Anonymous asked:
OH GEE. Just a small and accessible question I feel fully equipped to answer!!! Ha ha, hah. Lord. Ok let’s just dive in here and see what sort of long jointless thing I write, what’s my first thought….. well, one is that a discrepancy in discussion could be due to how Will’s feelings about Hannibal often aren’t as much fun as the Lovestruck Cannibal’s! Because honestly, for a lot of the series’ run, even at the most mollified level Hannibal is kinda like the cut inside Will’s mouth that he can’t stop worrying with his tongue. (pls everyone use 1000 versions of this WAITING METAPHOR in your S4 speculative fics, god)
There’s also something about how most of the softer feelings Will has for Hannibal would gall him to admit, for evolving (and worsening) reasons, but throughout the whole show. Even in S1 Will is a pretty stirring blend of grateful and dismayed over how nice Hannibal’s support feels, and since he doesn’t like to need people (notorious fall-throughs, the lot of ‘em), he gets edgy about it. I’m kinda repeating some things I’ve brought up regarding Monster Husbands before, but the Support element is closely tied to the Understanding element, and both of these are suspect & dangerous to Will in his like, roiling turmoil over What Kind Of Crazy he is and what he should be ~allowed~
And then this gets all fucked into worse tangles during the long period when Will is all INCANDESCENTLY bitter & fighty toward Hannibal, for the very good reason of [U PICK]. He’s still his dearest enemy though, throughout. There’s just something to be said for that one asshole who appreciates your dark weird jokes, y’know? Also there’s the fact that they’re pretty fated into this at this point, your old school Doomed Love model probably as much as why the enemies-to-lovers trope exists. There’s just a lot of “inconvenient” passion going around. Fuck com-passion for a minute, honestly — you two literally try to make each other bleed out your betrayal on the regular.
But…. ok there is the compassion too. How Will can’t actually bear to watch Hannibal be killed, or how it feels so natural to partner up against shared adversaries, or how he tries to warn him in “Mizumono.” At that point in the narrative, well shit gets real heavy & drowny for Will and it’s a little hard to comb out (how damn d r e a m y is the Italian arc for him, seriously?) but I think in a lot of ways Hannibal begins to represent for Will a mysterious & scary but darkly appealing fairytale other-future. The World That Could Have Been, past-tense intended. Because I’d say part of the reason why Will even entertains it is because he thinks he’s already abandoned it, that Hannibal will never accept him after his betrayal and can just replace him with Bedelias more fit for his world. But Will feels all entranced and hopeless rn and is just gonna keep throwing his fluffy singed little moth body at Hannibal’s consuming flame in something he’s only half-heartedly calling “revenge” until Hannibal finally kills him good, whiiiich is an approach to looking at “Dolce” that is only just now coming together for me, wow.
But another aspect of this, that I’m remiss not to mention until now, is that Will’s always kinda “surfing his emotional breakers,” as @confusedkayt once phrased it, obliterating me with aptness as per usual. He’s really reactive to others obviously, and so with Hannibal’s shifts in his OWN feelings toward Will (or at least his shifts in understanding and then expressing them), Will’s feelings sweep & surge in turn. He’s the tugging moon to Hannibal’s tides as well though, so it’s not like this is only working in one direction. Anyhow, for reasons of parallelism that have made me want to lie on the floor even since I saw @genufa point this out, in “Digestivo” Will tries one last time to set aside Hannibal and make a grab for the quiet ~regular~ life he still thinks he wants, folding the season neatly in two, with Hannibal’s attempt to live the glam murder-cool life HE still thought he wanted making up the first part. They both had to go through this to learn how everything paled without the other, it seems.
I love how my paragraphs are getting longer & longer as I do more of a verbal throwing-my-hands-up-in-the-air as we go. And I feel like I still haven’t even answered your question! God, maybe it’s actually just pretty simple — maybe Will is, at times resentfully, at times hungrily, but always helplessly drawn to Hannibal for a lot of the very same reasons WE are. Hannibal is engaging. He’s the most interesting cannibal we know. We rage against all his terrible doings, but he always charms us anew with his quaint fussy preferences and warm-sad eyes, his murder-cat grace and that boundless, breathtaking devotion to his dear Will. Hannibal knows that no one will ever love Will the way he does, and Will knows that too. So in the end, he just has to decide whether he’s gonna take that leap.
