

But what really drives me up the wall is that Will is somehow equally jealous/possessive to Hannibal, or even more so! Or that this somehow makes him "just as bad as" or worse than Hannibal! i.e. "people think Hannibal is the jealous one, but it's actually Will"/"ok, but Will is jealous too!"/"Hannibal might be evil but Will is ~jealous~ so it balances out" and whatnot.

Yeah sorry but I think the guy who engineers a situation in which Will's unborn child gets aborted, stabs Will and then kills someone Will cares about right in front of him as punishment for Will betraying him (and for valuing getting justice for the previous-presumed-dead person Hannibal kills more than he values going with Hannibal), AND tries to have the family that Will formed without him killed... might be a little bit possessive towards Will! That's not actually a wild and crazy extrapolation! And those actions are unequivocally worse than Will being bitchy with Bedelia in season 3.

(Yeah, there's the leg post-fall, which could be said to be an escalation of Will's antagonism towards her. But that comes after the events of canon and doesn't represent a tendency Will displays throughout the show. And furthermore, while it's reasonable to assume Will is an active participant in that, I'm pretty convinced that going after Bedelia was Hannibal's idea - there are a lot of hints dropped in 3A that Hannibal's been planning to eat her Abel Gideon-style for a long time. I might make a post about that later.)

A lot of this stems from people wanting to avoid interpreting the characters through very narrow archetypal lenses. And to some degree, that's understandable, because neither Will not Hannibal is just one thing, and they both defy categorization in a lot of ways. But sometimes people resist common character tropes a bit too extensively, in ways that also ignore canon characterization. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes the serial killer dude who displays a complete lack of regard for others' boundaries over the course of the show is jealous and possessive. It happens.

Furthermore, I think that Hannibal's possessive behaviour is extremely sexy of him and a major part of the appeal of his character, to me. It's a gothic romance! We do not need it to be egalitarian.

[free space]

This is also relating to Will, but something that's been getting my goat frequently is the idea that because Will has a penchant for manipulation (which, yeah, he does), everything he says and any emotion or vulnerability or inner conflict he shows must be a lie. As I argued in this post (and touched on it here too), Will doesn't like being perceived as weak, and with very few exceptions, his active manipulations are about playing up his confidence and certainty. (The deleted scene from season 2 where he plots with Mason Verger is a good example of this - the sort of faux-joviality and barely masked contempt of his affect are a pretty clear indication of how he performs). And while he's often unforthcoming about his own motives, like when he talks to Pazzi and says "you don't know whose side I'm on", he doesn't usually show the inner conflict turmoil he's actually feeling.

All of that is to say - when Will does outwardly express fear or uncertainty, he usually means it! I've seen a lot of takes that downplay the degree to which he's conflicted about Hannibal, especially in 3B - like, the idea that he was "manipulating" Bedelia in their therapy sessions and wasn't actually unsure at all as to whether Hannibal was in love with him (which... manipulating her to what end??? he doesn't need anything from her other than therapy at that point. he hates her! why would he subject himself to her company if not for the simple reason that she might be the only person on Earth who has any capacity to possibly understand what he went through with Hannibal?) Or that he wasn't actually conflicted about getting involved with criminal investigation again (and by extension, seeing Hannibal again) at the beginning of 3B, and he was just "manipulating Jack" (again, why??? Why not just readily agree to Jack's request, and claim he's invested in saving lives, if he really is super murder happy at that point and wants to hide that? And if he was truly so uncomplicatedly eager to see Hannibal again, then... why didn't he just visit him? Why wait until another murderer needed to be caught?)

Those are just a few examples of that sort of thing, and they stick in my mind because season 3B is just more interesting to me if Will was sincere about wanting to break free of Hannibal at the end of Digestivo, got pulled back into Hannibal's world in a way he couldn't bring himself to say no to, and seeing him against brought up long-denied personal feelings and inner urges. But it does crop up in plenty of other contexts too, and it just seems like such a flattening take on his character. Will being constantly torn in two and at war with himself and his own impulses is such a fundamental element of his character! What's the point of even having a story if he doesn't feel at all conflicted about Hannibal and his own darker side?