They are IDENTICALLY DIFFERENT, Hannibal and Will.
I am actually intrigued with this topic, would you really say they are identically different ? I am not sure if that quote was really supposed to explain the situation at that particular point or a deliberately misleading quote or supposed to define them. Because they way I see them at the end, their entire journey it doesn’t look like they are identically different. Probably at that point where the people who don’t fully understand them are looking at the empath-psychopath contrast.
They are absolutely not “identically different” and if that’s what the writers were going for, they failed. And I’m really not sure what to think, because some of the things they were trying to do don’t hold up on examination.
I don’t think writers were aiming for ‘identical difference’. Because they reinforced (even in text) how they are similar in many ways. “You and I are alike”, Chiyoh pointing out how he is thinking like Hannibal and ‘curious what will happen’. Also the story fleshes out that Hannibal is not a psychopath and Will is much more than ‘pure empathy’, he has his own agency and his violence has to be do a lot more than just empathy.
Yes they are different in some respects. Doesn’t qualify as identically different.
Talking about Bryan though I get confused about his personal stadpoint at times. He keeps saying things like Hannibal was attracted to Will because Will presented humanity while Hannibal is Devil, and Will’s corruptibility. I think this hugely contradicts the version of Will presented in the show, which is not a simple Humanity - Devil kind of contrast.
Identically different to me though never meant different in every way or complete opposite on every axiom possible. They are so identical yet so different, that’s what it meant to me. Two sides of a coin, really. Mirror images. That’s all. The gifset was just supposed to be about the different forces acting on them and yet how similar they turned out - to me, identically different fit that concept well.
