#i say nothing new here im basically giving myself a powerpoint presentation to organize my thoughts

[ear-motif]

ive been thinking a lot about the emotional motives behind nbc hannibal’s killers lately…

youve got our first baddie, gjh, who i think killed out of a fear of losing control. His only child was going away to college, and for some reason or another, he was terrified of losing her. I think he was fearful rather than angry because he’s never shown to be angry at Abigail. He knows it’s not her fault that he feels like this. But his feelings could also be framed as a fear if rejection from Abigail herself; choosing to go to college would mean leaving him. So he has an insatiable need to keep her close that morphed into knowing that he was going to snap. That he was going to kill and eat her like a buck so that he could honor her and she could never leave. But killing her would be a loss in and of itself, so he sublimated this desire by killing girls that looked like her.

Next, we get Will goin a lil apeshit on gjh. Yes, he was terrified for Abigail’s sake, but he also felt powerful, righteous, and just. I think his emotional motive for this kill and all his subsequent ones is righteousness - a combination of the joy and thrill of being powerful and the anger of someone committing an injustice that hasn’t been punished. I think Hannibal has the same emotional motivation, which is why he and Will connect so well.

I bring up fear of rejection in gjh’s case because it tied into our next two killers (not counting Abigail); Eldon Stammets (mushroom guy) and the Lost Boys. I think Eldon was driven by a yearning - fearful of connection due to possible rejection, but joy in the beauty of his art. The Lost Boys were children manipulated into killing their families and for the child we focus on (the youngest one, Christopher) his motivation is obviously the fear of being rejected by his new family, plus maybe fear of retaliation from the mother figure and oldest “brother”.

Ok, back to Abigail. Her motivation for killing whatshisface sorry it took me so long to look up christopher’s name and NICHOLAS BOYLE there we go. Anyways its obviously fear at first but um. She guts him. And later on her and Hannibal exhume gjh so she can punish him via slitting the corpse’s throat. So I think that her motivations are the most interesting and most subtle - I think she’s a righteousness killer too. Like Will and Hannibal, she’s been desensitized to the violence and horror of murder, so now she utilizes it as a punishment.

An interesting thing is that her and Hannibal share a connection here - they both use murder to take back power that was stripped from them. I don’t really see Will doing that, he kills for purposes and while he does feel powerful, murdering people doesn’t give him much power over the one person who is taking it all away (mr medical malpractice.jpg). It curries him favor with Hannibal, and you could argue that his murders in s2b are part of his manipulation of Hannibal and therefore add to his power, but I still dont think reclamation of power is a motive for Will. It definitely is for Hannibal; his traumatic childhood led him to do all this and as much as his pride would have him deny it, building himself as a god among pigs ensures that they can never hurt him again.

Ok so we got fear (subcategorized into fear of rejection, fear of loss of control, and yearning [fear + awe and joy]) and anger (all i outlined was righteousness=anger at injustice + the thrill of punishing wrongdoers but I’m sure there’s more). Later I wanna add on my thoughts about Michael Brown’s motives and Will’s emotions behind killing Randall Tier specifically (bc the motive was obvious, he needed Hannibal to trust him as a fellow bad bitch in baltimore, but I think his emotions with Randall are a lot more complicated than they were for gjh). But I’m done for now