Welp that sure happened.
I don't know that words can do justice to the scale of my delight at how vicious and horrible the Hannibal finale was. Sort of a blurring of Bryan Fuller's gleeful cruelty as a writer and Hannibal's sense of wounded betrayal as he realises, slightly too early for Will's good, that Will has been playing him. I especially loved Hannibal's self-pitying wandering into the rain all "I loved them and was going to make them a little family and then Will THREW IT ALL BACK IN MY FACE and now I've been forced to kill him really horribly GOD LIFE IS SO UNFAIR".
He chose to gut Will literally because Will had gutted him figuratively. He gave him a potentially-but-not-necessarily fatal injury because he wanted him to maybe have to live with what "he'd" done (led to Abigail's real and final death). He also gave him one of the most painful killing blows there is, one which will lead to protracted agony and can take a very long time to kill someone, if I remember correctly.
It was calculated cruelty. He fumbled, trying to let Alana go, because he likes her, and her betrayal is simply the removal of a blindfold. He expected nothing less of her. But he LOVED Will. He was deceived by Will, and part of his furious, reasoned cruelty comes from his punctured pride, the idea that he had the wool pulled over his eyes by his desire to be known, understood, and admired for what he is.
Cannot put this analysis on Tumblr because they will moan that I'm somehow exonerating his actions as opposed to the fairly obvious "explaining the perspective of the character", b/c apparently there ARE people out there who feel that somehow you can justify overreacting like a giant tantruming murderbaby and basically stabbing/throwing out of windows everyone you have cultivated a relationship with simply because your feelings were hurt.
And on that note: man that was some intimate-ass sexual-as-fuck regretful power-waving near-disembowelling Hannibal did.
(Yes I continue to be fascinated by his character because LOOK AT HIM. He's an egocentric psychopath with an incredible talent for manipulation and influence, he is charming and astronomically self-important and he has only the most tangential relationship to normal feelings. He is basically Satan. Of COURSE it's fascinating. His motivations run outside of the field of normal human feeling [love, lust, revenge, anger, honour, fear] but at the same time are infinitely more petty for being removed from that: he kills people because they're rude, or they hurt his feelings, or it's amusing to him. He only has the watered-down version of inner circle emotions and he treats them like they justify extremis-emotion behaviour. A lot of what he does IS congruent with what Jon Ronson describes. Tumblr, naturally, thinks that being more interested in the abhorrently aberrant than the heroically aberrant is somehow a sign of being either 2edgy8me or somehow morally defective; heroically aberrant is what we're encouraged to worship and strive for, abhorrently aberrant is what we're encouraged to fear and avoid. What, exactly, is wrong with Know Thy Enemy And Know Thyself?)
He chose to gut Will literally because Will had gutted him figuratively. He gave him a potentially-but-not-necessarily fatal injury because he wanted him to maybe have to live with what "he'd" done (led to Abigail's real and final death). He also gave him one of the most painful killing blows there is, one which will lead to protracted agony and can take a very long time to kill someone, if I remember correctly.
It was calculated cruelty. He fumbled, trying to let Alana go, because he likes her, and her betrayal is simply the removal of a blindfold. He expected nothing less of her. But he LOVED Will. He was deceived by Will, and part of his furious, reasoned cruelty comes from his punctured pride, the idea that he had the wool pulled over his eyes by his desire to be known, understood, and admired for what he is.
Cannot put this analysis on Tumblr because they will moan that I'm somehow exonerating his actions as opposed to the fairly obvious "explaining the perspective of the character", b/c apparently there ARE people out there who feel that somehow you can justify overreacting like a giant tantruming murderbaby and basically stabbing/throwing out of windows everyone you have cultivated a relationship with simply because your feelings were hurt.
And on that note: man that was some intimate-ass sexual-as-fuck regretful power-waving near-disembowelling Hannibal did.
(Yes I continue to be fascinated by his character because LOOK AT HIM. He's an egocentric psychopath with an incredible talent for manipulation and influence, he is charming and astronomically self-important and he has only the most tangential relationship to normal feelings. He is basically Satan. Of COURSE it's fascinating. His motivations run outside of the field of normal human feeling [love, lust, revenge, anger, honour, fear] but at the same time are infinitely more petty for being removed from that: he kills people because they're rude, or they hurt his feelings, or it's amusing to him. He only has the watered-down version of inner circle emotions and he treats them like they justify extremis-emotion behaviour. A lot of what he does IS congruent with what Jon Ronson describes. Tumblr, naturally, thinks that being more interested in the abhorrently aberrant than the heroically aberrant is somehow a sign of being either 2edgy8me or somehow morally defective; heroically aberrant is what we're encouraged to worship and strive for, abhorrently aberrant is what we're encouraged to fear and avoid. What, exactly, is wrong with Know Thy Enemy And Know Thyself?)