#hmm note that alana and margot should /not/ be grouped

[cadisflya]

i love ur portrayal of will! he stays true to his duality of fascinating and somewhat doesn't deserve this shit but also rancid.

that really is the balanace tho—the heart of the horror. will is, at his core, a rancid little bastard. he is also, at his core, someone who feels a powerful protective urge over the vulnerable. he wants to punish those who abuse their power over vulnerable people, especially those who betray the basic principle of not punching down. that is, in itself, a heroic impulse. the PROBLEM is that will graham believes that /his/ view of the world is singular, and his self-imposed ‘non-humanity’ makes him a thing who stands outside of humanity, and he believes that /his/ understanding of who does and doesn’t deserve punishment is really the only understanding that he genuinely values despite the fact that he is perfectly able to understand the conceptualizations of others.

we call will an ‘empath’ and yea conceptually, theoretically, that is true. he is able to conceptually cognitively empathize with almost anyone because his imagination is so strong and his natural and educated insight so remarkably keen—but the fact that he can understand and even emotionally reconstruct the experience of others doesn’t mean he actually values those experiences and it doesn’t make him a decent person. empathy is not inherently sympathetic and it’s not inherently altruistic, either. the only other perspectives he honestly cares about are those of the people he considers dear to him who are people in which he identifies elements of himself. hannibal, alana, abigail, bev and margot to a less intimate degree. a lot of time this value is actually a recognition of self, and the pieces of himself he sees in others are what he identifies as valuable—that’s a basically rancid concept if you really analyze it, but we all do it, and it just happens to work out that because he has felt vulnerable, he identifies with the vulnerable, and what’s to punish their abusers. that’s righteous, and poetic, and makes him an appealing character.

problem is that, in order to punish those abusers, he wields the exact same tactics that those abusers think are ‘theirs’, he weaponizes the manipulative tactics people have tried to use against him, and he is willing to manipulate those he wants to protect in order to protect them. AND he still considers himself ‘outside’ of others and, thereby, above them. it’s why angels are monstrous, why monsters are monstrous. he feels communally with hannibal who employs his own form of righteousness that is simply based on different value perceptions. rancid value perceptions, rancid in ways that he is also rancid and in some ways that he’s not. we say again y’all, it’s all a matter of taste. that’s the crux. you cannot attempt to moralize those who act outside of communal morality. will is bad. hannibal is bad. there is no argument that will make them good. this is all still poetic, sure, but it’s why it’s horror. it’s horrible. because we have to say ‘damn you are rancid but you also move me and sometimes you kind of make sense’, when we see margot and alana murdering their abuser we say ‘hell yeah’ even though, objectively and by the communal values of society, it’s horrifying. because it’s both horrifying and not, it’s both terrorizing and absolutely righteous. the isolation and prioritization of one perspective over another is the way that the person constructing the narrative manipulates the way the narrative is perceived, and the show is a masterclass in that. trying to moralize will graham means you’ve fallen victim to that narrative. will is a murderer, point blank. he’s also a bitch, point blank, like he’s mean. what we see in him is the part of us that has been raw and vulnerable and vicious, and that’s a human part, too, and being moved by that vicious righteousness and its otherness, wanting to justify it, is what makes horror such a fascinating genre.