I wonder if Will realizes that he sometimes acts like the abused child that he is. “I am not abused!” But he was. Why else would Will be confortable with Hannibal since the beginning? Why else would he have that fucked up of a relationship with sex? Why else would he keep floating around men with power, like Jack and Hannibal, but also Chilton and Gideon?
As I explain:
He is the bird on the side of the street in the metaphor that Bedelia proposed to him. He knows he’s vulnarable and that he’s been wronged and that he has broken wings that will never function correctly (if not at all) again, and subconsciously he knows his childhood is not like it should have been, but he refuses to think he was abused, even though he was. Which is very similar to Hannibal’s “Nothing happened to me. I happened,” which could be translated into “I am like this because I chose too, not because of outside influences. I am not an influenceable person, because I am not weak,” which is —I think— exactly the same thing that Will thinks of himself in relation to his past.
He must have been used to have someone obsessed with him, or he would have never accepted Hannibal’s obsession. I think old man Graham (Beau? Bill?) had a unique interest in his son —his only relative, the only person who looked up to him while everyone else rejected him because of his absolute lack of social standing— and that interest is what has shaped the entirety of Will’s early life. It could have been a sexual obsession, and it most likely included it, but most of all it was a power trip for Beau/Bill. To have someone to dominate completely. To be the only influence in Will’s life. To isolate him from his peers and force him to basically live inside his head to substitute his need for relationships outisde of his father.
That’s how Will developed his imagination and that’s also why he related so much to Abigail right from the start. I’d argue that it’s also the reason why he figured out the reason why Garret Jacob Hobbs was killing those girls in the first place. When Will sees a man obsessed, his first thought is that he’s obsessed with his child, because that’s all he ever knew in a parent. Of course it wasn’t just instict —his training confirmed that instict, though.
So yeah, I think one big similarity between Hannibal and Will is the need to negate to an absolute degree that they were scarred by someone outside of themselves.
It was honestly a miracle, given how repressed Will and Hannibal both are about this, that in season 2 and 3 they could admit that the other had had influence on them.
