#bluebeardsbride

Jack slides a picture his way and folds his arms expectantly. The grainy image shows what is clearly a severed arm laying on a metal slab. The hand curls as if it is still trying to weakly grab unto something.  The cut is clean, precise, and just below the elbow; the bone still clean and white against the jagged flesh. It’s been done recently. Will instinctively reaches for it, feels the edge of the photograph against the pad of his fingers.

“It is hers,” Jack speaks after a minute. “Whoever cut it out wanted us to know it was hers.” 

“What makes you so sure?” 

“He had the detail to leave her ring on.” 

okay i’m going to do this generally on what other people’s takes (that i’ve seen or read somewhere) are because none of my hannibal takes are bad. 

top 5 best:

that margot should have been butch in the tv show and that the margot/alana romance could have been developed a little more, i’ll elaborate more on the butch angle in top 5 worst, but i think while i enjoy marlana in s3 (who doesn’t) i do think that there could have been a Little More to it, especially since there was admittedly a lot of gratuitous metaphorical work on a visual or verbal level in early s3 that didn’t... really do much after the first few, and that i think bryan fuller definitely got a bit self-indulgent. while i love s3 i think it was weaker because it got quite ensnared in feeling like it had to explain everyone’s individual recovery (not a bad thing necessarily and the looping narrative definitely had this feeling of “time has been changed, mutilated, adjusted after mizumono”, but on a narrative level it could have probably still been achieved but left more room for things to. Happen) and i think that some of the excess could have been trimmed to allow for more margot-alana development beyond simply talking about taking revenge, i would have loved to see some genuine conversation that only affected both of them that made us realise just why alana would raise the child with her, why they would get marriedーalana having very little dating life and presumably trauma around relationships since her immediate ex tried to murder her and is also a serial killer, and margot having been traumatised repeatedly due to being a lesbian in a very homophobic family, they deserved some space in order to explore why exactly they mean a lot to each other. even a singular scene that didn’t depend on taking vengeance on the men who hurt them would have given us enough i think. 

lara jean chorostecki’s hot take (implied) that freddie would have a wife. groundbreaking. love that. regardless of bryan fuller i am assuming with full confidence that freddie lounds has a wife after the timeskip

autistic will graham. enough said. hugh dancy’s only stupid thing was saying will isn’t autistic. that was a sin. will graham is autistic

lesbian abigail hobbs. lesbian abigail hobbs!

the hot take that hannibal doesn’t do its women characters justice, this isn’t just about deaths (i do agree that for the gothic horror narrative characters are doomed to some extent, and i don’t overly grieve over deaths that came too early, so i’m not too fussed) but on a writing level, bryan fuller definitely tries to portray himself as a very woman-positive author who introduces feminine energy - and he does! but at the same time there is a lack in developing relationships between women, and for a story to truly give space to be a genuinely woman-positive story there needs to be strong relationships between women that don’t depend on men; obviously since hannibal’s presence is insidious and infects everything, as is his luciferian ways, and will’s often the binding agent, this can’t be entirely avoided but regardless of hannibal they can exist, on some small level, individually. we saw that a lot in s1! between abigail and freddie and alana and abigail mostly, plus there was a small glimpse at it in season 3 with bedelia and chiyoh (underrated imo i would love to see further into why bedelia has her views of chiyoh and what that means ... i hope they interact again if hannibal s4 comes to pass!). so it proves there is room for it. it doesn’t need to be every episode or even have a huge arc but seeing hannibal pass the bechdel test more than like. twice a season would be nice!

top 5 worst takes:

that bedannibal is more romantic than hannigram (lol)... i love bedelia and bedannibal a lot but that’s just. hm. incorrect

that hannibal has never loved anybody except will. i’ve wrote about this before but i think that’s a deliberate misunderstanding of the character hannibal. what is unique about hannibal and will’s relationship is not the presence of love but the presence of being changed by that love; transformation is at its core, the openness to being adjusted or altered... recognition, seeing, understanding, and that allowing compassion not only for the other (in hannibal’s case) but for the self (in will’s case). hannibal loves a lot, but his love is not separate from crueltyーi think this is where people misunderstand. just because he is willing to hurt or harm people isn’t, in the narrative (not in real life), because he doesn’t love them. his cruelty is because he loves people enough he wants to bring them to the height of their being, in extremis. he loved alana, which is why he showed her a chance at mercy. he loved bedelia. he loved jack. he loved abigail! he loved bella especially, and he genuinely mourned. these went beyond fascinations; these were genuine expressions of affection, love, whether they be platonic or romantic or familial. hannibal’s flaw is not that he is incapable of love. and personally i think to disrespect his relationships with other characters (who are all women, black or both lol) in order to further isolate the white m/m relationship is... not ideal. not a sign that someone is wholly prejudiced but i think it’s something we should be critical about, especially when hannibal through word of god is confirmed to love other people. 

bryan fuller’s own take that margot being femme is somehow less prejudiced or problematic than if she was butch. i haven’t read the book yet but i already know that margot’s portrayal as a butch lesbian was problematic but thomas harris is . undoubtedly prejudiced in many ways and that’s a fault of him, not a fault of the existence of being butchーbeing butch isn’t just a “stereotype” it’s a genuine mode of existence, it’s an intricate relationship with gender, sexuality and love, and butchness deserves to be represented as something beautiful, desirable and complex... instead of just deciding she should be conventionally feminine because that’s somehow more progressive. but then again he also made her have sex with a man so you know. lol

ANY take that involves over-analysing who is a top or who is a bottom and then rendering the characters into homophobic/fetishistic stereotypes. it’s ugly! it’s weird! keep that shit away from me. also any take involving “dark!will”. again that just does the character of will disrespect lol. the whole point of will is that he is morally complex and perhaps beyond the human scopeーhe is not just an echo of hannibal... i’ve seen one too many fics where will just becomes a savage brutal unfeeling murderer who only cares about hannibal after s3. like please watch the show

that hannibal is a narcissist/sociopath... or any other ableist interpretations. not every villain is a narcissistic (a genuine disorder) sociopath (just another word associated with npd etc) just because they do bad things. they’re very real disorders that people deal with and are infinitely more complex than just a character having a god complex and killing people. the whole point about hannibal is that he exceeds what is considered neurodivergent and while i don’t mind if people with similar disorders relate to him (much like how i relate to will’s autistic traits) i think a lot of bad comes from people throwing the label sociopath around because it becomes dehumanising and leads to further stigma against truly vulnerable people. 

this is a difficult question, mostly because I don’t want to repeat what we all know, which is to say vampires as ersatz of Eros, dark Eros, monstrous Eros, who substitute the arrows and quivers for the ever white fangs. Vampires are all mouth, sexual beings marked with an erotic seal. Immortal beings seduced by the death drive, by the intoxication of the senses, too much blood, too much beauty, too much satin; that we know of, so what is there left for me to tell, say?

this is interesting but i don't entirely agree with it

I feel like it ascribes a necessity to garrett jacob hobbs that isn't necessarily there in the text. also him & hannibal's motivations (while they are both cannibals) are very, very different. Hannibal's task is elevation; Hobbs is seeking substitution

I definitely think this chapter’s analysis of Hobbs leaves a pretty large whole (as does another from the same book) in that it doesn’t address the “all of the girls resemble Abigail” thing, even if I don’t think it would change the general point it’s making about Hannibal

& for sure there is a lack of necessity for Hobbs (I mean, duh. the Hobbses wouldn’t starve), though I don’t think they’re trying to argue a difference of need? mostly highlighting a difference between Hobbs’ more utilitarian “blue-collar” (as the authors word it) cannibalism, which seeks to waste as little as possible of each individual murder, and Hannibal’s “neo/colonial” cannibalism, which wastes quite a bit of viable meat as he adheres to some unspecified aesthetic code. like... there’s no reason he can’t take all the myriad organs he needs to cook each banquet from 1 or 2 individuals, since iirc from “Futamono” he doesn’t hunt for doubles that often, mostly just taking one organ per kill. it’s Extra as hell.

compared to Hobbs who “honors” each of them to the fullest extent.