“it’s a fighting pose. you’re a total poser”

i’m gonna yap about will grahams speech patterns and overall syntax of his voice and words because it’s just so fascinating to me like his whole character and the way hugh dancy portrayed him so clearly

and yes i am a will autism truther it’s non debatable for me and i truly dgaf if bryan fuller or hugh denies it

so i know in hannibal he’s a british man using an american accent so of course words are going to sound a little off, but i’ve seen adam where hugh is not putting on an accent and the man still sounds like autism turbo blasted!

so to start, reading red dragon by thomas harris, literally 3 pages into the book you get met with this

“Jack Crawford heard the rhythm and syntax of his own speech in Graham's voice. He had heard Graham do that before, with other people. Often in intense conversation Graham took on the other person's speech patterns. At first, Crawford had thought he was doing it deliberately, that it was a gimmick to get the back-and-forth rhythm going.

Later Crawford realized that Graham did it involuntarily, that sometimes he tried to stop and couldn't.”

so it gives a very good foundation for the concept of wills speech patterns in the sense that he Doesn’t consciously know the patterns he’s picking up on and taking on himself.

hugh reading red dragon absorbed that quote and STUCK to it because the way he talks with hannibal versus jack versus bedilia verses alana ETC his speech patterns change every time.

i wanted to highlight this part of the script and i unfortunately couldn’t find a recording of the whole quote but it’s this one

Hannibal: You stood in the breathing silence of Garrett Jacob Hobbs's home, the very spaces he moved through. Tell me, Will, did they speak to you?

Will: With noise and clarity.

Hannibal: You could sense his madness, like a bloodhound.

Will: I tried so hard to know Hobbs. To see him--past the slides and vials, beyond the lines of the police reports, between the pixels of all those printed faces of sad, dead girls.

Hannibal: How did you feel seeing Marissa Schuur impaled in his antler room?

Will: Guilty.

Hannibal: Because you couldn't save her?

Will: Because I felt like I killed her.

the way will talks is so….not neurotypical whatsoever like saying dead bodies spoke to him with “noise and clarity”

first thing is they’re dead they don’t talk so the word noise is very interesting to use and Clarity as well

and his monotone face as he says guilty i cant

and the way he feels guilty to an extreme as though he himself killed her feels so….idk the word but yeah pure empathy etc etc but i feel like autistic people (myself included but this isn’t gonna be intentionally projecting) but walk around feeling an overwhelming sense of guilt for even existing in a neurotypical centric world and having a brain that need something different just can feel very burdening.

and this is just crazy his ‘breakup’ scene w hannibal where he says

“I miss my dogs. I'm not going to miss you. I'm not going to find you. I'm not going to look for you. I don't want to know where you are or what you do. I don't want to think about you anymore.”

If I try to drive from here in Maine to New Mexico, it’s 2,400 miles. 

From here to Oregon, 800 miles from my current residence to my relatives in NJ, then another 3,000 miles after that. 

A brisk 8 day drive that meanders through mountains, forests, corn fields, dry, flat, empty plains, more mountains, and then a temperate rain forest in Oregon.

The land has some seriously creepy stuff, even just right outside our doors. 

There is often barking sounds on the other side of our back door. 

At 3 am. 

When no one would let their dog out. 

It’s a consensus not to even look out the fucking windows at night. 

Especially during the winter months. 

Nothing chills your heart faster than sitting in front of a window and hearing footsteps breaking through the snow behind you, only to look and not see anything. 

I live in a tiny town whose distance from larger cities ranges from 30 miles, to 70 miles. What is in between?

Giant stretches of forests, swamps, pockets of civilization, more trees, farms, wildlife, and winding roads. All of which gives the feeling of nature merely tolerating humans, and that we are one frost heave away from our houses being destroyed, one stretch of undergrowth away from our roads being pulled back into the earth.

And almost every night, we have to convince ourselves that the popping, echoing gunshot sounds are really fireworks, because we have no idea what they might be shooting at.

pretending we don’t know we’re sitting on top of limestone caverns filled with icy water

meanwhile in maryland the summer is killing-hot, the air made of wet flannel, white heat-haze glazing the horizon, and the endless cicadas shrilling in every single tree sound like a vast engine revving and falling off, revving and falling off, slow and repeated, and everything is so green, lush poison-green, and you could swear you can hear the things growing, hear the fibrous creak and swell of tendrils flexing

The wind picks up, you get nervous. a helicopter passes low overhead, you get anxious. You wait for sirens. You watch more helicopters carrying heavy sacks of retardant, tanks of water, and keep testing the way the wind blows. Somehow, the fire misses you this summer.

Wintertime in California. The yellowed, crackling grass that looks like miles of sand dunes turns gray and falls loose from the baked earth. You pray for rain but you beg that it doesn’t come with lightning. Still, you don’t expect rain because every winter is “dry.” Snow falls somewhere in the mountains where someone skis then comes back and tells you it wasn’t much. No rain means more fire in the summer.

Then, after New Year’s, it rains. And rains. And gushes. The ground is baked stiff and won’t absorb water after an hour of moderate rain. The water rises. It fills streets, houses, threatens levees and dams. After days of this the ground finally softens. The plants, their root systems shriveled and mostly washed away by the flooding, can’t hold the dirt in place. Where it has no choice,the earth gives way to landslides.

The Sierra Nevadas, riddled with abandoned gold mines and in some place stripped by hydraulic mining. The water is always tainted with mercury and alkali. Occasionally a mine collapses and a sinkhole appears. If the house shakes you ask your friends and neighbors if they felt it too, but then you forget it happened. You actually sleep through most tremors.

Everyone knows at least one old mining song. School projects and field trips are to Fort Sumter and the missions. Cracking adobe that predates the country. You can tell vultures apart from other birds of prey easy because they’re the ones you see most often. Orchards that go on for miles and towns built on top of old olive orchards—occasionally a business or private home has kept a few to remind you. They don’t plant them. Those are the original trees.

You’re hiking and you find a massive flat rock with fist-sized holes bored into it. Trees and fenceposts that look like they were used for target practice with a machine gun. You hear what sounds like a lawn sprinkler go off and you get as far away from the rocks as you can, watching where you step.

Sacramento is a concrete jungle of one way streets and sky-blocking towers before endless miles of ugly industrial wasteland. San Francisco is a twisting maze of clogged overpasses where you drive three miles an hour and watch a dense blanket of bonechilling fog climb over the hills and obscure everything before you enter the city and keep your foot pressed flat to the brake at the steepest intersections. LA is a fever dream, a knotted nightmare of traffic you can never escape, air you can’t breathe even when there’s no fire, and someone’s always playing Norteño, which sounds exactly like polka but with melancholy Spanish lyrics.

The Central Valley gets funnel clouds that touch down even less often than snow falls, but you remember once as a kid getting sleet in the Valley and thinking that’s what snow was then later hudding in the school cafeteria because of a tornado warning. You remember visiting the ocean and bringing home kelp and colored glass. In the mountains you found a sticky pinecone the size of your head and a snake with miniscule legs. An owl with a broken wing was brought to your classroom, there are giant statues of golden bears at the state fair, and someone’s always going missing from Modesto.

They have shiny eyes that reflect your headlights.  When you see them, you look away as fast as you can.  DO NOT MEET THE GAZE OF THE THINGS IN THE CORN.

Corn is planted in neat rows.  It should be child’s play to find your way through a corn-field.  Just pick a row and walk down it until you hit the end.  And yet, people get lost in cornfields all the time.  Sometimes people even DIE lost in cornfields, though this is less common in the age of cell phones.  And if your cell phone just happens to lose signal at the place where you are CERTAIN you have walked the rows at least twice as far as the cornfield should logically stretch… keep walking, friend.  Just keep walking.

Everywhere is haunted. We touch the visor and lift our feet off the floorboard and pedal as we roll across a railroad track. We drive out to the crossroads in the dead of night with flour on the trunk’s lip to see the tiny handprints of dead children trying to push us out of the way. We see things in the shimmering curtains of heat that aren’t there when we blink. I’ve seen things moving in the fields in the dark. There are so many churches, dead and living, because frightened people will pray to one ghost to keep the rest of them at bay.

People know which way to hang horseshoes around here. It’s a U-shape, so the luck doesn’t spill out. I think I must have hung one upside-down once.

The stars at night are big and bright and so are the eyes reflecting the porch light out among the trees.

And I’ll just repeat what @gallusrostromegalus said:

entire neighborhoods disappear once you step into the forest. that highway you drove on to reach this trail is silent and when you look behind you the parking lot is nothing but trees. don’t think too hard about it. if you go and come back, so will your car. 

sometimes there are signs telling you not to follow a trail. there’s no explanation so you peer past it and everything looks fine, but there’s something you can’t put your finger on. some feeling that maybe this time you should listen.