Will Graham’s entire character is about self acceptance for an individual who doesn’t conform to societal ideals.
When we meet him, he’s desperate to shape himself into the man he’s suggested he should be from his environment. He has a neorodivergence and sees the world in a fascinating and beautiful way, but from a lack of understanding from others, their dismissal or flat out perturbation of his nature, he grows ashamed. He’s socially withdrawn, afraid because he finds the very ‘self’ a cause of causality, that he’s fundamentally broken. He works for the FBI, became a cop prior, as a moral justification for existence. He has to prove that he is a good man, no ill intentions. It’s like he read how to be culturally acceptable in a book and longed for this to become what he could be.
He has an empathy disorder, yet tries to withdraw from expressing many emotions. He desperately attempts to work as a police officer before academic study. His romantic pursuits are attractive white woman who he can have a marriage with and take care of and give hospitality to without having to share himself too much. Alana could never have fulfilled this narrative after his attempt because she saw him for more of his own nature. His relationship with Abigail is odd, until you realize it isn’t about the girl herself fully, but his desire for fatherhood. We see this more in season two with Margot. He believes a child could bring him to be more acceptable. He desires it but it can never be what is true to him.
Do I condone murder? No. However in the context of the story, Will’s progression to murder is a metaphor for self acceptance. Will has the capacity to kill and a deep seeded bloodlust and attraction to violence. He tries to deny this, of course, but as the shoe progresses he escalates and finds himself true to his essential attributes of his innermost self. He allows himself to find more pleasure in his designs and innate brutality with a guiding hand.
And here’s where we see Hannibal come in. Hannibal has always expressed his manipulation as a mechanism to Will’s becoming. This becoming isn’t about changing Will, but rather a progression of recognition, to forbearance, to embracing. He says he doesn’t know himself as well as he does with Hannibal. That’s because Hannibal allows him to say what he wants without scrutiny, he’s rather proud by what he thinks. He has no expectations of conformity, the exact opposite! He doesn’t have to mask around Hannibal, because he’s just as unorthodox. In season one, he claims murder is the most horrible thing in the world. Season two, he ‘tolerates’. I’m season three, he finds it beautiful. These can be read about his feelings on his own desires.
When Will has a wife and child, he has all he ever wanted. He’s indiscriminate, normal, living the perfect, happy, simplistic life of white-collared Americana. Only it’s an illusion, it’s an ill fitted glove and he knows that. In a way, Hannibal is the personification of Will’s ‘forbidden fruit’ if you will, an eradication of morality or norms. Artistic, flamboyant, unapologetic, affluent, indulgent darkness and supremacy, and providing a relationship far from paternity or god forbid a white picket fence, but something unpredictable, sadistic, homoerotic, and all over deeply strange. Yet in the end he makes his decision, for he can no longer harbor his shame, and Hannibal is his absolution.
His plunge into the water is a baptism to be born again, no longer tethered to his self inflicted chains of condemnation, his person suit, and fully actualized.
