Ãŧĥęńą

[…] inherently violent,dangerous and toughest characters in the show. He still is. And this is shown many times both with his internally aggressive and abrasive attitude and in his utter determination despite having his entire head and body work against him. Will is smart,clever and fully capable of both handling and controlling himself. He knows the tricks,he knows the ways to get things done and need I remind,is strong enough to break his own finger,get out of cuffs,and take down three men. All three of whom were bigger than him,and easily over powered him. But again,until people get the concept of submissive=/= weak out of their head,he’s unfortunately always going to be seen as such in some respect. And it just isn’t true. Will isn’t weak in the slightest. If he WERE? He wouldn’t still be here.

Will is not submissive at all, not even outwardly, and he is not at all “comforted by dominant forces.” In fact, they really seem to set his teeth on edge. But the fact that he’s not submissive doesn’t make him dominant, either, because he has no interest in that. He just wants to be left alone. He’s avoidant (and by that I don’t mean that he has the personality disorder of that name—I mean, simply and straightforwardly, that he would rather be by himself than around other people). I wonder sometimes if people confuse Will’s “shut down” state with submission, but two things should be noted as far as that goes: one, his shut down state is a set of deliberate behaviors he has adopted as a defense mechanism for certain circumstances, not a natural tendency; and two, the purpose of shutting down is to absent himself from human contact, not to give into, or submit, to them. He’s trying to disappear. 

And Hannibal doesn’t dominate. He manipulates people through suggestion and colluding with secrets and wrongful deeds, and through giving in, or the appearance of giving in. (“I can help you, if you ask me to.”) Hannibal has ZERO interest in dominating people because that would ruin the fun of seeing what they will do, of exploring his curiosity about them. That doesn’t make Hannibal submissive, either. He’s just flexible: he submits where necessary and is assertive where necessary. Dominating others is not his purpose and never was. He’s primarily motivated by curiosity: he’s curious to see what people will do. If they’re going to do anything of interest, then they have to have agency of their own. Hannibal will control those who need controlling in order for him to pursue his interests (and to keep from getting caught), but that’s a means to an end, not the end itself.

By contrast, Jack is dominant. He runs a very tightly controlled ship of people who don’t speak up against him, by and large, and he controls them through force of his personality. He’s capable of taking a step back, such as how he appeals to Hannibal by appealing to Hannibal’s vanity, but his default operation, at least professionally, is dominance. (In his personal relationships, there’s more give and take.)

And how does Will react to these two men? When they’re dominant with him, almost never well.

Will yells at Jack repeatedly, storms out of rooms, shuts doors in people’s faces right in front of Jack, and he grumbles and complains. He tolerates some of Jack’s behaviors while on the job because Jack is his field supervisor, but he’s never pleased with Jack when Jack is behaving in a dominant fashion. Their relationship gets better in the latter half of the season because Jack stops behaving so dominantly with Will.

In fact, the primary turning point that allows Jack and Will to become friends happens when Will gets Jack to submit to him. “I’m going to sit here until you’re ready to talk,” Will says to Jack. “You don’t have to say a word until you’re ready, but I’m not going anywhere until you do.”

Hannibal, by contrast, catches on to Will’s dislike of dominant behaviors much faster. Hannibal seduces Will by submitting to Will. Not the other way around. 

Will storms out during their first meeting when Hannibal forces intimacy with the “no forts in the bone arena of your skull” line. Will is also decidedly cold to Hannibal when Hannibal brings him breakfast in bed. Hannibal only breaks through to Will at all in that scene because he tells Will that he doesn’t see him as a “fragile little teacup,” but instead considers him dangerous and powerful, “the mongoose I want under the house for when the snakes slither by.”

Will tolerates Hannibal after that, but to persuade him into a therapeutic relationship, Hannibal has to do a few unorthodox things. First, he “rubber-stamps” Will, which is an example of Hannibal finding a way to get someone to collude in wrong behavior in order to ingratiate himself with them. Another is that Will requires Hannibal to disclose information about himself in order for Will to give up the information Hannibal wants, in a weird reverse quid pro quo evoking The Silence of the Lambs: “How does that make you feel?” and “Tell me about your mother.” And finally, Hannibal encourages Will to recognize that he likes feeling powerful, which is obviously not a submissive tendency.

What’s key is that whatever manipulations Hannibal engages in with Will, he only rarely uses dominant means to get what he wants, and when he does, even later in the season after they have an established relationship, he gets a mixed bag of results. 

Will is attracted to and comforted by Hannibal’s presence for two reasons, and neither of them have anything to do with dominant/submissive dynamics.

The first and probably most important is that Will has an empathy disorder, and Hannibal radiates calm. He is one of the few people Will could ever be around where Will isn’t getting a constant and exhausting emotional and cognitive workout. If anything, Will is repelled by dominant behaviors as a function of his empathy disorder. Anyone who demonstrates a forceful personality around him is in a constant process of pushing their own thoughts and feelings onto him, and it’s only natural that he’s going to want to flee from them at the first opportunity.

The second is that Hannibal sees Will, the dark and the light halves of his nature, and he both respects and is not repulsed by what he sees there. There is an authenticity to their interactions that Will can’t find anywhere else. 

None of this has anything to do with dom/sub dynamics. People—and well-developed, fully-rounded, three-dimensional characters—aren’t all basically dominant or submissive: there might be (and I stress might be) such tendencies, inwardly or outwardly or both, but human behavior is generally a lot more complex than this. Part of the reason why is that by breaking humans down into either dominant or submissive, we ignore that people might be primarily motivated independently of their interactions with other people. They might be avoidant. Self-sufficient. Independent. Egalitarian. 

I know this is a highly unpopular opinion and will probably lose me followers (it always does). In any case, whether it’s with Jack, Hannibal, or people in general (I could go into his interactions with other characters too, but this is long enough), Will’s behavior is consistently unsubmissive: he’s often avoidant, and when entering into close relationships, he requires the other party to give in to him as well.