#hannibrainworms

[flock-of-cassowaries]

For Christmas this year, the roiling water of my subconscious have delivered me a nifty new set of recurring dreams.

Either:

A ) I fight Hannibal Lecter (who wants to eat me, in a horrifically literal way that is not a metaphor for gay sex);

or…

B ) I fight my mother (who wants to make sure no one eats anything, ever again).

Sometimes, on very special nights, both my mother and Hannibal Lecter are present. Sometimes he survives her, but barely.

I, however, always perish.

…so that’s cool and definitely not indicative of any kind of psychological damage I should probably talk to a professional about.

[flock-of-cassowaries]

Hey, it’s me! The Fun Police.

All cops are bastards, but I don’t have the brutal force of the state behind me - just the willingness to be really didactic and irritating at a moment’s notice!

Anyway, a thing I learned after being infected by the Hannibrainworms is that cannibalism does not cause prion disease.

Prion disease, as far as anyone can tell, is a very, very rare affliction that arises randomly.

Cannibalism - particularly of the brain and central nervous tissues - is just an incredibly efficient vector for spreading prion disease within members of species (including humans and ungulates) that are vulnerable to it.

Eating the bodies of individuals with prion disease can also spread the disease between vulnerable species - hence, the BSE outbreak in the 1990s, and more recently, the unfortunate people who got it from being brave enough to eat squirrel brains. (The pickier eaters who only ate the squirrel meat were okay, in that case.)

The popular conception that cannibalism causes prion disease comes from the fact that at one point, a member of a group of people who practiced funerary cannibalism (eating the bodies of their deceased loved ones as a form of respect) developed spontaneous prion disease.

The consequences were absolutely devastating, but keep in mind - this group had mourned their dead this way for thousands of years without issue before one of their members spontaneously developed the misfolded protein disease; everything was fine until that person’s corpse infected his grieving loved ones, who in turn infected others (when they perished and were consumed).

It’s actually super-fucking sad, and the fact that it’s been flattened into a “divine consequences of immoral actions” example is… kinda just racism.

But yeah - good news for anyone whose gone to a Lecter dinner party, I guess.

…and also, bad news for anyone reading this post - recent research has shown that Hannibrainworms are extremely contagious, and if you’ve gotten this far, I’m sorry to inform you that you almost definitely have them.

[flock-of-cassowaries]

As a person diagnosed with a disease that causes brain inflammation, whose diagnosis was significantly delayed by a neurologist failing to pass along important MRI results - yes, this was infuriating.

I nevertheless ship Hannigram, for reasons I struggle to succinctly explain.

(I would say “brainworms”, but I now get a monitoring MRI every year, and my last scan was clear. Presumably, someone would’ve mentioned it if there were literal worms in there.)

More on both the medical angle, and the “why TF do I ship this??” angle, below the cut.

What it felt like to find out important test results were not shared with me:

It was a horrible gut punch. In my case, there was no malice - only negligence - but the result was that I had been walking around for ten years gaslighting myself that the worsening symptoms I was experiencing couldn’t possibly be what I originally thought they were.

I was mad, but also just devastated. It really shook my core sense of safety in the world.

It took me about a year to even start to kind of feel normal again, despite the fact that I was getting really good medical care in the wake of the error being detected.

Details of what’s portrayed in this episode that are just dumb (aka ✨pedantry✨):

My experience of actual medical testing and care around inflammatory autoimmune brain conditions makes me even more irritated by this plot line.

First off, the MRI scene. Like, perhaps it’s different in the states, but in Canada, MRI departments operate 24/7. I’ve had scans scheduled at 3am.

They will definitely set up an emergency scan for you if you have an emergent condition (I only waited four days for the scan that ultimately got me diagnosed), but there’s no way that they could just do an “off the books” unofficial scan with no one around, as is portrayed in the show.

Also, neurologists don’t perform the MRI. Radiologists do it, and then they send it to the neurologist to interpret.

Most importantly, you CANNOT move your head during a scan. There’s actually a little cushion in there that fits tightly around your head to stabilize it so you don’t accidentally move it, but they also will tell you to stay very still. One radiologist warned me to “breathe gently”.

In the show, you can see the plastic frame where the stabilizing cushion should be, but in the name of a cool shot, they’ve removed it, and Will Graham is just bobbing his fucking head like he’s in Night At The Roxbury.

I was so irritated I made a gif.

That scan would be unusable.

Also, the fact that Hannibal is able to correctly guess the exact condition Will has makes no sense. So many things could mimic those same symptoms.

To conclusive determine that what I had was MS, the following tests were done (within the context of the taxpayer-funded Canadian medical system):

1. Standard blood panel and urinalysis to rule out common infections

2. MRI

3. MRI with contrast fluid

4. Spinal tap

5. Seventeen additional blood tests

And they did all that despite the fact that I had a first degree-relative already diagnosed with the same disease.

Some people have suggested Hannibal made the diagnosis based on smell, but that is anatomically nonsensical. The brain is wrapped in a pretty thick membrane; aseptic brain inflammation would be not off-gassing from the skin or mouth like a stomach cancer, or arsenic poisoning.

Finally, the ease with which Hannibal is able to talk Dr. Dipshit into committing gross and easily-detectable medical malpractice makes no goddamn sense. It is perhaps the baldest example of the cynicism of the show’s writing - as I argued in another post, it portrays a world in which almost everyone is despicable.

If we rule out the possibility of literal brainworms, how the f*^% did I end up shipping these two?

As for how I ended up shipping Hannigram anyway - I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that as a former right-wing true believer, I am an expert at creatively misreading media.

When almost all of popular art has the theme “your beliefs are bad, and you should feel bad”, you learn to preemptively kill the author (death the author?) so that you can extract enjoyment from a work of art without reexamining your odious beliefs.

( See: Republican politicians using lefty protest songs at rallies. )

I’m no longer a conservative - I excised those brainworms about a decade ago, thank god - but the willingness to just arbitrarily toss out parts of a story that don’t suit remains strong in me.

Season 2 of Hannibal is quite good, and Season 3 (while objectively bonkers and very poorly paced) has some great character moments. Hannibal as a character becomes a lot more complex as he unravels.

This unraveling makes him a fascinating figure onto which to project some of my worst psychological tendencies - specifically, my tendency towards splitting (where I see the people close to me as either all good, or all bad, and for that perception can change in an instant). So that’s really interesting to explore.

It’s also probably a deliberate misreading of the text on my part, but there are quite a few parts in s2 and s3 where Hannibal can be read as straight-up delusional; and while I am sensitive to the fact that people with delusional disorders are far, far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators, I am also endlessly fascinated by the trope of “character looks back on his life, and sees a series of horrible sins he’s committed, whose damage to others cannot be undone; and struggles with how to cope with that.”

So in that context, giving Hannibal a deus-ex-machina of high-dose risperidone creates some fascinating narrative possibilities.

(This is probably something I enjoy writing because I spent 15 years being an obnoxious apologist for horrible right-wing politicians.)

I also just like the idea of Will taking it upon himself to kill this guy once and for all, and then not being able to bring himself to do it, and instead just keeping him captive and constantly wrestling with the question of whether he’s just being pragmatic about keeping everyone in the vicinity safe from his pet serial killer, or if he’s actually doing what he’s doing to passive-aggressively punish Hannibal.

There’s just so much there, thematically, that I love to play with.

hannibal lecter SLANDER rant [spoilers for 1x10]

WHATTTT WHAT WHAT. Hannibal Lecter…Oooh… this just confused me so bad guys and when I finish the whole series and this whole rant turns out to be wrong I’ll admit it but how can you still sit there and ship hannigram!!!!! after this!!!!! it made me so mad that a LICENSED RADIOLOGIST sat there and lied to Will’s face ABOUT HIS OWN RESULTS because Hannibal asked him or whatever the fuck, I don’t know how close him and the doctor are yet or what their relationship is BUT???? LIKE???? He’s actively subjecting him to hallucinatory torture and the pain that comes with it, HALF. OF. HIS. BRAIN. IS. INFLAMED. HE CAN LITTERALY DIE FROM IT + brain damage, seizures, and worsen his already worse mental health. I HATE THIS GUY!!!! My hate train will start from here and continue on until he can prove me wrong

[flock-of-cassowaries]

So the Hannibrainworms have led me down the rabbithole of reading about the origin of the concept of “psychic driving”, and jesus h. christ on a triscuit… comparing Frederick Chiton to the person who developed the methods Chilton practices (Donald Ewen Cameron) is like comparing Succession’s real-eldest-boy vanity presidential candidate Connor Roy to habitual wildlife corpse-disrespecter RFK Jr.

Like. You watch the show, and you think:

“Wow, this feels slightly overdone; no one is this obviously slimy and unethical [Chilton] / naïvely entitled and obviously unqualified [Connor Roy].”

…and then the somehow-even-more-intense reality hits you like a whale carcass sliding off the roof of a speeding minivan.

Like. Look at this shit:

(…or maybe don’t - cw for fascism and severe ableism)

Cameron started to distinguish populations between "the weak" and "the strong". Those with anxieties or insecurities and who had trouble with the state of the world were labelled as "the weak"; in Cameron's analysis, they could not cope with life and had to be isolated from society by "the strong". The mentally ill were thus labelled as not only sick, but also weak. Cameron further argued that "the weak" must not influence children. He promoted a philosophy where chaos could be prevented by removing the weak from society.

[source: wikipedia]

I thought the most sinister thing about Montreal was the omnipresent sketchy-ass concrete infrastructure, or the mafia, or the bikers, or maybe that guy who forever attached an unwelcome asterisk to the New Order song “True Faith”.

But no. It’s this fucking guy. Donald Ewen Cameron.

…who, btw, was invited to work at McGill by Dr. Burnt Toast himself, Walter Wilder Penfield.