Testaments to the Boom Times to Come

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

1x06 “Entrée”

tfw Chilton

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Hannibal Rewatch: 1x06

Season 1, Episode 6: “Entrée”
or, THE SHOW THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

**Warning: rewatch blogging, written with knowledge of the full series

“Entrée” is basically about as far as everything currently happening on Hannibal got before it turns on its axis in the next episode, the literal and figurative center of season 1 and, arguably, the entire series.

Yeah, we’re going bold here. I hope you are enjoying these Bold Proclamations.

The reasons for why I hinge PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING on Season 1, Episode 7 “Sorbet” will be explained in full on that rewatch, so for now let’s just talk about what we’re nearing the peak on here in ep. 6, some of which will continue at this level, some of which will crest here and never reach these heights again.

1. Will’s Horrifying Kill Reconstructions

OH MY GOD.

I can hardly watch this sequence, not gonna lie. It’s far & away the darkest murder scene in this season, and I think a lot of it’s because every ounce of clinical remove Will usually tries to maintain in his narration is gone, for his entire narration is gone. There are no words, no “this is my design” no “I [murder action here],” he just does, and it’s deeeeply upsetting. Even later at his most Monster Husband-y, even just in his imagination, it doesn’t even approach how disturbing this scene is. The casual easy way he moves around the space, unhurried, because he knows exactly what he’s doing. Surety. Utter surety. So so so different from the Will Graham we are about to see, and what makes this SUCH A FUCKING PERFORMANCE by Hugh Dancy.

2. Will Destroyed By His Kill Reconstructions

OH MY GOD.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Anonymous asked:

Who do you think would make a better actor, Will or Hannibal are? 2x02 absolutely freaked me out when Will seemingly had a sobbing breakdown and just became cool again in a snap. And although Hannibal's person suit is good, when he says something like "Killing must feel good to God too He does it all the time," I'm like, "Will?! Are you sure you want this guy as your psychiatrist??" I'm still wondering how Will took this comment. That's not exactly what people expect to hear everyday.

WELL, I’d say the show actually lays this out for us very neatly, and also very symmetrically, as they like to do. In season 1, Hannibal is the better actor because he bamboozles Will. In season 2, Will is the better actor because he bamboozles Hannibal — and, I would argue, also himself, which is really just a whole new level of method acting, so good going Graham. Although actually, Hannibal also tends to bamboozle himself regarding his feelings for Will, just in the opposite direction, so really they’re pretty even on the self-deception front.

Which brings them up to par with each other on all counts moving into season 3, where against all reason they continue to act at each other even though they both KNOW that the other is acting. And yet they still do it, even using acting as one of their primary flirting avenues, which is somewhere between hilarious, adorable, and totally fucked. The Show™. Since they’re both savvy now, the bamboozling in season 3 is directed outward this time, where it turns out that Will & Hannibal acting in tandem is highly destructive effective. Which really we should have all seen coming.

…..though now it occurs to me that you might actually be asking which character would be better at acting as like, a profession? If so, I mean idk, if either actually cared to they’d probably both be pretty great, in precisely the ways Hugh Dancy & Mads Mikkelsen are great: Will fabulous at broadcasting feeling, and Hannibal incredible at nuanced restraint.

As for all the weird shit Hannibal says, what’s key to remember are two things:

1) That he’s saying it to Will, who is weird. I mean, I’m nowhere near as bad as Will and tbqh if I were in his position and my psychologist told me “killing must feel good to God too, He does it all the time,” I’d think “holy shit,” but it would be because I’d found someone on my same strange level. I mean, Hannibal’s insights are all very sound & accurate, it’s just the way he uses them that’s such a problem. He’s absolutely right that a lot of killers have a God complex, he just phrased this in the sort of odd inference poetics that Will (and myself apparently) happens to find appealing.

2) That this show was written by Bryan Fuller doing an impression of Thomas Harris – it’s gonna be purple.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Anonymous asked:

I love your rewatch and am looking forward to reading your opinion about Sorbet surgery scene. By the way, I wonder what it'd've been like if we hadn't known that Hannibal was cannibal from the start. Like, seeing s1 from Will pov? We goes into the show expecting to see adventure with a quirky (occasionally creepy) psychiatrist and a weirdo fbi guy and then wahm bamn season finale happens. Is Will crazy or is Hannibal really the killer?? Alana and Jack would've been us x)

GOD you don’t even know how much I am looking forward to rewatching Sorbet, like my hands literally start skittering around I AM SO EXCITED. I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS. I WILL EXPLAIN THEM ALL SOON.

Re: your POV thought experiment, actually what’s really interesting about Hannibal the NBC Television Show No Really, is that it can only ever operate in a world in which your audience already knows about Hannibal Lecter. I mean, I’ve actually (*gulp*) never even seen Silence of the Lambs (I knoooooww I know), but I still absolutely knew his deal because he’s just shared cultural property at this point. This pre-knowledge might be most weird & fascinating in the later seasons, because we all know that time’s ticking down on when he’s gonna end up caught and imprisoned, and we’re just like, ???? how tho. And that creates a cool tension with your audience and their expectations.

In season 1, however, they play with what-you-know/what-you-don’t-know in a different way, and it all has to do with how much WILL knows. Tbh, I’ve always felt that S1 is extraordinarily from Will’s POV, as everything from the plot to the framing of Dancy’s eyes to that beautiful fucking shallow focus is so concerned with What Will Sees. Will is our nearly-literal eyes on the world, and probably my hands-down favorite thing about the way S1 operates is how Will’s dawning realization that he can’t trust his own perceptions is also OUR dawning realization. We are with him in this, just like we’re with him in his horror and we’re with him in his strange draw to Hannibal Lecter, despite everything that does & rightfully make us uneasy about him.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

The Unwilling Prophet & the Lonely God

Sometimes (a lot of times), I think about Will Graham as an unwilling Prophet, and Hannibal Lecter as the lonely God who has finally found someone who can hear him. It’s just a metaphor, but, as is the way of old allegories, there’s something about this frame that can lend a certain heartache clarity to the events of Hannibal, and I’ve been promising that I would write it down.

At first I didn’t know what form this post was going to take, but then I realized that this was already decided for me millennia ago –

Let me tell you a story, about the Gods.

---

Will Graham is a Prophet, and he did not ask for this. He did not ask to see them, to know their awful designs. He did not ask to hear them all, the whole black broken pantheon that slipped away from the mountain to make their own heaven on earth. And he does not want it, he does not.

The unwilling Prophet screws up his eyes against the forms crowding him, tries to shut his ears, but how do you lock out the Gods?

Hannibal Lecter is a God, and he is alone. He crafts humanity into beautiful forms with cruelty & care, elevates them, and, at his long table, he dines upon what he has transformed. And no one knows. No one knows how the God is sustained.

And no one knows how he is alone.

But he is content, mostly, safe in his temple of marble and horn. So many lambs for the slaughter — his slaughter. He sings over them, and he didn’t know how mournful his song was, perhaps, until one day, someone hears him. Someone as alone as he is.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Anonymous asked:

Will there be surrealist boat smut, though? Asking for a friend ☺

Haahh oh sweet sexy anon, you do not want me to try to write you porn

because it’ll wind up being this

---

Just when Will and Hannibal were finally about to bone down on each other with the kind of fevered pent-up passion that would shame the waves in boat-rocking — pirates attacked.

“Fuck,” Will muttered.

“Evidently, not just yet,” Hannibal replied through his teeth.

They hauled themselves up to face their newest problem. It was Raúl Esparza with a peg leg and an eyepatch.

“YAAARRRRRRGG,” he yelled. It was nearly musical.

Hannibal threw an anchor on him and pounced on Will again.

The End

#Raúl Espirates

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

wayofcloudbrain asked:

Just dropping by to say how much I love your Will Graham & Hannibal Are Dead thingies. I hope you keep 'em coming! <3

Dear one, ask (for surrealist boat drabbles) and ye shall receive (surrealist boat drabbles).

---

Hannibal held up the dice, which had refused to turn up anything but doubles from their first roll atop an aesthetically convenient barrel.

“Consider,” he said. “One: probability is a factor which operates within natural forces. Two: probability is not operating as a factor. Three: we are now held within un-, sub-, or super-natural forces.” He mildly dropped the dice on the wood. Two twos. “Discuss.”

Will dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I have a headache.”

He felt rather than saw Hannibal look at him sharply.

“Ask.”

“What?”

“Ask me first.” Will took his hands from his face to look at Hannibal, frozen in the act of leaning toward him.

Hannibal dipped his head a little. “Will, may I smell you for fever?”

A crinkle of a smile passed over Will’s face, then he raised his eyebrows in mock need. “Please, Hannibal.”

They could blame the waves for the way Hannibal almost toppled toward him, if they liked.

Hannibal brushed his nose gently through Will’s hair, and Will was swept with a shockingly tangible memory of being hovered over by the black feathered stag – although that couldn’t have been real, he realized. Could it? Was it, here in this place? Will sighed, because reality was difficult, and not because of the way Hannibal’s breath warmed his ear.

Will’s headache turned out to be merely philosophical in origin. His flush, also, did not come from a fever. Hannibal carefully noted but did not mention that, just as he’d carefully kept from touching Will anywhere else. They were playing a game of tenuous allowances, though neither could have said why any more than they could have figured out when it had begun.

But, well it was something to do. The dice didn’t work, after all.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

I was tagged by @genufa to write a speed drabble, and am ignoring the original rules even harder than she did, bahaha. This actually comes from a few weeks ago, because I rediscovered a nautical Fun Fact and I’m so weak for Will Graham & Hannibal Are Dead that I got distracted from whatever else I was doing and wrote another bit of it.

Honestly the crutch beauty of a Stoppard-y limbo boat is that spontaneous drabbling is really my entire process/output, lbr. #No Shame November

---

Will leaned back against the railing next to him. “Y’know,” he said, “the word nausea comes from the Greek word for ship. Perhaps there is some comfort to be found in the historical precedent.”

Hannibal sighed deeply, head bowed over the edge. “Maybe you’re becoming me after all.” Will snorted. “Frankly, I do wish you’d stop,” he muttered.

“Right now, or in general?”

The boat heaved in the storm, sliding a few objects on the deck not lashed down quite well enough, and Will’s arm darted out to grab the back of Hannibal’s collar. Hannibal thought this was the second sweetest gesture that he had ever experienced. Then he vomited into the sea again.

Once Hannibal’s stomach seemed spent, they crossed the rocking deck back to the cabin, windows glowing warm against the storm clouds. Will rummaged through a small cupboard while Hannibal sipped at some water.

“I found some Dramamine.”

“You do not want to give me a Dramamine.”

“Why do I not want to give you Dramamine?”

Hannibal gave him a strangely bare look, and said: “I will fall asleep on you.”

Will furrowed his brow. “Wait — on me on me? Why would—”

Hannibal was about to clarify, badly, but clamped his mouth shut suddenly, looking ashen.

“I’ve decided I don’t care,” Will decided, because he did care, and pushed the bottle across the table. The hurricane lantern swung above it, casting shadows around the wooden walls. Will’s eyes followed them. His furrow returned, and deepened. “This is probably not the best time to bring this up,” he said as Hannibal swallowed two pills, “but are we on a ship now?”

“I’ve lost all capacity for disbelief. I’m not sure that I could even rise to gentle scepticism.”

“Oh, that’s just the Dramamine kicking in.”

Hannibal huffed as he laid his head on his arms. Not on Will.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Hannibal Rewatch: 1x05

Season 1, Episode 5 - “Coquilles”
or, SOO MUCH, IT, IT – FLAME, FLAMES ON THE SIDES OF MY FACE

**Warning: rewatch blogging, written with knowledge of the full series

So in the way you could say that 1x04 was about family, 1x05 is about control. HOO BOY. Yeah we’re gettin into it.

“Coquilles” is notable for being the first episode that directly treats with Will’s sleepwalking. Honestly, I have to keep reminding myself that this is the first time we’ve learned that it even happens, so natural and #on theme is this development.

Sleepwalking is a perfect way to to get into issues of control, and helpfully this is a show with psychology so our characters get to directly talk about it:

Hannibal: “Your experience [of trauma] may have overwhelmed ordinary functions that give you a sense of control.”

Will: “If my body is walking around without my permission, you’d say that’s a loss of control?”

I think the eyebrows say that Will is trying to joke here, which is itself a great way to illustrate how he deals with control, A+ show. Here’s how Will Graham attempts to maintain his tenuous grasp on literally anything: snark about it. Make a joke (that comes out all wrong). Humor has been a defense mechanism for a million years for a reason: if you can make light of something it means you’re not overwhelmed, and if you’re not overwhelmed you’re not vulnerable. 

I’m sure you see where this is going.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

CRIMSON PEAK

You know those posts/quotes that are going around about Crimson Peak that are like hey ladies, ever wanted to be invited along for the horror adventure? TRUE. Crimson Peak rolls up in a ornate black nightmare carriage and leans out the window to holler “GET IN LOSER WE’RE GOING HORRORING,” and you’re like “YES let me just grab a shawl that perfectly coordinates with my MASSIVELY ELABORATE DRESS” and Crimson Peak gushes “OMG YOU LOOK GREAT.”

In short, I went to Crimson Peak last night and I started shrieking about a minute in and haven’t stopped.

SOME OF THAT SHRIEKING AND ALL OF THE SPOILERS (srsly do not read unless you have seen this) UNDER THE CUT: