fatalism-and-villainy

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Favourite moments of the 2024 NCAA gymnastics season: MSU ties the programme record on beam, scoring a 49.600 as part of the team's first win against Michigan in Ann Arbor since 1990.

#augh... msu my beloved #gymnastics #ncaa gymnastics #giana kalefe #makayla tucker #gabi ortiz #skyla schulte #baleigh garcia #gabi stephen #queue

[fatalism-and-villainy]

#'the divine punishment of the sinner mirrors the sin being punished' etc etc

has been pointed out before by greater minds but the way garret jacob hobbs' wounds resemble the marks left by the antlers on the girls he killed is always crazy

#was just going to add that quote! #i love the foreshadowing of the kind of tableau will might eventually create more deliberately #hannibal #aperitif #queue

[fatalism-and-villainy]

dude i just got shot i need you to suck the bullet out

#🍳 #this was hannibal season 3 episode 6 i believe

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Wahoo

#wahoo

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Standing at the top of the stair well wearing my bunk mates clothes to scare him at the abandoned factory sleepover after our scary "Clone vat" movie watch party but I forgot he put a curse on his clothing to act like puppies when ever they see him so they rip themselves off my body and bound down the stairs to greet him and start barking and im just naked at the top of the stairs and afraiud and embarased and but instead of being angry he steps up to me and stwrts to. .. .... we start kissinf

#great thoughts philosophy indeed #queue

[fatalism-and-villainy]

2.09 | 3.07

#yeah completely agree with your commentary #will knows hannibal deserves it by his own metrics #but he can't bring himself to apply those metrics to hannibal #THIS is one reason i so badly want will as a killer of killers post-canon #i want to see him FULLY in his hypocrisy era #and doing elaborate mental gymnastics to justify himself #hannibal #meta #will graham #hannibal lecter #queue

[fatalism-and-villainy]

When planning fic I usually make a bullet point list of basic scenes I want to cover, with particular dialogue exchanges and turns of phrase I don't want to forget, and for this fic the bullet point outline is already over 3,000 words long. For contrast, the Miriam Lass-themed fic, which came out at 12,000 words, only had a ~1500 word outline. So this is looking to be a long one.

I was on the phone with Hannibal Watch Buddy and was talking about how my goal with this noncon fantasy fic is to draw a continuity between sexual violence and the ostensibly non-sexual forms of violence and violation present on the show, and especially the gendered lines along which that split is conceived - the ways that violence-against-women and violence-against-men instinctively register as qualitatively different to Will, but with the pull of them ultimately implied to come from a similar place - using the homoerotic elements of the violence on the show to contextualize Will's sexuality crisis, probe at the epistemic confusion surrounding desiring other men, and connecting that to what already feels familiar -

Which is all to say that I'm really hoping this fic will prompt a "critically jacking off to this problematic fic in a scholarly manner" response.

#fic talk #noncon

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Multifandom Challenge  ||  54/100 Characters  ||  Abigail Hobbs ↳   “I knew what my father was. I knew what he did. I knew. I was the one who met the girls, talked to them, laughed and joked. Found out where they lived, where they were going, when they’d be alone. Girls that looked just like me. They could have been my friends. I couldn’t say no to him. I knew… I knew it was them or me.”

#abigail hobbs #hannibal #edits #queue

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Trying to find The Most Accurate reading of anything in a text is like the opposite of what professors at the graduate level are looking for, much less journals where one is aiming to get published. Like you’re trying to produce *a* reading that you can support, not *the* reading, there is no Ultimate Accurate Reading because you’re working with like interconnected systems of meaning that will mean different things to different people in different contexts. It’s not like trying to solve an equation

#yeah this is one thing that frustrates me about a lot of fandom discussions #literary criticism #queue

[fatalism-and-villainy]

sex line operator: oh yeah baby, i’m taking off my cloths. my clothe is coming off. me: hmm.. ok… sex line operator: yeah baby youre so hard, i can tell youre getting turned on me: i never said that. youre godmodding. im hanging up

#ahahaha a classic #queue

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Hey, what are you looking at? Who the hell do you think I am? And what are you looking at? Like you never seen a broken man

#she's sooo #st. vincent #music blogging #queue

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I listened to Taylor Swift's new album and girl.... stop churning out Albums and start putting effort into writing decent songs again

#one of the most grotesque public displays of neuroticism i've ever seen #personally i am more excited for st. vincent's new album. #music blogging

[fatalism-and-villainy]

mmm I forgot that both Will's interim family and Alana's family are both framed in the same way in the dialogue as well.

3.12:

Bedelia: Hannibal gave you three years to build a family, confident that he would find a way to take them from you. Will: And he has.

and 3.13:

Hannibal: You died in my kitchen, Alana. When you chose to be brave. Every moment since is borrowed. Your wife, your child… they belong to me. We made a bargain for Will’s life. And then I spun you gold.

Both operating on the borrowed time argument, the idea that any time they have free of Hannibal's influence is his gift to them, before he comes to collect in some manner or another.

oh boy so I’m thinking about what might have come about in a) a more extended Red Dragon arc that had a full season’s worth of time to play with, and b) a Red Dragon arc less adaptationally married to the book, AND c) a Red Dragon arc that engaged the secondary characters more, and allowed them to be more dynamic than they are during that part of the show -

and while I know Hannibal was more immediately concerned at that point with dealing with his feelings regarding Will than with fulfilling his promise to Alana, I can’t help but imagine (and really wish we’d gotten) a scenario where it’s Alana, Margot, and their son who Hannibal sends Dolarhyde after.

(Could be a what-if AU scenario, or it could exist alongside the attack on Molly and Walter in an extended arc.)

A lot of the threads the show picks up on from the book involve the theme of family - Dolarhyde’s murders of the families are used to dig into the family Will made for himself, in contrast with the family Hannibal wanted to give him. Margot and Alana’s family would have made a fantastic counterpoint to that - an unconventional family that was forged in blood under circumstances that occurred heavily in Hannibal’s shadow. I often think that Hannibal symbolically officiated Alana and Margot’s marriage ceremony - they first got together during the search for Hannibal, the murder that they committed together (parallel to the shared Hannigram murder at the end of season 3) was done partially at Hannibal’s urging, and they were only able to get away with it because of the devil’s bargain they struck with Hannibal in which he took the fall for it. So how fitting, for Hannibal to be the one to torpedo the family dynamic that he helped facilitate!

And I think for Alana too, there’d be the topic of how family burdens you with the protection of others - how others’ vendettas against you suddenly extend to the people closest to you, because family is often considered an extension of you.

Of course, those last two points would have to feature in any post-canon threat to the Verger-Bloom family as well - their indebtedness to Hannibal, and Alana having to contend with the fact that Hannibal’s “promise” to her has put others in danger as well. But they would work so well when incorporated into the arc that already focuses on family, especially since Margot and Alana’s deal is arguably something of a middle ground between the full normie familial experience Will was trying to enact with Molly, and the completely outrageous murder family scenario Hannibal was gunning for.

Ultimately, Dolarhyde’s deal is that he breaks families in one way or another - whether via murder, or by psychologically fracturing them (i.e. what happened to Will and Molly in both the book and the show). A threat to Margot and Alana could similarly shake things up between them and bring up pre-existing tensions (I’ve never particularly been interested in the ultra-peaceful fanon Marlana) while raising the question of whether they could fall apart, like Will and Molly, or be strengthened by his attack - as Will and Hannibal ultimately are.

Also, imagine the “how’s my wife? she’s lucky”/“she survived the Great Red Dragon. takes a pinch more than luck” exchange transposed onto Hannibal and Alana. It’d work sooo well in reflecting Hannibal’s pre-existing fondness and admiration towards Margot (and perhaps as foreshadowing of the ruthlessness that she’s still capable of more of).

#love the rumplestiltskin metaphor. #and you know what? hannibal is valid. fuck them kids #hannibal talk #my meta #hannibal season three #will graham #alana bloom #hannibal lecter #hannibal

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Hannibal + Hannibal Lecter’s home

#yesss #hannibal #edits

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I think one thing that always bothers me about the Red Dragon arc is - well, it’s a common talking point in the fandom that each half of season 3 represents Hannibal and Will, respectively, living the lives they’d ideally want but without each other. But the thing is, we don’t actually really see much of Will “living without Hannibal.”

Like, in 3A, we get an entire episode of Hannibal’s life without Will, one in which Will doesn’t even show up (and for a season premiere, that’s an even more radical departure from the status quo - we feel Will’s absence as much as Hannibal does) but it feels like there’s this void of negative space where he is. And the contours of that void are so brilliantly and subtly suggested through the flashbacks to Gideon, which contextualizes the preparation of Bedelia (the inadequate substitute for Will Graham) and underlines Hannibal’s need to have others bear witness to his artistry (again, something only reluctantly done by Bedelia, and done in a manner unsatisfactory to him by Anthony Dimmond, the episode’s other unsatisfactory replacement for Will who gets recycled as a macabre valentine for Will). So Gideon saying “if only that someone could be Will Graham” feels like the culmination of what everything that has until now been unspoken has been leading up to.

And in 3B, we don’t really get any kind of analogue to that with Will. In some ways, that makes sense - given Hannibal’s Hannibal-ness, it’s possible to devote an entire episode to his murder and identity theft shenanigans and get some entertaining television out of it. But the life Will is living is a lot more mundane, so it’d be pretty boring to watch forty minutes of him fixing boats and playing with his dogs and eating dinner with his family.

But I do think there should have been something to indicate potential cracks there. We could potentially have had some bits of Will’s life interspersed with the expositional sections of episode 8 that were dedicated to Hannibal being a little shit while in prison, maybe featuring Will being haunted by murder (in the form of the disturbing visions the show is so good at) or missing Hannibal and feeling out of sync with Molly and Walter somehow (as opposed to waiting to get back to Will until literally the equivalent of the first chapter of Red Dragon). Or, they could have been included in flashback form in episode 9 alongside Hannibal’s memories of Abigail (especially in keeping with the themes of family, and Hannibal’s cruel contrast of the family he tried to give Will with the family Will chose for himself).

I get that time constraints were a concern, but ideally, this sort of thing would have helped a lot. Because what we actually get is somehow, simultaneously, Will leaving his family (apparently on a suicide mission) without any kind of mention of them at all, and Will seeming perfectly content with them without much qualification. (And even the book gives us more potential cracks in his marriage - both in it being made clear that Will never expected the marriage to last, and in the “maddening politeness” he endures near the end. The show does give us a little bit of that with the friction between Will and Walter after Dolarhyde’s attack, but Molly still isn’t as angry or distant with Will in the wake of that attack as she should be for me to really buy the dissolution of that family.)

So, all of that is to say that, while 3B has grown on me quite a lot, I think it fails to show us the Hannibal-shaped negative space in Will’s life. And I don’t buy the argument that we should just take it for granted that of course Will couldn’t live without Hannibal. Just as with the Minnesota Shrike, I need to see a negative to fully see the positive.

#i do think there's also something here about how show!Molly feels... softened from her book counterpart #which does what the show is doing no favors #hannibal meta #will graham #hannigram #hannibal season three #hannibal #my meta #hannibal talk #queue

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Belated reply, but yeah, I completely agree. The way the time skip was handled (or wasn't handled, given how opaque its events are) is one of my bigger problems with how the Red Dragon storyline was incorporated into the show*. I think it causes some characterization issues for several people, Jack included.

I think the other problem is that the show's take on Red Dragon is just... too much of a straight adaptation. Which feels jarring in the wake of how much Hannibal and Hannibal Rising were scrapped for parts for the first half of the season, and also feels out of alignment with the previously established storytelling premises of the show. This feels especially egregious with Jack, who ends up playing exactly the same role vis a vis Will as he does in the book, even though given the weight of their history together his outlook should be completely different. (And given how much self-reflection and regret he's prone to in the earlier seasons regarding the people he's sacrificed, it seems like he should at least be agonizing over the decision to bring Will back much more than he does.)

I agree the religious references would have been a way to bridge the gap between the two - the way Jack readily agrees with Hannibal comparing him to God is a really interesting character moment, and matches the ruthless he's been consistently capable of in his quest for justice. But it definitely could have used more scaffolding.

(*One reason I mourn the lack of season 4 is because of the additional context for season 3 it likely would have provided, since season 3 imo provides a lot of important context for season 2. I could very well see them incorporating more flashbacks to fill in that stretch of time between 3A and 3B, since so much of the show's MO is going back and filling in the blanks for what we've already seen.)

While talking to @menciemeer, something came up re: Jack’s motivations for being in Italy in season 3 that I haven’t seen discussed much - and that is that he’s explicitly there not to catch Hannibal, but to save Will. Here’s his dialogue with Pazzi in Secondo:

Jack: If he hasn’t already, Il Mostro will return to Florence. Pazzi: Come back with me. We have a chance to regain our reputations and enjoy the honours of our trade by capturing the monster. Jack: I’m not here for the monster. Not my house, not my fire. I’m here for Will Graham.

This is even more striking in light of the context for his character that the very next episode gives us - his conversation with Chilton in Aperitivo establishes that he’s been forced into retirement with the FBI, but he’s not interested in regaining his standing or reputation. (Very odd in light of the fact that come the Red Dragon plot, he seems to still have his old job in Behavioral Science). Chilton tries to get him to use Will as bait to find Hannibal:

Chilton: Will is going to lead you right to him. Jack: Oh, no, he’s not. Not to me. I’ve let them both go. I’ve let it all go. Chilton: You dangle Will Graham and now you cut bait? You’re letting Hannibal have him hook, line, and sinker. Jack: You’ll excuse me, Dr. Chilton. I like to be home in the evenings when my wife wakes.

What stands out about this exchange is Chilton’s “letting Hannibal have him” phrasing. It foregrounds not subduing Hannibal, but preventing Will from succumbing to his worst impulses, as a central motivation for Jack in 3A. It’s also significant that it’s his need to care for Bella that leads him to defer pursuing anything relating to Hannibal or Will, because her death is framed within the episode as the impetus for his investment in following Will to Europe - as he tells Will in the funeral scene, “you don’t have to die on me, too.”

So much of Jack’s character arc in the first two seasons is juggling his repeated sacrifice of others for the greater good. His guilt over what befalls both Will and Miriam features prominently in season 2, and during Will’s trial, he’s already prepared to put his career and reputation on the line to stand up for Will and atone for what he feels is his role in Will’s downfall. Both the traumatic events of Mizumono and Bella’s death bring about more of a full turnaround in that direction - Jack becomes less invested in apprehending killers in service of public safety, and more invested in saving the specific person who’s been harmed by that project.

I think this motivation doesn’t always stick in people’s minds because these exchanges get eclipsed by Jack beating Hannibal to a bloody pulp a couple episodes later, as well as his inexplicable return to working for the FBI in 3B. But even in the former altercation, his fight with Hannibal feels personal, more about venting anger and grief than actually apprehending Hannibal. In Dolce, when Will asks why Jack didn’t kill Hannibal, Jack responds “maybe I need you to” (in the same exchange, of course, as “you need to cut that part out”). That scene also establishes clearly that Will and Jack are, like Pazzi, “outside the law and alone.” As in Mizumono, they’re effectively vigilantes - and Jack’s mission is not serving justice for the FBI, but in saving Will from Hannibal’s influence.

This is why, despite the fact that Jack is once again embroiled in FBI business in season 3B, I always envision his role post-canon as being a continuation of what haunts him in the first half of the season - less about catching or killing Hannibal than about rescuing Will. It’s a lot more compelling to me, at least, than him simply continuing to be the face of law enforcement.

#also hi! i really like your meta #i could spend a long time just trawling your archives #bonearenaofmyskull #replies #my meta #hannibal talk #jack crawford #hannibal #hannibal season three #queue

[fatalism-and-villainy]

St. Vincent tickets secured!!!

#music blogging #justalphathings