Zoeryl

Chapter 8 is now up! Hope you all had a lovely holiday <3

❤ Give love! Spread love!  ❤

Child: grandma what does this have to do with the 2020 election

Me:

idk maybe slow your roll and realize that like… actors can be closeted, content creators can be closeted, and tbh this “you can only write your own experiences, never write someone else’s” rhetoric is also a bigot’s fucking wet dream?? like the perfect excuse to never write diverse characters?? and to say that they have nothing in common with people who don’t look/love/exist the same way as them??

yeah, the author of simon vs the homo sapien’s agenda is a cis straight woman, which means love, simon (though directed by a married gay man with multiple gay characters played by gay/bi actors) is based on a novel written by a straight woman… but this straight woman literally ends her book acknowledging the LGBT teens who helped her write the book and make sure she was writing it appropriately.

this is the content we want

listen… EVERY SINGLE piece of media EVER involves some level of writing about experiences that are not your own, especially if it’s diverse. even bland stories just about white people involves an author writing about genders that are not their own. if you want a story with characters of color, white authors are going to have to write about those perspectives. if you want gay characters in every story, straight authors are gonna have to write about those perspectives. even LGBT narratives might involve gay authors writing about bi characters or cis authors writing about trans characters.

what we HOPE FOR when they do that is that they talk to people… actually belonging to those groups to learn what is and isn’t appropriate and true to life. which is what the author of simon vs the homo sapien’s agenda did.

it’s exactly what she did. she literally worked in a support group for LGBT and GNC kids, saw they did not have cute love stories written for them after they told her this, and then worked with them to give them the love story they craved.

this is a good thing. this is progress for lgbt people. this is the path we need to walk towards getting LGBT content created by LGBT authors.

when you attempt to take the ~moral ground on protesting this film, all you’re doing is telling people who fund these projects that gay products don’t sell. they don’t get the nuance of what you’re going for. and, chances are, you’re looking like a fucking hypocrite, because i can promise you most of the canon gay characters you stan profit a cishet somehow (if they’re even canon).

so, y’unno, as someone who has read simon vs the homo sapien’s agenda AND seen the fucking movie let me tell you!! it’s fine!! it’s diverse beyond having gay character, it’s written respectively, and it hit home on a lot of experiences i WISH i had as a gay teen. it’s corny, it’s silly, and it’s all i ever would have wanted at 13, 14, 15

“Sunrise to Sunset” [Hannibal (2013-2015)]

Reader-Insert / CYOA / Dark Comedy / Slice of Life / Romance / Thriller / Drama

{Murder Family AU} {Bed & Breakfast AU}

[Hannibal Lecter x Will Graham] [Reader x Abigail Hobbs] [Reader x Will Graham x Hannibal Lecter]

After a messy breakup, you wind up on the doorstep of a quaint New England bed & breakfast run by the charming, well-spoken Hannibal Lecter, his sardonic but helpful husband Will Graham, and their enchanting daughter Abigail. This was supposed to be a simple vacation, but you soon realize this “perfect” family is far from normal. Curiosity barely kept at bay, you soak up the mystery unfolding around you. Furtive conversations overheard through thin walls. Hosts that sling dark humor like its a second language to them. Unruly guests that suddenly go missing. Its becoming hard to decide what emotions you feel most: fear, intrigue, lust…? Oh, hell, this is going to be a wild ride…

An Interactive Story: Choose which characters to befriend, which characters to pursue romantically, what suspicious noises to investigate in the dark of night. Or choose to mind your own damn business. But reader be warned, some choices may have deadly consequences…

“Moral Ambiguity” [Hannibal (2013-2015)]

Drama / Romance / Slow Burn / Angst / Hurt / Healing

[Hannibal Lecter x Will Graham] [Chiyoh] 

“Of all the trust exercises I’ve endured, this has, by far, been the most painful.”

They’ve taken the plunge together, quite literally. After surviving their free fall into the Atlantic ocean, Will and Hannibal are adjusting to the peculiarity of their new lives. Thrust into hiding, their newly-minted fugitive status means they must remain far from prying eyes until things settle down. Alone in the woods and licking their wounds, they’ve suddenly found themselves with a lot of time on their hands. Maybe a little too much time.

“Children of the Dark” [The Lost Boys (1987)]

Drama / Romance / Dark Comedy / Slice of Life / Slow Burn

[Marko x Paul] [David x OC] [David x Star] [Dwayne x OC] [Maria x OC]

Vampires, witches, werewolves… Santa Carla is a haven for all kinds of supernatural creatures. And not all of them play together nicely. When Marko gets mixed up with a nomadic werewolf, tensions rise in the coven. Old wounds come to light, while new romances blossom. But with bigger problems looming on the horizon, will there be more bloodshed or will peace finally prevail among all the children of the dark?

*okay, here goes*

I noticed that all the way through the Dragon fight we were being presented with two versions of reality – the truth, and the ‘story’ of what is happening, the grandiose violence that is somehow more real than what [we] know to be true. 

Look: 

What we see flickers from reality / to story /  to reality. 

The truth: Hannibal and Will kill Francis.

The story: Hannibal the Cannibal and Will Graham slay The Dragon.

.

And how is this switch between reality and story signalled?

By Will POV:

Look. Will is seeing The Dragon, not Francis. 

He sees the Story behind the reality. 

.

Now, immediately before this fight ensues, Will and Hannibal talk about what is about to happen, while drinking wine. 

Hannibal: Save yourself, kill them all. 

Will: I don’t know if I can save myself. Maybe that’s just fine. 

Hannibal: No greater love hath man, than to lay down his life for a friend. 

[ they looks at eachother, and Hannibal nods ]

What does the drinking of wine usually signal, on this show?

How many times have we seen Hannibal smell the bouquet (as he smells the cork before pouring, here), make a pronouncement, and then take a sip?

It’s the victim-ritual, it signals that Hannibal has decided to kill someone; someone has just made the menu. Here the toast is made with Will, a toast to honour the death they have just decided to create. 

Whose death do you think they’re talking about? 

And what kind of death?

Do you think Will is really saying he intends to die? 

If that were true, then why, when the Dragon shows up, does he fight back? Why does he warn Hannibal that the Dragon is watching them? If he really wants to die, or to let the Dragon kill Hannibal, all he has to do is stop saving them, right? 

In the inception, it’s possible his plan might have been more open - let the Dragon kill Hannibal, then let the Dragon kill me. (We know he was planning to get Hannibal out, with or without the Dragon as leverage, because he’d already made the first moves of murder-husband courtship with the Chilton-burning, and then made Escape seem attractive to Hannibal with his brutal goodbye, when he thought the Dragon was dead.)

But during the course of this short exchange, his plan alters; Hannibal persuades him to switch one death, one sacrifice, for another. 

Will’s actions make complete sense if the death he’s talking about – the sense in which he cannot ‘save’ himself – is symbolic. 

He may as well be saying, ‘Will Graham is dead, long live Will Graham.’

So… he runs that possibility by Hannibal, (perhaps only then realising that it is a possibility), Hannibal takes it in, and then he talks about laying down one’s life for a friend. 

Will has to make a plausible end for himself, just as Francis gave himself a plausible ending by seeming to Share with Reba and then kill himself out of remorse. He has to free the woman in his life by dying. 

When Hannibal says ‘than to lay down his life for a friend,’ he’s telling Will what a plausible ending (for them both) would look like. 

And, honestly, if you had to pick a likely cause of death for Hannibal, can you think of a better one than ‘because he was trying to save Will?’ It’s what has Hannibal already been banging on about (’you made a bargain for Will’s life, and then I spun your gold.’) 

This is the only way. 

But if they want to convince the powers-that-be that they both died attempting to save each other from the Dragon then they have to let the Dragon come. They both have to bleed. 

So they let him come, they let him attack them. 

And what does Hannibal say while he’s there? 

Suicide is the enemy. 

For Francis’s benefit, or for Will’s? 

And all the while Francis is talking, Hannibal is looking at Will, signalling to Will. 

Francis tells him he’s going to kill him; Hannibal’s eyes go blood-in-the-moonlight black, and he looks at Will like LET’S KILL HIM, and Will nods. Then Francis pulls out a knife, out of Will’s sightline – but Hannibal can see – and tells Will about it by feigning a kind of woozy look in his direction.

Anyway!

Fight over, they have their beautiful moment, the Dragon is Slain.

And then we get?

Will POV again.

Meaning?

We’re about to slip back out of Reality and into Story-mode again.

Will is thinking ‘this is where we died.’

(And every moment after is borrowed.)

The pattern goes:

reality [they are finally united]

story [they commit ‘suicide’]

reality [they go and eat Bedelia].

All this season they’ve been putting the emphasis on emotional and character-driven rather than plot-driven story-telling. This is the universe in which Abigail went to Florence. In which Mischa’s spirit, embodied by fireflies, lead Will down to the cellar where Grutas was held. The universe in which the Dragon appeared and attacked Francis.

It’s the alchemy of lies and truth again. 

So this is what happens in the Story: 

But it is not, necessarily, what actually happened in reality. 

Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham did ‘die’ on that cliff. That is what is emotionally true.

.

Other reasons to believe that they didn’t actually fall off the cliff: 

- Bedelia isn’t stupid enough to hang around long enough for them to mysteriously not-die in the ocean, change their mind about wanting to die, get to a (Will’s?) boat, heal their wounds, sail back, break into her house, and then eat her. 

- but Bedelia might not have moved fast enough (there is a precedent for that) to get away in time if they turned up at her house immediately after this. They could not do both; it’s either or. And since we know, for a fact, that Bedelia gets eaten, it has to be the latter. 

- if they did go straight to Bedelia’s house after this, it would cue up a great parallel (which this show loves) between S04E01 and S03E01 where Hannibal shows up at her house to lick his wounds after Mizumono. 

- Will’s carefully obvious telegraphing-in-advance that Hannibal was going to die. Hey everybody, pay attention, Hannibal is totally going to be dead soon okay, just so everyone is clear how dead he is going to be, the answer is: extremely. He is going to be shuffled off this mortal coil and joining the choir invisible, he will be pushing up the daisies, bereft of live, he will be resting in peace. He will be an EX. CANNIBAL. Got it?? That dude = totally not alive any more!!

- The Eroding Bluff. Do you not see the CHEKHOV’S PUNthere? 

.

One reason to show the cliff-fall:

Y’know how in those old Hayes/censorship-era films where homosexuality was still the love that dared not speak its name and even heterosexual sex was frowned upon? 

And they had to imply sex by, eg. showing rockets going off, trains slamming into tunnels? Basically being as Freudian as they possibly could? 

The way they suggested Francis’ climax by showing the dropped martini glass?

Well look at Hannibal’s face when Will’s head hits his shoulder: 

Look me in the eye and tell me that ^ isn’t orgasmic.

In this show, with these two, gut-stabbings are tantamount to flirtation, violence is romance, kill is kiss. 

So what is killing together? 

Consummation. 

That fall off the cliff isn’t just about symbolic death, it’s a symbolic little death. It’s about physical release, these two men finally letting their bodies go, (and while they’re wrapped around each other no less). If you wanted to show this with two female characters, you’d have them appear to die in a mysterious explosion, to mimic the female orgasm. 

Last night when I first watched this, I interpreted the cliff as entirely visual metaphor. This was Will finally falling off the cliff with Hannibal. Sexually and romantically, yes, but also into the liberating psychosis–diving off finally into the mindset of Hannibal. In the cold light of morning, however, I was exposed to a lot more literally thinking and started to doubt my late night interpretation. 

After reading this post, I’m convinced all over again, and here is one thing I noticed which strongly supports the symbolic reading: After killing the dragon, Will doesn’t collapse near the cliff’s edge.

Here is a view of the cliffside scene by daylight. 

For reference, there is a squarish step by the windows (1), a bench (2), and another bench (3) which is obscured by the bushes in this angle.

During the fight, Hannibal is cliffside, and Will is near those benches. Here are their orientations when Red Dragon collapses:

Hannibal is near the cliff, but Will is collapsing quite far from it. 

Will collapses and looks at the blood. Ah yes, black in the moonlight

Here is Hannibal looking back at him:

Will reaches for Hannibal

And boom, the lighting shifts (ok, in this screenshot it also shifts because I added exposure, but the lighting in show also shifts ok) and Will is suddenly cliffside. 

And these scenes are played alongside the shots of the “body” heart in the Capella Palatina, which Hannibal made for Will:

Will is Hannibal’s perfect man, his heart. The Beatrice to his Dante. 

But, look at that heart there in the Norman Chapel. It’s being held up by three swords. The thrice pierced heart is a tarot card, one frequently used in readings about romantic relationships/lovers. Tarot has a rich history in Italy.

This are all things of which Hannibal would definitely be aware. Symbolism is never lost on him, and always intentional. 

This is the Three of Swords. In it’s upright position, as we see above, it means “Painful separation, sorrow, heartbreak, grief, and rejection.” 

S2 finale, anyone?

But, notice how the Norman Chapel heart is actually in the reversed position? Like this:

In the reversed position, the Three of Swords means “releasing pain, optimism, and forgiveness.” 

Will understands. 

“Betrayal and forgiveness are best seen as something akin to falling in love.”

Me: please let Nico be happy he's been through enough I just want my boy to get all the cuddles and kisses and go to damn therapy

Aaaaa happy pride month! 💕💕💕🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍🌈

And with every thing going on in the world, let’s all remember:

•Lgbtq+ lives matter

•Black mlm lives matter

•Black wlw lives matter

•black trans lives matter

•lgbtq+ Muslim lives matter

Feel free to add on :)