#a criticism of hannibal criticism

[bonearenaofmyskull]

Feel free to answer this whenever you want; I just had to write it down because I've been seeing this analysis in the "Hannibal meta" tags for some time. I came across an analysis, or rather multiple analyses, that blatantly dismiss the Hannigram hug. Despite being a big romance fan and interpreting it romantically, the analyses mostly argued it was a tactic for Will to push them both into the sea. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. Additionally, I vaguely recall a post suggesting that Will's 'it's beautiful' remark is actually distracting and disturbing, but I don't recall the details. The gist of the analysis was to not interpret the embrace and the words as romantic but rather as a rejection. Whenever you're free, could you help me understand this? Thank you; you're the best. ❤️

Okay, I'm laughing a little at this because I think...I think...I just might be the originator of the interpretation that Will used the embrace as a tool to throw the both of them off the cliff:

I almost hate to suggest this, but it’s possible the reason Will pulled Hannibal into his arms at the end of “The Wrath of the Lamb” was because he knew that the gesture would be overwhelming to Hannibal because Hannibal is in love with him. With that touch, Hannibal wouldn’t be able to think ahead to what must be coming next. (All that business about touch making us who we are and putting hands on shoulders for authenticity.) Which doesn’t mean that Will wasn’t authentically feeling the moment, but just that he knew exactly why it would work. (x)

I can't find any posts in the hannibal meta tag that you're referring to, either about the embrace or the "It's beautiful" line, and it could be either that I'm just not going back far enough (that tag is way busier than I expected it to be) or that one or the other of us are blocking each other.

So I'm not sure I understand the logic of what you're responding to, but I would say that with both points and with analyses about Hannibal in general, the biggest and most frequent mistake that I see people make is their inability or unwillingness to manage nuance. This is especially problematic in a show that is primarily concerned on the character front with duality and transformation. Hardlining a strongly polarized opinion almost never serves people well.

Both (the romantic and the tactic) can exist, but more importantly...my take on this is not just that both can exist but that neither can exist without the other.

Obviously the tactic couldn't work--it couldn't exist--unless it was overwhelmingly romantic for Hannibal. But it has to be for Will as well because it is only in its authenticity that the gesture has power over Hannibal.

And if it wasn't authentic for Will, then there would have been no need for Will to go over the cliff. The same is true for the "It's beautiful" statement: if he doesn't mean it, then there's no reason for him to die alongside this man who helped him see that beauty. My conclusion from the above post had been:

I don’t think he planned for suicide specifically or that he knew exactly what he expected to happen between himself, Francis and Hannibal (in the sense that I doubt he’d have leaped to his death if Hannibal and Francis had somehow managed to kill each other without involving him), but I think finally accepting his and Hannibal’s relationship as one that’s in love helped ready him to take that dive off the cliff. When the moment comes, when he’s finally killed with Hannibal and is awash in the beauty of that moment, it doesn’t surprise him to the point of inaction. He’s able to draw Hannibal gently into his arms and guide them both into the abyss. The beauty, the love–they simply make his path more clear.

Perhaps less easy to see from the point of view of looking at the finale in isolation is that the romance couldn't exist without the tactic either. More specifically, their interest in loving each other stems from Will's ability to match Hannibal's cleverness, manipulation, and opportunism with his own. That has been the point of the show from the start, from "You and I are just alike" to "I see myself in Will" to "I don't expect you to feel self-loathing or regret or shame. You knew what you were doing and you made your own decisions, decisions that were under your control.... You found a way to hurt me. I wonder how many more people are going to get hurt by what you do" to "Did you think you could change me, the way I've changed you? --I already did."

All of this is their "zero sum game." It is a cornerstone of their relationship that they each respond to the other's manipulation with manipulation, even when it's blatantly transparent. And that push over the cliff was blatantly transparent. Hannibal didn't fight it, he submitted to it as a kind of weird trust fall that started with the catch and ended with a death. Of a very particular sort.

Is this a rejection? I mean, yeah, sure, by one of way of looking at it. Will is taking their fate in his hands and sentencing them to death, which is definitely not sending the message that he's okay with their mountain of sin and iniquity.

But it's also a marriage, in a Shakespearean kind of way ("All...now marry in an instant"), and also in a Christian way: "Let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made herself ready."

I chose that quote because of its direct use of "the Lamb" which the the show instructs us through its title is the lens through which we should view Will's "wrath." Hannibal has already been established in the wife/mother (the woman clothed with the sun) role in the ritual by the Red Dragon, which puts Will in the husband/child role, similar to the dichotomy involving the Christ-child. The show has positioned Will as Christ for at least two seasons at this point, tbf, and in placing Will as Christ, then his sacrifice is by definition born of love. Christ takes human sin on himself to be washed clean through his death for those who believe and submit themselves unto him. For Hannibal this becomes a very literal baptism in the "roiling Atlantic" where "Soon, all of this will be lost to the sea."

So the question then left at the end of the series is not, "Does Will reject Hannibal?" No--he takes Hannibal's sins on himself, as Christ bore humanity's sins on the cross. That has been the story.

The real question is, "How deep and real does Hannibal's baptism go?"

If one views the finale as the definitive end of the show instead of a stepping stone to seasons we'll never get to know (I prefer thinking of it as a stepping stone, to be clear), then I'd say probably the stronger interpretation because of the Biblical undertones and Hannibal's ultimate submission is that dark!Will doesn't win, BUT that Hannigram totally does. And them going to visit some old Testament comeuppance on Bedelia doesn't contradict that.

They called to the mountains and the rocks, 'Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?' Revelation 6:16, 17

WELL, NOT BEDELIA

[artemis-pendragon]

Canon gay confessions alignment chart

[undead-knick-knack]

Please, I just wanna make ginger maple cookies 😭

[zombxie]

love being in obscure fandoms nobody my age cares about about

[puppydoggraham]

Jack: lol we need you to help us on these cases

Will:

[amarriageoftrueminds]

maybe it's bc I grew up seeing (and can still see from the outside) how cis men play/joke/fake gayness as a display of domination but yet all somehow knew to avoid actual gayness like the plague (bc the it's so real how cishets manage to know what we are b4 we ourselves do) but I see that exact same "locker room" idea of playing gayness for laughs (usually by violating of sexual boundaries) + treating actual gay love like an unmentionable replicated by the cishets making media

like, look at marvel's iron man thor and gotg movies littered with writing that might nominally be considered "gay" jokes abt men being placed in sexual situations each other (again, often by laughing at the idea of sexual assault/nonconsensual sexualization) but cishet norms don't consider this gay in any real sense. it's the "accepted" way of portraying "gayness" in a way that signals to the audience that it's there to poke fun at the characters and knock 'em down a peg for comedy

This is part of why I rolled my eyes at ppl claiming queerbait at tfatws (completely not knowing what the bait part of the word means). Those "gay" moments in that show were the most classical homophobic dudebro locker room comedy that I've grown to recognize as an extension of the homophobic rough housing culture growing up among cishet boys. Every "moment" was just a Gunn-esque laugh at the male characters being degraded by being put in a position that seems gay against their consent, either by literally falling/rolling into it, by purposeful taunting by a malicious (and shoehorned) character, or literally by the force of the state(state as in governing body). it's meant to be funny in that the cishet culture the comedy comes from dictates that violating men's boundaries with a superficially "homo" act is a way to enforce hierarchy within the group. the jokes come from homophobia (which is why the creators were baffled at the idea of shipping in that show, they recognize the difference between real gayness and their homophobic lockerroom-culture jokes)

This is also why we never see anything even remotely like that between Bucky and Steve, they have genuine love for one another, the same cishet "gay" rough housing culture recognizes that between them it wouldn't be a joke, it'd be actually gay, so they avoided it like the plague. That's why we hardly ever see Bucky and Steve's canon platonic friendship portrayed, it holds actual love for one another that can't be played off by stoicism or homophobic lockerroom-style comedy. They can't do Gunnisms to make it a haha hehe, so the marvel franchise opts to not show the best friends inseparable from playground to battlefield as actual friends. Actual factual, sincere, earnest friendship between men is considered to approximate to gayness by comic book dudebro culture, so they don't show it and then blame gay ppl for "ruining" the platonic make friendships that they were too scared to show because anything more than hooking up with a bunch of interchanging women and meeting up one a year at a bar to talk about the women they've hooked up with is considered to gay by cishet men who still haven't grown out of that homophobic (& misogynistic) locker room culture.

Anon you're so right, and this is also how Tony can be cracking jokes about holding Rhodey's dick in the Avengers movie and no one in the execs room has a gay panic about needing to separate them!

Given that it also had Sharon mocking Bucky for being 'Mr America' tfatws especially seemed to revel in these nasty little homophobic digs. 😥

[suchawrathfullamb]

Since we're on the alana bloom topic: saying will and hannibal's relationship didn't "need to be sexualized" because "it was deeper than that" is inherently problematic for two reasons.

The first is inequality.

It would indeed present a starkly different narrative if both characters were asexual, aligning with a distinct portrayal. However, their identities are clearly depicted otherwise. Despite exhibiting the pinnacle of intimacy and passion in the show, the only instances of sexual intimacy portrayed are within heterosexual or lesbian contexts, seemingly tailored to appease a presumed straight male audience.

The deliberate choice to depict numerous intimate encounters between them and various female counterparts, excluding such intimacy between Hannibal and Will, is not a random occurrence. Rather, it mirrors the influence of censorship pressures and the complex dynamics at play behind the scenes. Those involved in the production navigated within restrictive boundaries, leading to these patterns. The cancellation of the series further underscores the challenging terrain wherein the exploration of Hannibal and Will's intimacy became untenable, drawing a line that couldn't be retreated from without facing repercussions (season 3 had the highest score, it didn't make sense to get canceled).

This discrepancy underscores the imbalance in representation, where heterosexual relationships are often granted more screen time and explicitness, catering to a presumed mainstream audience, while LGBTQ+ relationships are either marginalized or sexualized for the male viewer's consumption.

The disparity in the portrayal of intimacy and complexity between these relationships highlights the unequal treatment of diverse identities in media. The show's tendency to prioritize and depict heterosexual encounters more explicitly while downplaying or withholding similar portrayals in LGBTQ+ relationships perpetuates a systemic issue within the entertainment industry, reinforcing the unequal representation and visibility of different sexual orientations.

The second issue is this false notion of purity.

This notion inadvertently perpetuates the belief that sex is somehow tainted or impure, while implying that emotional connections are more virtuous or pure when devoid of sexual elements.

The comparison drawn between the treatment of their relationship and those with women underscores a double standard prevalent in media representation. While heterosexual relationships are often portrayed with sexual elements, LGBTQ+ relationships are frequently deprived of the same depth of intimacy or physical expression, reinforcing the idea that non-heteronormative connections should remain chaste or non-sexual to be considered emotionally pure.

This perspective not only undermines the validity and complexity of LGBTQ+ relationships but also reinforces the societal discomfort or stigma associated with non-heteronormative expressions of intimacy. It contributes to the erasure of diverse experiences and perpetuates the idea that relationships devoid of sexual components are somehow more authentic or morally superior.

[denkies]

Some of yall do not know the difference between "media that glorifies Bad Thing" and "media that portrays Bad Thing and the audience has to use critical thinking skills" and its actually concerning

[isthatacalzone]

is this anything

[bonearenaofmyskull]

Hello, Twyla here. ♡ ̆̈

I've been chatting with @crimsondinnerparty about the Hannibal series. My blog mainly focuses on love, the Hannibal series isn't a genre I typically cover. However after hearing about the pair, I'm interested in featuring them on my blog for my audience. She suggested your account for any questions, so I hope you don't mind me asking you.

For me to feature any pair in my blog I only have 3 questions -

1. Are the actors fine with the shipping?

2. If the ship is canon , do the actors acknowledge it?(it would be great if you can tell me if they interpret the relationship as romantic or just a bromance , just for clarity to my followers,I get a lot of suggestions from people who sometimes want me to feature a fanon pair )

3. Are the actors and crew respectful to the LGBTQIA community ?

⤷ I hope you don’t mind me asking these questions. I eagerly await your response, and I hope your community gains more followers from my fandoms.

Hi, I sent you an ask a few hours ago. If you could reply to me privately, it would be great.* So, I was talking with some of my friends, who are my mutuals, and they really don't want me to reblog Hannibal-related content at all because they think it would give my blog a negative impression. For context, I am an active ally who fights for LGBTQ+ representation in movies and series. My focus is on normalizing queer relationships in my media and not stereotyping the community. My blog is important because people come there to get recommendations and send me theirs. In the discussion, one of my friends said there's a homophobic lesbian scene and also mentioned that the storyteller is problematic because he said his story is "queerbaiting." I really don't want to post any queerbaiting content as my followers mostly come from the Sherlock fandom, and if I put the same thing in front of them again, it's going to be very messy. For example, my followers are used to canon pairings like Ofmd, Maurice, Fellow Travelers, etc. I personally do my homework to see if any actors are LGBT+ who played the characters. After the discussion, I am hesitant about the Hannigram ship. Also, there's a debate about one of the actors' hesitation towards the fandom and relationship. This will be the same as the Supernatural fandom, and again, it was a mess, and I don't want to deal with that either.

Well...I'm going to give you an answer of sorts--I'm going to tell you where you can find your answer, at least--but I'm not actually going to answer your specific questions in any meaningful way.

Because here's the thing: you've got a question here that is the thread running through all your other questions and the context of your friends and others trying to influence your blog content. And that's because that question isn't really about Hannibal at all.

It's about what kind of blogger you want to be. And what kind of person you want to be, and where you want that person to exist in the spectrum of history and experience that is the queer experience.

In more cynical terms, it's a branding question: what kind of blog are you running with what kind of content, and what kind of experience do you want people to have if they follow or visit, and who do you think your audience is?

In that context the most important thing I saw in your asks was: "I am an active ally who fights for LGBTQ+ representation in movies and series. My focus is on normalizing queer relationships in my media and not stereotyping the community. My blog is important because people come there to get recommendations and send me theirs."

So it seems to me that if you apply Hannibal to your vision statement here, you get a pretty easy set of answers for some of it:

Is Hannibal a queer product with queer representation? Yes. Did people recommend Hannibal? Apparently. Might some of your audience be interested in the series and want to see it? Based on the three other products you mentioned blogging...maybe? At least some will. And some, like your friend, won't.

The trickier question is the middle question: will recommending Hannibal help normalize queer relationships and resist stereotyping?

Well, nothing about Hannibal, textually, is normal. Whether it's queer or not. It's about extraordinary people doing extraordinary things in a world that only looks normal. But subtextually--and even metatextually--the struggle at the center of Will Graham's character journey is entirely queer, and intertextually, that struggle is the same struggle between feared monstrosity and self-acceptance that is at the heart of why so many queer people are attracted to monster horror. Here is a good article that summarizes some of the issues that you're wondering about, and about the level of queerness that exists on a show that is entirely consumed by the love between two men while never actually allowing them even to kiss.

So as far as normalizing as in making gay stuff seem totes ordinary and all, without being stereotypical, the answer is sure, kind of--especially given there's also a lesbian relationship. Anecdotally I can tell you that my students perceive and accept the gayness of it more readily now than ever, and whether that's because media in general is more accepting or because people are or because the show itself creates that doesn't really matter--it's all a cycle of reinforcement, and the show does contribute to that reinforcement, so I'd say it's a net positive. But it's not going to meet the bar of the shows that you've cited here as the other pieces that you are interested in blogging about. Those seem to be explicitly gay, and/or often specifically about being gay, where the queerness is consummated and a main driver of the plot and center of the story. TBH, I wouldn't even know whether to recommend Black Sails to you based on the list you gave. And that show is gay af.

Hannibal doesn't belong in that group.

But that does not mean it's not queer. it's definitely more in the closet, but the queerness is threaded through the narrative thematically and symbolically in ways that the other shows you blog about might not do (I haven't seen them, so IDK--I am aware of them).

Hannibal is a product that is derivative from original works that definitely used queerness or queer-coding as horror itself. The author of the original books, Thomas Harris, had some real homophobia. To give credit where he put in the effort, he listened to criticisms about his work on that level and seemed to really work on trying to change that in himself and do better for representation and in his work over the course of time (with some hits and misses which is typical of this kind of personal growth), but regardless, Hannibal Lecter will always be an inheritor of the mid-twentieth century notion of Stereotypical Evil Gays, and anyone who wants to object based on that heritage will always be able to do so as long as Hannibal himself remains at all queer in any subsequent iterations. I think that's a bit of a bad faith reading, personally, in this day and age, but someone will always complain about it.

And that's the thing about Hannibal: it's problematic--not in the ridiculous way the word "problematic" has come to be used, meaning just "offensive," or some such nonsense (because the show really is not to anyone who is thinking critically) but truly in the sense of literally presenting problems and posing questions that are not easy to answer in a way that you can tie a pretty little bow on and put it on a controversy-free shelf, never to be taken down again to be re-examined.

Which is why Hannibal will be a part of literature--and queer literature, history, and heritage specifically--longer than shows that are easier to approach. Much like being queer itself is often problematic: it's not an easy road to travel, but there's a depth of human experience and history in it that means that most of us would not choose to travel a different, easier road, even if we could.

And it got canceled before it got to finish telling the story that it wanted to tell about these two men. It's forever been robbed of the chance to state definitively and finally what story it was ultimately trying to tell.

So the question you have to answer for yourself about whether or not Hannibal belongs on your blog has a lot to do with the queer zeitgeist that we exist in at this moment. Western queer communities are now passing through a phase of media consumption that is both a vast improvement on what the Sherlock fans you mentioned had to deal with, while also not quite releasing the trauma from the Sherlock-type experiences at the same time. It's fostered a kind of judgmental "queer fragility," wherein audiences, having come from a heritage that first entirely ignored the existence of queer people to the point of necessitating queer-coding, then depicted as mostly stereotypes, then started to have some real representation, but often what you got was sidelined or "bromanced," while creatives were often actively hostile to queer fans, and finally, now we have some pretty regular and relatively common and nuanced representation. With all that baggage for audiences to lug around, a lot of people are--understandably!--not at all interested in any media that reminds them of any of those other painful phases of the past. This fragility is something I tend to believe is a vocal minority, but they are VERY vocal, to the point of easily making themselves look like a majority in spaces like social media, where one only sees the people who are talking, not the rest of the people standing in the room. I believe as time goes on, if representation continues, people will eventually move out of this phase of fragility and be able to look back at the cultural media heritage of queerness without it eliciting such a visceral response. But I don't think we're there yet.

So who is your audience, then? Whom do you want to be your audience, and how will your content cater to them? Do you want your audience to be primarily the most traumatized and to cater to them in a fully safe way, where all your reblogs are considered endorsed as "safe," and they don't have to approach anything that has as much nuance going on with it as Hannibal? This kind of safe space is fully warranted and needed for these people, and if this is what you want your blog to be, I'd probably forego highlighting Hannibal.

But if you want to have a broader audience than that, or if you consider part of your mission to avoid stereotyping and to advance representation to mean that you need to include more queer representation, across a broader spectrum of queer history, heritage, and time, and if you see your reblogs as representative of offering that whole and varied spectrum of queer experience for your audience, then Hannibal 100% should be included.

Neither of these are without pitfalls: if you do the first, you'll have to vet everything down to the last detail. It'll be a lot of work. And woe betide you if you ever include something someone doesn't want.

If you do the second, you might let yourself off of some work, but your content will be diluted unless you assume a rather comprehensive tagging system and at least watch everything you recommend. And woe betide you if you don't include everything everyone wants all the time.

So in the end, the answer just lies with you, what you personally think of Hannibal, and whether or not you want to include it. Ultimately you're always going to be the judge of that, so what I say about the specific issues your friend mentioned versus what they said doesn't really matter either way. Your blog needs to be yours, even if it's based on recommendations. You're going to lose people either way you choose to do it. So just remember that your first audience--and last--is always just you.

I couldn't possibly go into significant detail about all the things you've mentioned in the course of a single post and do a fair job representing the nuance behind all those controversies, but I can tell you what I think about all the things, briefly.

And my brief opinion is that your friend has shit for takes. Sorry. But the list you gave of the things your friend objected to is all the absolute worst takes on every last one of those topics. If you want to do more research about any of this, I have already spoken to nearly all of it in my Hannibal meta tag, which you could probably pretty easily skim through (with some time, lol) to find most of your answers since there's no way I've the energy to rehash it all. Or ask @crimsondinnerparty, who has a preternatural ability to find things in my blog that even I can't find. Or you could just take your friend's word for all of it, to keep the peace and just assume that whatever they think is what you think and that they're educated enough to know what they're talking about. (It sounds to me like they've just heard gossip.)

You ARE going to have messes. That is one reality of running a fandom blog on Tumblr, if you have designed a blog for audience input, which you have. Specifically, if you reblog Hannibal, you'll disappoint your friend. If you don't, you'll disappoint the person who recommended it.

I think in the end you just need to decide to blog what you like.

Show us who you are.

_____

*I doublechecked that answering this publicly would be fine. It is. I wanted to publish this because I think there's an inherent greater discussion going on here about the nature of queerness and the nature of fandom.

[phasmid42]

hello all, if you like transsexualism (and transsexuals) and/or horror movies please consider watching this silly thing i made i think the tumblr crowd would like it a lot ok bye.

[undead-knick-knack]

Do you understand my vision

[soullessseraphim]

I just had an idea. let's all just turn ourselves into courtiers and see how funky shit gets

Lore dump about him

[genericpuff]

Wait wait when did RS draw herself getting whisked away by Mads or did Hannibal art of HxP? Was this the art where Persephone is holding an eyeball or is that different art?

sigh

[deerabigailhobbs]

Alana Bloom (and Hannibal ladies and in general fandom misogynists) go away! This isn’t just your story and the ladies of Hannibal (all media) do so much.

Just cause you can’t textually appreciate all their nuance and all they do for the story doesn’t make you a majority!!

Yes! No Hannibal women slander in this household!