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Name: Dr. Hannibal Lecter Door: Left Canon: Hannibal (TV) Canon Point: Season 3, Episode 13: The Wrath of the Lamb Age: Canon is vague on this point. I'm saying 43. Appearance: Hannibal is modestly tall and well-built, with sandy brown hair and deep brown eyes. He is impeccably dressed and groomed at all times. History: So much blood... CR AU (Optional): N/A Personality: Positive Trait: Polite Hannibal is exceedingly polite, to friend and foe and stranger alike. Even to his victims, he will remain civil, even kind, as he kills them, or mutilates them, or feeds them their own flesh. One might argue that this politeness is Hannibal's best weapon, in that it disarms those around him, as they cannot believe that such a cultured, even kind, man could commit such horrors. Bedelia du Maurier, Hannibal's colleague, former psychiatrist and captive companion, describes this aspect as Hannibal's "person suit." Negative Trait: Egotistical Hannibal's dominant trait, which informs every part of his personality, is his egotism. That is to say, instead of an externally imposed morality, he follows an internally composed aesthetic. He acts for the purpose of beauty, and as the highest arbiter of such. That is why he kills the rude to transform their bodies into works of art (like a professor who attempted to bribe Hannibal and whose body Hannibal uses to construct an origami heart as a love letter to Will Graham) and their body parts into gourmet dishes (such as the leg he amputated from Abel Gideon, who tried to take credit for Hannibal's murders, which he roasted and shared with him.) His elevated sense of self also means that he does not consider himself a cannibal, because, as he told Gideon, cannibalism requires the source of the meat to be your equal. Negative Trait: Manipulative Hannibal's egotism is also manifested in his penchant for manipulation. His interactions with everyone are intricately calculated. He enjoys setting the pieces (that is, people) into motion and watching them dance. People sometimes think they have the upper hand with Hannibal, but in almost all cases, it's Hannibal who has allowed them to think so. This dynamic is evident in every one of his relationships...with relationship used in the broadest possible sense. He manipulates Abigail Hobbs into relying solely on him by playing on her fear of the world seeing her as a killer like her father. He manipulates his colleague Alana Bloom, first into defending him against any suspicion, then into releasing him from the clutches of Mason Verger. However, there is no greater example of Hannibal's manipulation than Will Graham. Hannibal's relationship with Will started as an experiment to see if he could slowly mold the empath into the monsters that he hunted, turning him into a murderer. However, much to Hannibal's surprise, Will became something more than an experiment. Hannibal trusted Will in a way he did not trust others, and when Will betrayed that trust, it led Hannibal to an act of barely controlled rage, a night of carnage so foreign to Hannibal's careful, methodical homicide. His love for the man led him to allow himself to be captured just to prevent Will from being able to forget him. Negative Trait: Pitiless When Hannibal manipulates people, ruins them for his own purposes or enjoyment, and/or kills them, he does so, almost exclusively, without any pity toward his victims. They are means to an end, whether the young women he kills to first attract Will's attention, or, much later, Will's wife, on whom he sets a serial killer. The importance of this trait is made all the clearer when thrown in sharp contrast against the times when Hannibal does feel something for the people he manipulates. He has loved three people in his life...his sister, Abigail, and Will. In each case that love was a dangerous weakness, but especially with regards to Will, for whom he has an inconvenient compassion. Powers and Abilities: -Perfect recall. He remembers everything, in detail. - Psychological analysis. He can get into your head with little effort, uncovering your motivations and blind spots, and use it to manipulate you. - An almost preternaturally sharp sense of smell. If you have been in a room in the past few hours with someone he knows, he can tell merely by detecting the lingering scent of their perfume or aftershave. He is also capable of diagnosing illness by scent, including certain types of cancer. - Incredible strength. He is capable of carrying a full grown man and killing a person by snapping their neck with his bare hands. - Culinary skills. With and without human ingredients. - Medical expertise. He has been both a psychiatrist and a surgeon, so he has extensive medical knowledge, including drugs and their effects, surgery techniques, and human anatomy. Inventory: A corkscrew Samples: (I believe both of these show both the way Hannibal thinks and the way he communicates.) Here Here |
Revisions
Date: 2024-05-23 04:23 pm (UTC)From:Hannibal's dominant trait, which informs every part of his personality, is his egotism. Hannibal has perhaps the purest example of a God complex: he believes himself superior to others, with the power to control them as if they were pieces on a chessboard. He even obliquely equates himself to God, saying "Killing must feel good to God too. He does it all the time, and are we not created in God’s image?" He recognizes no higher power but himself, and his morality is based not on what others might consider right but on what he deems beautiful. The only worth anyone has in his eyes is in relation to the aesthetic value he sees in them. If a person is rude, then Hannibal decrees that the proper thing to do is to slaughter them and use their body for purposes more aesthetically pleasing, like a terribly beautiful tableau (such as the origami heart he created out of a body and displayed in the chapel in Palermo) or an exquisite dish (Abel Gideon's delicately roasted leg that Hannibal shares with the man himself). In the case of the latter, his elevated sense of self also means that he does not consider himself a cannibal, because, as he tells Gideon, "it's only cannibalism if we're equals." When he's not killing people, he plays around with their lives for little more than his amusement. For instance, he decided on a whim and a coin flip to revive Bella Crawford after she overdosed in his office to spare herself a painful death of lung cancer. And he makes unwitting cannibals of his dinner guests, including Jack Crawford, to whom he feeds "rabbit", and even Freddie Lounds, a professed vegetarian, by serving her a salad where the salad dressing is highly suspect.
When Hannibal is doing the calculus for his manipulations, he views others not as people so much as either his experiments or as means to an end. Will Graham was an experiment, Hannibal curious whether he could turn the sensitive empath into a murderer. The many people Hannibal manipulated and/or killed to fulfill that goal were means to that end, their lives meaningless to him aside from that purpose. As his relationship with Will grew, however, Hannibal found himself contemplating friendship with Will, and even love, which would require equality. Even then, it would have been the two of them, murder husbands, above all others. However, when he thought they had achieved that pinnacle, holding onto each other as their shared kill cooled and the blood shone black in the moonlight, Will surprised him by dragging him off the cliff.