“Is Hannibal in Love With Me?”

So with that little lesson in terminology, we come back to Hannibal.

First of all, in case it wasn’t obvious by the existence of this article, I loved Hannibal. I can’t think of the last time I willingly, without force from my family or friends, sat down and binged a show in it’s entirety. Even separating it from the gay context, it’s an amazing show — unbelievably cinematic, with phenomenal acting and cinematography (James Hawkinson, you genius!). The final season, undeniably, is some of the weakest content, but filler episodes are nowhere near enough for me to deem it anything less than a phenomenal success in visual media. If Bryan Fuller gets his Silence of the Lambs miniseries, I can guarantee I’ll be there for every beautiful second of it.

The gay subtext of the show is the other major player in why I loved it so much; I feel like even saying subtext under-sells the extent of what they put on screen. Anyone following my Twitter got to watch me unintentionally tweet through almost all of it, completely in disbelief that this had aired on prime-time television and I hadn’t been there to witness it live; I can’t imagine myself at 15, seeing Will Graham be told that Hannibal loves him — explicitly. No metaphors or deep subtext you have to analyze, just flat out explicitly stated and not made a joke of. To give the audience a showcase of exactly what I was reacting to:

So, yeah. To my own defense, it’s not just me — the Hannibal/Will fanfiction count on Archive of Our Own has reached 15,000 works, and is rising still by the day, four years after cancellation. A quick Google search still brings up dozens of articles talking about their unique relationship, and the auto-fills validate this too. People still love this show, and they love the idea of this relationship, past and present.

Let’s go back, briefly, to the subject of queerbaiting. A lot of what you see in media that queerbaits is the subject of authorial intent; that being, when the creators become aware of the subtext in their work and don’t deny it, but don’t validate it either. This happened with Sherlock, where the light homoeroticism remained, but with “I’m not gay” shields thrown up every now and again to keep things, for lack of a better term, balanced. They didn’t want to scare away their viewers that wanted a gay relationship, but they were never going to give that to them either. Queerbaiting was their best choice to have their cake and eat it too.

Will and Hannibal, despite all their tension and purposeful intimacy, are never an explicit item, and continue to sleep with women throughout the show; so, compared to these other shows, how is Hannibal different?

Firstly, authorial intent. Bryan Fuller, the show’s creator and a gay man himself, has actually taken the time to discuss Hannibal and Will Graham at length in specific context to their sexualities. While he describes Will as “very definitely heterosexual”, getting a wife in the second half of the third season, he also acknowledges that that doesn’t void the ability to explore his relationship with Hannibal in a way that allows for subtext that is “practically text in a couple of episodes”. And while Will might be spoken for in terms of sexuality, Hannibal, purposefully, is not (paraphrased, he states that he has no idea what way Hannibal goes). But Fuller’s decision to introduce queer subtext into the show wasn’t born out of desire for gaining wide viewership under false pretenses, and upon realizing how so many of Will and Hannibal’s interactions came across, he didn’t shy away. While gay people certainly have the ability to feed into queerbaiting (see: Sherlock), Fuller is the refreshing other end to this spectrum, where he acknowledged and actively encouraged reading into a relationship they made purposefully intimate.

In a 2014 interview, Fuller comments that one of the writers had been actively pushing for more gay text within the show, and his discussion of the organic nature of the queer angle to the show is all just that — organic. Fuller seemed to be forever cautious not to fall into queerbaiting, while also not wanting to completely pander to what he saw as a very loyal demographic within the fanbase.

You can read that interview in full here, if ever curious.

Hannibal doesn’t stop at just male-specific homoeroticism, either, though. I can only write so much about the relationship between Alana Bloom and Margot Verger, but that’s only because the series was canceled right as they were introduced in this angle. Alana, previously relegated to an on-again off-again love interest for Will (and Hannibal, in season 2), enters Margot’s sphere in season 3; Margot was a minor character introduced about halfway through season 2 as one of Hannibal’s new patients, and slept with Will for plot purposes.

Margot and Alana, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, aren’t given much in terms of buildup. They get a sex scene after maybe only a handful of conversations — unfortunate in that we don’t get a similar build of tension or emotion as we do with Hannibal and Will (who, again, are never even a couple), but fortunate in that we might never as long as the show remains canceled. Beyond that, once the Red Dragon plot starts, Margot kind of just disappears until the final episode, where she has no dialogue. One could make an argument that the show’s seeming lack of investment in Margot and Alana as a couple results in them becoming just flatly sexualized; however, I’d make the argument that everything in this show is so sexual that its hard to point to them as the only aspect that gets special attention. Hannibal doesn’t have many explicit sex scenes, but those it does have are almost mild to how any scene of dinner is filmed. Food gets a larger sexual focus than the canonically gay couple, which, hey, it’s a nice change.

Are they sexualized? Undoubtedly. But they aren’t sexualized to the point of dehumanization, they aren’t senselessly murdered, and each woman is her own unique and complex entity outside of the relationship.

(Further, Fuller didn’t just add in this aspect in order to throw in some more sex or to heighten the possibility that Will and Hannibal might end up together. Like we writers tend to see happen, it just ended up being the direction the character was meant to go in, and he’s incredibly protective of Alana’s character growth and revelations: “I think there was some criticism like ‘Oh, now she’s a lesbian just because you want her to be a lesbian’. No, she’s bisexual, she’s always been bisexual, and stop being so narrow in your perception of sexuality”.)

And, hey, they get a happy ending too! Alana and Margot kill Margot’s sadist of a brother in one of the most satisfying deaths of the third season, and they survive to the end of the show (mostly because they get the hell out of Dodge the second Hannibal escaped). When “burying your gays” is so prominent a fate for so many fictional gay characters (lesbians especially), it’s incredibly important to take note that Fuller gave them “as close to a happy ending as we could probably pull off”.