Dark Obscure Poet

Liars make stories twist, characters clash, and readers question everything. But not all liars are created equal. If you're writing one, ask yourself: what kind of liar are they? Because there’s more than one way to deceive…

Many types of liars

the one where you know they are lying

the one where you never know that they are lying

the one who lies about everything

the one who lies to themself

Writing Tips:

Know why they lie

Every liar has a reason. Is it survival, manipulation, shame, love, power, or habit? Understanding their motive helps you shape their behavior and emotional responses.

Use subtext and contradictions

Liars rarely say "I'm lying." Instead, they contradict themselves, dodge questions, or over-explain. Let their words and actions subtly clash.

Let the lie shape the plot

A good lie should ripple through the story. It creates misunderstandings, false alliances, and dramatic irony. Use it to mislead characters and readers.

Use silence

Sometimes the most powerful lie is omission. What a character doesn’t say can be just as revealing as what they do.

Play with perspective

Use unreliable narrators or shifting POVs to blur the line between truth and fiction. This keeps readers guessing and deepens the mystery.

Show consequences

How are characters reacting to someone lying to them? What happens if people find out a character lied?

Tom: I love him

Everyone: my Lord...pls...he will kill you

Tom: nothing can stop true love

Everyone: we literally just watched you die...multiple times to the same kid

Tom: he's tenacious, I like that in a man

Everyone: Tom...no...

Each year he is different. Sometimes he is the serpentine wizard with blood-red eyes and translucent, alabaster skin. Sometimes he is little more than a child, the eager boy who always knew he was special. Always he is Tom Marvolo Riddle: the monster, the nightmare, and, as Harry slowly and unwittingly comes to learn… the tragedy.

(I hadn’t answered this one before, and thanks for looking first!)

I see this scene tagged in gifsets as stuff like “the moment Will Graham fell in love with Hannibal Lecter.” I think that’s overstated: “Sorbet” and its partner, “Fromage,” are really more about Hannibal’s journey in his affection for Will, rather than the other way around. Nevertheless, the idea has some merit.

The way Will lifts his chin as he’s gazing at Hannibal does suggest a moment of revelation. It’s definitely a moment where the audience’s greater knowledge causes a certain amount of tension. You can’t help but think, “The Ripper is a Baltimorean surgeon, you KNOW he’s a surgeon, and Hannibal’s a surgeon, so why don’t you SEE IT? YOU’RE LOOKING RIGHT AT HIM! ISN’T THAT SUPPOSED TO BE YOUR THING?” And yet, as you say, he’s clearly more trusting of Hannibal afterward than he was before. So what’s up? 

I think it’s impossible to say for sure what exactly was going through his head at that moment, because the narrative doesn’t fill it in. But I think we can at least explain why he doesn’t see Hannibal for what he is then because of how the situation plays into his own vulnerabilities. 

It must occur to Will to really think about how Hannibal used to be an ER doctor, which was a fact that Will probably hadn’t given much thought to in a while—in fact, it’s likely the last time that crossed Will’s mind with any kind of significance was when Will shot Garrett Jacob Hobbs and saved Abigail Hobbs’s life. 

Will crossed a threshold when he killed Hobbs. He liked it. A lot. Thus his sense of any nobility he might have felt in the act of saving Abigail’s life is tainted by this sense that what he did wasn’t really heroic at all. He may have saved a life, but he took one as well.

Hannibal, by contrast—in Will’s view—also saved Abigail’s life then, but his contribution to the effort was quite different from Will’s. He removed Will’s hands (useful for nothing but pulling the trigger), helped staunch her bleeding, and accompanied her to the hospital, where he was able to stay by her side as Will couldn’t. Because he’d been an emergency room doctor, he truly saved a life instead of taking one.

These are Will’s associations when considers Hannibal saving the life of the organ donor. It’s undeniable that Hannibal has done this many times. To Will, Hannibal is a man who saves lives, and as surely as Will lives in a world marked by death, Hannibal lives in a world marked by the restoration of life.

Hannibal reinforces this impression in the way in which he answers Will, when Will asks him, soon after that scene at the ambulance, why he quit being a surgeon. Hannibal essentially tells Will that he was so disturbed by the loss of life in the ER that he couldn’t take it anymore—he had to get out. Again, this aligns Hannibal firmly outside of the world of darkness and serial murder in which Will has found himself drowning.

We see the idea reinforced yet again in the next episode, after Will finds that Hannibal has been attacked by and has killed Tobias Budge.

Will tells him, “I feel like I dragged you into my world.”

It’s completely nonsensical thinking. Hannibal even corrects him, but in Will’s mind, the world of death and murder is his world, and Hannibal, who fixes minds instead of bodies so no one has to die as a result of his therapy (unlike how Hobbs had to die as a result of Will’s rescue) doesn’t belong to it. 

So I think that’s what Will sees when he looks at Hannibal in the role of an ER surgeon: he sees a savior, a man who belongs to the world of life and healing. Hannibal saved Abigail, he saved Devon Silvestri’s donor, and he’s trying to save Will. 

And Will, of course, wants this to be true. He needs it to be true. He wants Hannibal to be a savior, to be his paddle, because he likes Hannibal and wants and needs to trust him. Because he has no one else in his life he can rely on. 

You’ve been lying to me, Will.

Hannibal isn’t actually referring to Will’s acting this season. He’s referring to the sum total of Will’s behavior throughout their entire relationship and suggesting that all that was a lie. What Hannibal fell for was the truth, which was that “Will Graham is not a murderer.”

The lie he felt Will was telling was that Will is at base, innocent—that he is ashamed of himself for having that “grotesque but useful” mentality, that he regretted his enjoyment of killing, and that he loathes those parts of himself that are attuned to violence. 

I feel like I’ve been watching our friendship on a split screen, the friendship I perceived on one side and the truth on the other.

Hannibal exerted every weapon in his massive arsenal of manipulative machinery to make Will accept the part of himself that was a killer for all of season one, and in the end, Hannibal had to admit defeat. He couldn’t force, trick, drug, suggest, plant evidence, or gaslight Will into believing that he’s a murderer, or get him to actually kill three out of four (or four out of five, depending on whether you believe Hannibal thought it was possible for Will to kill Abigail in the Hobbs cabin) people that he set Will after, and the one Will did kill—Hobbs—he did in a clear emergency with a need to save someone else’s life besides his own.

Although Hannibal did have a small seed of victory in the fact that Will tried to take a shot at him in “Savoureux” before Jack shot Will, Will was deathly ill, hallucinating and feverish, so even though he made an attempt (gold star for you, Will), it wasn’t the victory that Hannibal would have liked to see if Will had accepted that he was a killer and had “become someone other than yourself.”

As Hannibal tells Jack over Will’s hospital bed, “I believe I have failed to satisfy my obligation to Will, more than I care to admit.” He failed.

As we come into season two, Hannibal learns that he misses Will so much that he isn’t content to just let Will rot away in the asylum, so he tries to “help” with Will’s trial and resumes Will’s therapy even though he knows—through Bedelia’s comments, Beverly’s actions, Chilton’s double-dealing, and his own instincts—that Will is lying to him about being a “poor, confused, wounded bird,” as Chilton puts it. The truth, then, is that Will is persistently clinging to the knowledge of his own innocence through his insistence on Hannibal’s guilt. And we also see, finally, Hannibal admit this truth. 

Will Graham is not a murderer.

But then that truth is overwhelmed by another truth, when Matthew Brown enacts Will’s attempted murder-by-proxy.

He asked you to do this?

The truth has become the lie and the lie is now the truth.

The lie Will has been telling throughout the whole of his friendship with Hannibal is that he is innocent, not of the copycat crimes, but innocent as a human being.

On one side of the split screen is the truth as it has always been: Will isn’t a murderer: Will withstands all that Hannibal can throw at him and then some, and in so doing, he finally convinces Hannibal that he is truly innocent (just as Jack has claimed all along). He is sincere about his shame and self-loathing and regret. He is innocent, he knows he is innocent, and so does Hannibal. 

But on the other side of the split screen, a new truth emerges: Will is not so innocent after all. The irony is that Hannibal didn’t kill Beverly to push Will’s buttons to try to motivate Will to do anything. He killed her to protect himself. It was not some part of a manipulation Hannibal concocted as a part of his “radically unorthodox therapy” of Will Graham. Hannibal killed her without expecting Will to do anything about it. That means that, essentially, Will motivated himself to kill Hannibal. Hannibal may have incidentally created the circumstance, but the psychology was all in Will’s hands.

And therein is the lie that Will has been telling: all along, Will has been proving to Hannibal that no amount of outside influence can turn him into the killer that Hannibal sees in him because at heart, he is innocent. The shame and regret and self-loathing that he has always felt about his own grotesque mentality has been evidence of this basic innocence at his core. 

But now, Will has proven that the reason no outside influence can make him a killer is not because he is basically innocent, but because Will himself holds those keys. It isn’t that the killer part of himself doesn’t exist, it’s that Will himself is in control of it. The shame and regret and self-loathing all concealed that truth. They made Will appear to be innocent deep down, they made it look like he struggled with impulses he couldn’t control as a side effect of his empathy, and that is what brought him such guilt. But, in fact, the guilt was the lie, because Will had control of those urges and impulses all along. Will isn’t delusional: he does understand the reality of Beverly’s death and his role in it. He just reserves all of the guilt (and all of his anger) for Hannibal, which is very different from his feelings in the past. And that is a matter of choice.

H: 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. 

W: Oh, you think I’m in control?

H: I think you are more in control now than you have ever been. You found a way to hurt me. I wonder how many more people are going to get hurt by what you do.

[insert cannibal happy dance]

(Whether or not Hannibal Lecter is correct in this assessment of Will Graham is a discussion for another day.)

Nobody’s asked me this specifically, but my opinion has crept into more than one post I’ve made just because…gah.

I’m going to put my answer behind a cut so people who really, really love this book can just skip it and save themselves the annoyance of reading my opinion on this topic. 

I’m not entirely certain what you want my opinion on (I’m really much better with a specific question rather than a statement and request for opinion). Is Will embracing Hannibal? Somewhat, yes. Did they do this on purpose? I’m sure they did. Does it say something particular about Will’s feelings toward Hannibal at that moment? Again, probably somewhat. 

They use the excuse of Will probably having difficulty standing with his abdominal muscles cut as an excuse to engage in the embrace in the first place. Will grasps at Hannibal and starts to fall toward him, and Hannibal gets the hand with the knife up under Will’s left arm and then hoists him up a little. While Hannibal is clearly embracing and caressing Will, there’s really little else for Will to do with that left arm except hang on, given that Hannibal’s arm is under his. Notice Will’s right arm seems to drop down: whether it’s dangling loose or if he’s still touching Hannibal’s side, I couldn’t say. But he’s not really clinging to Hannibal. 

But it is still an embrace, yes, and Will accepts it in the same way he’s accepted all of Hannibal’s “rare gift[s].” While it’s apparent that the emotional place each man comes from in this moment is a different place, the writers/actors/director gave us this tableau on purpose. Hugh called the moment a “consummation” of their relationship, and it strikes me in the definition of that term as not simply the completion of it but also the fulfillment—that Hannibal would, inevitably, turn his violence on Will and that Will would, inevitably, accept it from him.

Will and Hannibal are the central couple of the show. There’s a very different kind of show if Will dies, but it would be hard to find a better partner — in whatever way — for Hannibal. Absolutely. The tale of the series is the tale of Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham. So I think the challenge for us, as storytellers, is to keep shifting that paradigm, that dynamic, so it has a freshness every season. The first season, Will was totally victimized and was not aware of what was happening to him or who was doing it to him until the very last moments of the finale. In the second season he is well aware of who is responsible, and then it is a matter of how does he capture his prey? And now the third season is a completely different dynamic between Will and Hannibal, which I’m very excited to get into and start exploring. (x)

I don’t mind revisiting this question at the end of this season, as things have changed and new information has come to light. In that same interview, Bryan Fuller also said, 

Well we don’t have the rights to Clarice Starling! The plan is to re-approach the rights holders to Clarice after Season 3 and see if we can get that character for Season 4, but right now we cannot use her or use any character that originated in Silence of the Lambs. 

If they don’t get her then, I don’t know if they’ll put her off for another year and try again (I kind of doubt it), or if they’ll proceed with their Shmarice Shmarling expy. But so far the plans still seem to include doing her story somehow.

Just after the finale, I saw someone similarly posting about how hard it’s going to be for the show to sell Molly to the audience after Hannibal’s relationship with Will. So I guess they did a good job of earning not only our buy-in, but our commitment to this love affair between nemeses, such that it’s difficult to imagine either of them loving anyone else. 

I imagine Bryan Fuller has had some plan for Clarice ever since he pitched the first 247 seasons of the show to Mads Mikkelsen back in 2012.

However, from the sounds of the discussion at RDC3, it doesn’t sound like he anticipates there being movement on the rights issue, and additionally, that he thought it would be a shame to lose the investment and development that audiences and he have put into the Hannigram relationship. I believe the audience at RDC3 emphatically insisted that he keep his investment in Hannigram as well, and to my knowledge, he heard them loud and clear. But I wasn’t there, so you might be better off asking for opinions on this from @existingcharactersdiehorribly, @genufa, or @the-winnowing-wind. Whatever has happened to his plans for using an expy if he had to is not clear to me, and his discussion then of how you can’t copyright a performance and why he couldn’t use Will (or Jack?) if he used Clarice and or use Clarice if he used Will, but he could use Hannibal with either when he had previously said that MGM didn’t have the rights to Will, Jack OR Hannibal…well, none of that makes a lick of sense to me to this day. Maybe he was just brain-farting. Or I am.

Bryan’s talked a fair bit about potentially bringing Clarice on as a black woman, someone with a little more biting way about her than Jodie Foster’s version from the film, and someone who is less susceptible to Hannibal than Will, but tbh, he hasn’t said much that has been particularly concrete and what he has said has seemed to run a little hot and cold depending on whether he expected at the moment of any given interview to get the rights. I’ll let you Google his comments for yourself.

I have written a number of speculations about Clarice entering the show and what her relationship with Hannibal, Will and Jack might be like. They’re probably buried deep in my “s4 speculations” and “s5 speculations” tag, or you could alternately look up “clarice starling” or “clannibal.” Buyer beware, though–for a long time in the fandom early on, there was what I would call ship passive aggressiveness (not outright ship war) from Clannibal shippers who felt threatened by Hannigram, which then became reciprocal, and you’re likely to find me saying in no uncertain terms what I thought on that matter if you look back in the tag far enough. It’s not really pretty.

I don’t think I’ve written on it in a while, though, so in terms of my own opinion today, I’d say that right now I’d be surprised if they did more than introduce Clarice/expy in S4, and tbh, I’m not even expecting an introduction at all. Bryan had said that he’d written S3 to end in the way it did without the intention of going to SotL directly after and S4 would be the most interesting story yet for Will Graham, whatever that means. Bryan seeming somewhat negative at RDC3 about having Clarice and Will together and the fan response at the time makes me think that he’d set her to the side, at least for the near future, and whatever pitch he’d have to make in August/September would probably be without her.

In terms of the ultimate question about whether or not Hannigram would dissolve to make room for Clannibal…

Of COURSE Mads is the captain of the Hannigram ship. He is Hannibal Lecter, who is THE ADMIRAL OF THE ARMADA. Nobody ships Hannigram more than Hannibal Lecter.

For the last three years, he has literally been, as an actor, going into every scene like, “What’s your motivation for this scene?”

“I want to see if I can get Will Graham to kill. Because I love him.”

“I want to have a dinner party for Will Graham. Because I love him.” 

“I want to get Will to be completely dependent on me through this illness, and accept himself as a killer, so we can be killers together. Because I love him.”

“I want Will to know what I am. Because I love him.”

“I want to believe Will is honest with me. Because I love him.”

“I want to be a murder family with Will and Abigail. Because I love them.”

“I want to kill Will for betraying me…but kinda not…but both because I love him.”

“I don’t care if I get caught and am going to make myself a target. Because I love Will and I want him to find me.”

“I’m going to eat Will. Because I love him.”

“I’m going to prison because I can’t bear to be separated from Will. Because I love him.”

“I’m going to turn every conversation I have into one about Will. Because I love him.”

I got to thinking about this when I was thinking about how some have said that book!Hannibal wouldn’t hurt a woman, and specifically that it would be wrong if Bryan Fuller writes anything into S3 where Hannibal hurts Murasaki (Chiyoh, now?). Leaving the books aside, in this iteration, it occurred to me that while I’d doubt that Hannibal would simply be violent with Murasaki, it also seems unlikely that he wouldn’t try to involve her in his darkness, in that part of himself that sees beauty where others see horror, as Mads is fond of saying. Because if he really, deeply cares, he would want to share everything he thinks is possible to share, and if he sees beauty where there is horror, then he would definitely, definitely see the beauty in himself. (It’s with Murasaki that he probably learned to keep himself to himself, frankly.)

He does describe allowing Will to see and know him as “a rare gift,” not a peep into a freak show or anything monstrous or negative. As Dr. Sutcliffe observes back in the first season, Hannibal has a love for the rarefied. He is unique, and that is a beautiful and wondrous thing to him.

Mads talked about how Hannibal wanted Will to see the light, “and not just Hannibal’s light, but his own,” and I remembered his words about radiance to Will from the ortolan dinner.

You must remember that blood and breath are just elements undergoing change to fuel your radiance, just as the source of fire is burning. 

Hannibal always talks about Will in terms of beauty (well, not to his face so much), even in the first season, so it doesn’t seem likely that he would consider his similarities with Will as something ugly. The same holds true for Abigail, although he doesn’t speak to Abigail in these terms about herself, of course. But he tries and succeeds in getting Abigail to kill; he knows and is intrigued by her participation in her father’s crimes and in her own “penchant for manipulation.” Unless there’s some serious mental gymnastics going on in his head, what he thinks of as a “monster” doesn’t include Abigail, even though she encompasses these capacities for murder and manipulation.

Thus I don’t think it’s likely that “monster” equals “killer” in his head, either by his way of thinking about himself or by how he applies it to Abigail. Obviously, the line is a little piece of dramatic irony for the audience, since we know perfectly well that he’s a monster, but probably in his own head, a monster is someone more like Mason Verger: callous and cruel without reason, without respect to the beauty of the human condition. (I’d say someone like those who murdered his sister, but we’ll have to wait and see on that score.)

As for season 3, I’ve said on a number of occasions that I suppose Hannibal may learn to regret what occurred in his kitchen on that fateful night, but I’ll doubt he’ll do so on the basis of seeing himself as a monster. Rather, I’ve supposed that he’ll wish he’d been more resourceful and patient—two things he’d had in abundance prior to Will changing him—because he really did throw away his own happiness there.

Will that childishness on his part make him, or his behavior at that time, monstrous, in his own eyes? I doubt it. I’m sure he can easily rationalize himself to himself, but besides that, Hannibal has that unique view on turning back time, that inability to accept entropy. A teacup shattered can come together. Since Hannibal in this version is not looking to literally reverse the flow of time, he attempts instead to create circumstances that allow for patterns and passions to repeat themselves, fantasizing that he can change it just enough to make it work this time. This is a poignant and beautifully optimistic way of looking at the world, and with that it mind, it’s not necessary for him to damn himself for his past choices. He only has to try to renew and correct what came before. He shattered a teacup at the end of S2, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try to make it come together again.