Season 3 Ep 12 - "The Number of the Beast is 666" Discussion Thread

I feel that perhaps I need to explain myself better--so here I go on a long rant, but I hope that my true feelings on this matter will be impossible to misinterpret after the effort. I had to split this reply into two parts in order to get it all out.

First of all, it was not my intention in my original post to take a critical stance of the Hannibal/Will relationship. It was mentioned in one of the replies that "this is the only change that bothers me." I never said that it bothered me, or in fact, that it motivated me to feel anything--all that I did was neutrally comment on the issue; and to be fair to me, I don't believe such commenting should be automatically interpreted as an "attack" of some nature on the Hannigram community. There are really some of us watching this TV show who don't care either way--Hannibal/Will ship, Hannibal/Clarice ship, Hannibal/no ship. To imply that the only reasons one could have for remarking on the dynamic in any way other than via expressing adoration is making a blatant assumption that all opinions must necessarily have an emotional/personal basis, and could not conceivably be dispassionate intellectual discussion. While not truly offended, I am, on a certain level, somewhat insulted by this. I have re-read my OP and do not find anything in it that was overtly hostile or belittling to the Hannigram dynamic or to Bryan Fuller. In fact, I even took steps to make it clear that this was not my intention: "And yes, I do realize that I'm raining on the general Hannigram parade...Sorry :( But I do just honestly take some issue with this, reality wise." Would I have said this if it was my aim to piss people off? No. Before I comment any further, I just wanted to iron out this aspect of the discussion.

Now having said that: I realize that there have been several changes to canon in adapting the show from the source material. I am not a literary purist; none of these changes have bothered me in the slightest, especially as I feel that they were all well executed and appropriately rationalized for how they were diverging the storylines. I want to reiterate again that the change in Hannibal/Will's relationship does not perturb me on some emotional level; however, on an intellectual level, I do think it is fair to comment that this particular change may reside in a different category than the bulk of the others. The reason for this is the simple fact that this singular change dramatically changes a major character dynamic that exists between two of the universe's main protagonists--comparing it therefore, to changing the gender of minor characters, rearranging certain timeline events, and altering various pieces of dialogue, does not necessarily equate to the same effect. It's like finding a way to totally re-write the relationship between Frodo and Sam from LotR somehow--there's basically no way such an approach couldn't represent a significant change in Tolkien's world because Frodo/Sam happened to be a major plot point, not a minor one. And that's all that I'm saying here--that it's a significant change, and therefore notable enough (i.e. fair game) to comment on. Not whether it's positive vs. negative on a creative/qualitative level. And having clarified that, whether you ship Hannigram or not, I do think it would be entirely fair to at least acknowledge that the dynamic created by Fuller completely re-imagines the original relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham, something that none of the other changes do. This, in fairness, distinguishes it from all of the other changes that you mentioned. That is the first part of my point about the whole thing.

Now to my second point: I do not personally care whether or not Bryan Fuller wanted to portray Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham in a homoerotic relationship. As you commented, show Will seems to be a combination between book Will and book Clarice, so in reality, a creative spin of this type would have fit the television series quite well. The issue--as j-dusk noted and as I reiterated several times--is that Bryan Fuller stated that Will Graham is heterosexual. "Very definitely heterosexual", in fact, were his exact words, as j-dusk dug up in the link. I will also say that this specific article happens to be the exact one I was implicitly referencing and just didn't happen to post the link for.

The reason I find this problematic is that I personally feel it paints a very confusing picture of how we are meant to view the events of the television show. As you pointed out, the show is not the books--changes to the source material can be made at the discretion of creative license if the producer/writers desire to make them. Having said that, however, this is my real sentiment on the Hannibal/Will dynamic...Why didn't the creative team just blatantly change this element of the story?

/r/HannibalTV Thread Parent