Also "you lied to me" its like dude you're surprised? I mean I love Hannibal. So I'm actually a little disappointed that he would fall for Wills acting. But on the one hand wasn't he impressed by Will putting a hut on him?
Youāve been lying to me, Will.
Hannibal isnāt actually referring to Willās acting this season. Heās referring to the sum total of Willās behavior throughout their entire relationship and suggesting that all that was a lie. What Hannibal fell for was the truth, which was that āWill Graham is not a murderer.ā
The lie he felt Will was telling was that Will is at base, innocentāthat he is ashamed of himself for having that āgrotesque but usefulā mentality, that he regretted his enjoyment of killing, and that he loathes those parts of himself that are attuned to violence.Ā
I feel like Iāve 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 couldnāt force, trick, drug, suggest, plant evidence, or gaslight Will into believing that heās 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 killāHobbsāhe did in a clear emergency with a need to save someone elseās 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 āSavoureuxā before Jack shot Will, Will was deathly ill, hallucinating and feverish, so even though he made an attempt (gold star for you, Will), it wasnāt the victory that Hannibal would have liked to see if Will had accepted that he was a killer and had ābecome someone other than yourself.ā
As Hannibal tells Jack over Willās hospital bed, āI believe I have failed to satisfy my obligation to Will, more than I care to admit.ā He failed.
As we come into season two, Hannibal learns that he misses Will so much that he isnāt content to just let Will rot away in the asylum, so he tries to āhelpā with Willās trial and resumes Willās therapy even though he knowsāthrough Bedeliaās comments, Beverlyās actions, Chiltonās double-dealing, and his own instinctsāthat Will is lying to him about being a āpoor, confused, wounded bird,ā as Chilton puts it. The truth, then, is that Will is persistently clinging to the knowledge of his own innocence through his insistence on Hannibalās guilt. And we also see, finally, Hannibal admit this truth.Ā
Will Graham is not a murderer.
But then that truth is overwhelmed by another truth, when Matthew Brown enacts Willās attempted murder-by-proxy.
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 isnāt a murderer:Ā 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.Ā
But on the other side of the split screen, a new truth emerges: Will is not so innocent after all.Ā The irony is that Hannibal didnāt kill Beverly to push Willās 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 āradically unorthodox therapyā 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 Willās hands.
And therein is the lie that Will has been telling: all along, Will has been proving to HannibalĀ 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.Ā
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 isnāt that the killer part of himself doesnāt exist, itās 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 couldnāt 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 isnāt delusional: he does understand the reality of Beverlyās 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 donāt 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.Ā
W: Oh, you think Iām 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.)
(FYI @divinesugar: You started this ask with the word āalso,ā but if there was an ask that came before this, Tumblr must have eaten it because I didnāt get it.)