#hannibal character study

[verysickofthisshit]

TLDR: hannibal is a cougar. the cat.

hannibal and cougars are something i’ve talked about before in a long winded rant, so i’m going to put it more comprehensively because i will die if i don’t indoctrinate at least one person. i feel there’s a general agreement that hannibal mirrors a big cat. it’s stated in the show by chiyoh where she states, “he was charming. in the way a cub is charming. a small cub that grows up to be one of the big cats.” and will responds saying, “one you can’t play with anymore.”

we see hannibal act animalistic during his murders doing things such as nuzzling, biting, snarling, baring teeth, prowling, and, you know, fucking eating them. in comparison, cougars stalk their prey and dispatch them through fatal bites to the neck. once their prey is dead, they will eat as much as they can stomach. and if any is left they will drag the body off to hide and feast on later. of course, hannibal doesn’t eat it at the scene and is much pickier. and his victims usually die of mutilation, but the parallel exists all the same.

he also moves similarly to cougars: quietly, quickly, efficiently, and elegantly. they’re both very lean and muscular animals. hannibal walks very surely and somewhat intimidating, similar to cougars. cougars often walk very heavily, putting a lot of weight onto whatever leg they’re taking the step with. you can usually see the muscles flex to support the weight. WHICH, brings me to my next point: captivity.

this is more anecdotal than fact based, but i’ve seen a fair share of cougars in zoos and the like. they prowl, they stare, they lounge, they pace, but what’s most striking to me is the eye contact they make. they will full-on stare into your eyes and communicate very clearly that they want to eat you. it’s startling how intense it is. they are aware that they can’t eat you, but if they could, they would. you’re only safe, because of this glass. that’s how far away you are from death. and it’s not a threat, it’s a promise. “you died in my kitchen, alana, when you chose to be brave. every moment since is borrowed.”

but he’s also similar in the wild. as someone who grew up in a place where cougars were common, the fear has been drilled into me since birth. unlike hannibal, they prefer deer, but they aren’t against eating people. the safety precautions i’ve been taught have been don’t go alone, stay within sight, stick to the trail, and for the love of god do not ever let your children out of sight. if one finds you and decides you’re worth the trouble your best bet is to try and scare it. don’t run, because it will catch you. if you fail, you’re fucking dinner. there are very obvious parallels. hannibal is the apex predator of baltimore. and florence, when he visits for the local cuisine. if he catches you, you’re fucking screwed.

my last point is the coloring. cougars have a general coloring of tawny, white, gray, and some minor black markings. hannibal has a tawny, gray tinged hair color and spends most of season three dressed in white. also, his fucking sharp crooked teeth. terrifying. anyway, hannibal is a catboy and this is my essay. thank you!!

[crimsondinnerparty]

Gideon in *Antipasto* is an absolute force, and it’s such a delicious irony that he, the man with no limbs and nowhere to run, has Hannibal completely on edge. Gideon’s presence is the ultimate power move. Every word, every utensil tap is a challenge, a reminder to Hannibal that he’s no longer the puppeteer pulling all the strings.

Hannibal’s reaction when Gideon refuses to be cowed—his fumbling “you still have to eat”—is not just desperate; it’s telling. Hannibal, who thrives on control, is visibly rattled by a man who’s supposed to be powerless. And when Gideon taps those utensils, it’s like a slap in the face, a reminder that Hannibal’s carefully crafted world is slipping through his fingers. Gideon’s sharp “Why do you think I’m allowing this?” slices deeper than any knife, and Hannibal’s empty response shows just how lost he is—because Gideon’s not just sitting there; he’s indulging Hannibal’s pathetic need for an audience, for companionship, in the most twisted way possible.

Hannibal’s arrogance has always been his defining trait, but this scene strips him down. Compare it to *Aperitif*, where Hannibal is reveling in his solitude, dining on his secretary’s offals, radiating superiority. It’s all gone now. After Will Graham shattered his defenses, exposed his weaknesses, and took a sledgehammer to his heart, Hannibal’s left grappling with a stark new reality. He’s reduced to this shadow of himself, sharing joyless, empty meals with a man who’s more interested in psychological warfare than in the food. Gideon hurls truths at him like weapons: that Hannibal’s dining games are nothing but a sad parody, a hollow echo of his former grandeur.

Gideon’s relentless needling cuts through Hannibal’s pretense, exposing a rawness we rarely see in the cannibal. Gideon knows he’s living on borrowed time, and he uses every second to tear into Hannibal’s ego. He’s not just some victim; he’s a mirror to Hannibal’s own emptiness. And let’s not forget the meta-layer here—Gideon’s awareness of Hannibal’s desperate need for an audience mirrors the way Hannibal manipulates others but can’t handle it when the tables are turned.

[blurredfloweryblood]

I'm not the best person to do analysis on Hannibal, mainly because it's complex and it has so many layers and fragments and I'm so afraid of looking like a dumbass.

But every time I rewatch the first season (I'm sorry it's my favorite season, I feel like a failure), I really thought that there was a hanging theme of self-preservation among all the other symbols and themes (again, not a big "aha!" moment just verbal vomit). Abigail capture bonding with Hannibal, as well as tucking her cards near her because she is in a complicated situation. She wants to live, she really does. Her father's shadow is behind her, a bigger monster is lurking, and the seven girls yell in her dreams. She just wants to be fucking free, live a fucking life. Bloodshed, gutting, deers or whatever.

Alana doesn't want to get close to Will. Her relationship with him has to remain distant and warm enough to be somewhat solid, but careful to not let it go astray. She wants to be his pillar, and remain focused.

Hannibal is fucking thrilled. He has met the perfect being in potential, the shaking of diving into violence, the lie of self-righteousness, the thrill of blood and the mind that connects, more than other minds can. The vision that can not only observe, but know. The only person that can dig his fingers into Hannibal's skin, and appreciate what it keeps underneath. Yet, it's not that he's afraid, but un-peeling himself requires time, and he can't wait, he's on his toes and he wants to reach but things are moving fast and leading him astray, waves pulling him under and up and left and right. He is deciphering and whispering and moving strings while being beckoned. He keeps himself well hidden, but Will can't stop moving in mysterious ways.

Will is pulled and pushed and pushing and pulling back, he holds both ends of the rope, fighting with himself and the unknown in his mind. Hiding from his nightmares, people and his own eyes, using the glasses to reflect back what could be seen by him back to the exterior. He doesn't want to see, he does and he doesn't, and the cycle is burning his head. Tiptoeing at the edge of a cliff, he's starting to play with the swan dive he could take. He's been whispered too, but he was already burning before. Maybe he was born like that, and little crooked, with a spider-ish heart that pumps darkness from his core. Not like a disease, but like the soon-to-be-shed body.

They are all showing their sharp edges, just trying to lightly warn the other to not get too close, or they will be cut. Just a tiny, itchy burn of the small path of blood. But in their distance and their toying and testing and stepping and pushing away, they leave parts uncovered, slipping. They allow a little of softening, a little moment of closeness between the lone moments when they are surrounded by themselves. And in those seconds of quiet and fleeting warmth, they are already retracting their claws.

So they break. Chipping away their fragments, they are conjoined by blood and the search of something to grab on when you're drowning. Turning and twisting and hovering. They reach others, or submerge themselves in the bitter ends of having let others have a little piece of their mind.

They come undone, in ribbons of sanity. But that shall be later. For now it's just the beginning. The peek to the abyss. It's the match to the grass. Not yet a forest fire. But we all know what shall happen. It's not the knowledge of what will happen. Is the how. How will they break? How will they loose their ends? Like raggedy clothes. They stand before is, complete and made.

But at the end, unrecognizable and yet distinct. Because you are what you are, even if you shed yourself. There are things we cling to, even when we are eating ourselves away.

[djobiny]

Another quickie will Graham study <333

[toothington]

baby girl you are deeply off-putting 🍽️🥩🔪🩸

[neversetyoufree]

Christ okay, so for AGES now, ever since I first got into trying to track all the references in VnC, Mikhail's name has been haunting me.

Just about every major VnC character name is a reference to something from literature and/or history, and most of those references are pretty obvious. It's not just some of them; it's pretty much a universal thing for any character of note.

However, for a while now, Misha has seemed frustratingly like an exception. There is a serious dearth of characters named Misha or Mikhail in the historical eras and literary canons that Mochijun tends to pull from. I've been failing to find anything for a while, and I haven't seen any other fans picking out things he could be in reference to either. He's just this apparent weird exception, despite the fact that he's an important and extremely thematically relevant character.

But today I finally realized something. The spelling is different, but there is one decently famous literary character named Misha that works as a decent parallel to VnC's Mikhail—Mischa Lecter from the Hannibal series.

For those unfamiliar, in the book version of Hannibal, Mischa Lecter's entire narrative purpose is to be the younger sibling whose horrific death motivates Hannibal Lecter's violent revenge quest. The rest of the Lecter family is killed before the children, leaving Hannibal and Mischa alone in the world together with nobody else to rely on. Then Mischa is killed and cannibalized, and thus begins her brother's career as a killer cannibal.

It's not exactly a one to one parallel, but "desperate young siblings are trapped together in a horrible situation, and then the younger sibling Mischa dies, leaving the older brother alone and vengeful" does sound rather familiar, doesn't it? As remember, according to Vanitas, our Mikhail is supposed to be dead.

It's a weird and obscure enough comparison that I'm not about to declare I've solved the mystery for certain, but personally I've yet to find a better explanation for our Misha's name. After all, the French version of Michael is usually Michel, so Mochijun choosing specifically the Russian version of the name, then having Mikhail insist on going by "Misha" is a rather conspicuous choice. There has to be a reason for what's going on there.

[theantitheticallogician]

am i gonna make a playlist ab hannigram?

you bet.

[dyke-will-graham]

Long Live Abigail Hobbs!

In honor of our best girl I’m sharing my favorite Abigail Hobbs coded songs because she’s quite literally the ghost haunting me. No one deserved her.

Killer- Phoebe Bridgers

“Sometimes I think I’m a killer. I scared you in your house, I even scared myself talking about Dahmer on your couch.”

“I am sick of the chase, but I’m hungry for blood. And there’s nothing I can do.”

Family Tree- Ethel Cain

“I’m just a child but I’m not above violence.”

“Christ forgive these bones in hiding and oh and the bones I’m about to leave.”

Sun-Bleached Flies - Ethel Cain

“God loves you but not enough to save you.”

“But I always knew that in the end no one was coming to save me so I just prayed, and I keep praying and praying. If it’s meant to be then it will be.”

Strangers- Ethel Cain

“I tried to be good, am I no good? With my memory restricted to a Polaroid in evidence.”

“Found you just to tell you I made it real far. And I never blamed you for loving me the way that you did.”

“Am I turning in your stomach? Am I making you feel sick?”

Bite the Hand- Boygenius

“Who do you think you are? Who do you think I am? Maybe I’m afraid of you?”

“I can’t love you how you want me to.”

Vienna (in Memoriam) - the army, the navy

Enough said.

Smother - Daughter

“In the darkness I will meet my creators and they will all tell me I’m a suffocator.”

“Sometimes I wish I had stayed in my mother, never to come out.”

Im Right Here - Theodore Shapiro

The humming and melody feel like what Abigail’s life with Will might have been had they been in WolfTrap instead.

House Song- Searows

“Something is rotten inside me, I have to find it and cut it out.”

Hard Times- Ethel Cain

“Tell me a story about how it ends where you’re still the good guy I make pretend cause I hate this story where happiness ends and dies with you.”

“I thought good guys got to be happy? I’m not happy. I am poison in the water and unhappy. A little girl who needs her daddy real bad.”

“I’m tired of you still tied to me.”

OKAY THATS ALL FOR NOW. Abigail is one of my favorite characters ever and I think her complexity should be observed more. She was a survivor and perceived in the light of those around her and never as she truly was and I mourn her daily. I think about how she deserved to go to school abroad and never want for anything but in the end was a playing pawn in a game between two men who were themselves too terrified and confused to make sense of each other much less her as an independent.

IF YOU WANT MORE HERES MY PLAYLIST FOR HER

[cedarxwing]

I need a fic that's like, "Five times Will and Hannibal banged someone else because they couldn't bang each other (and one time they didn't)" but it needs to lovingly portray all the non-hannigram characters and I fear that's too much to hope for in this economy.

[artartartsstuff]

CHARACTER STUDY (gonna do movie accurate on the other side)

[vorpaelyzis]

🫀prey🫀

Hyperfixation made me immune to cringe and I am free drawing oc X canon. I'm doing way better painting faces now! And simplifying them too— this one I studied some of JC Leyendecker pieces c: hope y'all like it

[ninawolv3rina]

You know what? fuck this [animes twinks your old man]

OC: Faedril Silvarin (he/him)

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Mmmkay, I have thoughts on Alana’s arc and contextualizing Margot/Alana.

This is sort of tangential to what I said here regarding the interplay of control and violence on the show. In that post, I said of Alana:

With Alana, [violence is] the only possible culmination of her losing control of the situation with Mason Verger, with her being forced to follow the abdication of her morals all the way to the end point.

Alana isn’t a “natural” killer like some of the characters on the show, but she’s capable of it when pushed (unlike, say, Chilton) - and the set of circumstances that get her there are losing control, and only being able to regain control for the situation by enabling, and participating in, murder. And this arc sheds some fascinating light on some of the central traits that have defined her throughout the show.

Two of Alana’s key qualities as a character, I would say, are both related to control. Firstly, she feels a strong sense of personal responsibility - she can’t just stand aside and allow injustice to take place. She always intervenes in a situation to advocate for what she feels is right, such as with Abigail, and with Will during season 1 and his arc in prison. She’s very invested in rightness, rather than simply self-preservation, at least initially (less so come season 3, where she’s fine with throwing Chilton under the bus) - when Gideon is loose, with a strong possibility he’ll come after her, she’s not solely worried about her own safety, but rather expresses concern over what happened to him and the fact that he can’t truly be held accountable for his actions when operating under reduced capacity. And she can’t be persuaded or intimidated into acting in her own self-interest if it contradicts her values. She refuses to withdraw her report citing her concerns about Jack putting Will in the field when pressed to do so by Kade Prunell and smarmy institutional self-protection; and, of course, she refuses to take the out that Hannibal offers her in the s2 finale. That moment in Hannibal’s kitchen encapsulates so much of the essence of her character - she’s not the kind of person who could ever walk away without trying to bring him down.

Her other central attribute in the early seasons is self-control. She’s self-aware almost to a fault, and always striving to keep her worst interpersonal impulses in check. She knows her shortcomings in her personal relationships, and compartmentalizes accordingly. She avoids being alone with Will in an effort to maintain professional boundaries and resist indulging in something that she knows would be destructive. Her words to Will after turning him down are telling - she wanted to sleep with him, and was internally divided about the rejection, but an affair would have been “reckless.” She’s extremely careful, including with her own desires.

(Her relationship with Hannibal, tellingly, is not reckless from her POV - it’s her attempting to find emotional safety from her conflicted feelings about Will. There’s an interesting parallel in her kissing Hannibal after the party in Futamono to Will kissing her at his house in Fromage - she “reached” for Hannibal the way Will did to her, grasping for stability.)

What changes for her in season 3 is that, in a word, she gets reckless. She becomes much friendlier with ruthless pragmatism, whereas before, she was outraged at - for example - launching a defense for Will in court based on untruths, even if it could exonerate him. Her plan to play Mason relies on her confidence that the FBI will swoop in and bail her out in the end, so she maintains her trust in institutions (at first), but she’s still willing to use extra-legal channels to catch Hannibal, and manipulate an incredibly dangerous man to her ends. And it’s all still of a piece with her character and her need to take control over and assume responsibility for the situation with Hannibal - but it’s a version of herself undergoing transformation, becoming more ruthless and more willing to take matters into her own hands rather than following official channels. And, crucially, it involves her losing control of the situation, despite her conviction that she can manage it - by which she learns that it’s impossible for her to absolve herself of complicity here, and she has to take a more vigilante-justice route, put her life in danger by loosing chaos in the form of Hannibal, and allow him to take the fall and lie for her.

The fling with Margot correlates both to Alana’s becoming as this new, more ruthless and untethered version of herself, and in the slippage of her carefully maintained self-control. Hooking up with Mason’s sister is pretty much the definition of reckless! It makes the situation considerably more precarious, and the alliance with Margot is hardly essential to her original plan, even if there does end up being $$$ attached to it. But it’s an indulgence that she didn’t allow herself to fully give in to with Will. The parallel between Will and Margot is made pretty apparent wrt their relationships with Hannibal, but I think they also represent something similar to Alana (who herself gets, in certain ways, take the role of Hannibal for this arc). She wants to save people, and Margot, while not toothless, is fairly disempowered and traumatized, someone in need of saving. The relationship with her, for Alana, is a form of giving in to something she’s long denied herself. And, thematically, it makes perfect sense that the safeguards she’s put up around herself begin to dissolve in tandem with her personal beliefs being challenged and forced to adapt.

[blurredfloweryblood]

This isn't like a big "aha!" moment or a "look at how creative and different I am having this interpretation"

I just like to pour my thoughts. And I was thinking of the end scene of Hannibal (nbc) I always felt it like a triumph. The diving into the ocean, lost within the sea foam and waves. Part of a storm, deep within blue darkness, holding each other as they drown. With nobody else to find them, nobody else to chase them. The culmination of their love is the broken pieces of the people around them. Pieces that can never be glued together.

In death, they will still haunt their thoughts, creeping under the floorboards, passing reflections on the surfaces of mirrors, thoughts sharp cutting the mind and leaving a bloody trail of spirals. They will remain.

Together. In the ocean, looking at the Primavera. Whenever they've been, the phantom of their presence will stay. The blood that blackens at midnight.

They will be together, and ascend. Away from everything else. They have the victory, shining with the moonlight, witnesses of their violence, holding each other, like wedding vows, death won't do them part.

They are eternity. The horror itself. There is no heaven, there is no hell. It's just the ocean, where they will be no corpses. Why would there would be decaying bodies, when they've already become?

There is no death for them. No death when they're always in the background of reality, strangers to time.

[djobiny]

Will Graham studies :)

[judeeatstherude]

MCD FIC ?!

i’ve decided to start publishing the mcd fic i’ve been working on for a while.. it’s slow going but it’s really taxing so i hope you appreciate it!

this has been my most difficult & therefore most beloved project so i would really appreciate it if you could give it some love

sharing / comments / kudos all so so appreciated !! i’ve been writing this amidst some very important exams so it’s been. difficult and demotivating for sure

(if you can’t get to the mcd part that’s okay ! they’re both alive and well for now and a lot happens before that)