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.
Revisions
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.