Hannigram is a really messed up pairing, it's all about abuse, all Hannibal does is hurt Will. They don't love each other, they just want to destroy each other. I don't understand you people who ship this. You're all stupid and you romanticize abuse by making it seem cute. You're fucking sick.
Okay…. First of all, you’re rude. But I will try to be nice because I don’t want to waste any energy by getting mad and figting with you.
No one is ‘romanticizing abuse’ here. I think everyone who ships Hannigram knows that what Hannibal did to Will and what Will did to Hannibal (cause Will wasn’t a saint either, mind you) was not cute and not okay. Yes, it is true, they do have a rather toxic relationship, but at the same time, it is the most epic love story I ever saw on television. It’s unique and dark and intense and they do love each other. They are very complex and complicated characters, which is why their relationship is hard to understand. But I’ll tell you how I see it and why it’s my OTP.
I think Hannibal loves Will more than he loves anyone else. He is obsessed with him because he saw something in Will that he had never found before. Will is very angry at Hannibal for everything Hannibal did, to him and to others, but at the same time, he does love him too. Will had a lot of chances to murder Hannibal but he never did it. And even at the end, in the Finale, the first thing he said to Hannibal when he saw him was “You were supposed to leave…” He expected him to run away, he hoped he would, because even after everything, he wanted Hannibal to be safe. He wanted him to escape. Hannibal felt too betrayed though, because he had trusted Will and he had all these plans and dreams about running away with him and Abigail and being a family together. He thought they would be happy. Hannibal was crying when he left the house because he realized he had lost the one person he loved the most.
I think Hannigram is not a ship for everyone. You do need to enjoy dark, brutal themes in order to like Hannigram, but isn’t that a given with the Hannibal series in general?
I got a bit carried away and ranted a lot but your message really disturbed me. You don’t have to like this ship, no one is forcing you to. But don’t say we’re all ‘romanticizing abuse’ and that we’re sick. Ask more people why they ship Hannigram if that’s what you want to know, but at least try to be polite. I’m just saying.
A lot of people seem to measure fictional love stories by whether or not they would pass muster by 21st century middle-class American standards for a “healthy” romantic relationship, and if they don’t, then it’s not love. But by that standard, there aren’t any real love stories in Western literary canon.
Romeo and Juliet? Just poorly supervised hormonal teenagers.
Lancelot and Guinevere? A pair of horny cheaters.
Tristan and Isolde? Also cheaters, with added wtf-ery of marrying other people because they reminded you of your ex.
Anna Karenina and Vronsky? Cheaters, and also terrible at family planning.
Seriously, people need to stop trying to think of FICTION as if it were a CBS special about two real dudes next door. It isn’t. These are not actual people, and they are not meant to represent actual people.
Bottom line: if you are going to think of Will and Hannibal’s relationship as romanticizing abuse, then you might as well ask yourself why you’re watching a show that “romanticizes” something as abusive as murder and cannibalism with beautiful cinematography and compelling narratives. And when you’re done soul searching, either accept that fiction =/= reality or change the fucking channel and watch “How It’s Made”.
The other part being not just how ‘healthy’ a relationship is, but how it’s portrayed. Hannibal and will do have a fucked up relationship and both have done things that are not okay. AND THE SHOW ACKNOWLEDGES THIS. My beef with twilight isn’t that the relationship between Edward and Bella was unhealthy, it’s that their relationship is framed in the books and movies as very near perfect. Not once does the show make it seem like hannibal and will are in the ideal relationship, not once does the show act like everything they’ve done is absolutely a-okay.
That’s the other thing: people really need to stop conflating passionate love and a healthy relationship. The two concepts have very little to do with each other. There is a reason why poets since the beginning of time talked about love as madness, as a destructive force, as something that never, ever, ever ends well for the lovers. How could it, when it eclipses all reason!
Healthy relationships do not require ‘twu wuv’. They require two people who like their partner enough not to look for another or live alone. That’s it. That’s the secret of long-lasting marriages: being patient with someone you can tolerate seeing every day and not quitting.
But guess what? That shit makes for boring-ass television.
And that’s really the point, we know what healthy committed love is, what a good relationship is. Our main fanbase settles with women in their early to mid 20’s who’ve experienced adult love and healthy relationships. I am desperately in love with my spouse and I plan on living the rest of my life being so but honestly we mostly just sit on our bed watching cat videos and eating pizza. I don’t want to waste my time watching US on T.V. I want to see the lost souls, the ones who are making mistakes before they figure out what’s healthy for them, the ones that keep trying to make it work. That’s literally every great story in modern literature and film.
And when it comes to romanticizing that couple, we aren’t romanticizing their current state of affection, we’re taking the characters unto ourselves and either spotlighting the mistakes they make that curse their coupling or putting them into situations where they question their morality and decisions - to GET to that healthy place, that’s why the AU’s are so important to us - different paths to take them to different choices and more opportunity to get it right, to get to the bed to watch cat movies and eat pizza. We’re exploring the paths and decisions it takes to get to a realistic happy ending we are hopeful that even two wounded souls like Hannibal & Will might be capable of. Because every human is capable of happiness if they don’t like kill and eat people.
