blackharlaw:

I can’t wait to watch Game of What Will People be Offended at Tonight ◡‿◡✿

thepacosanchezz:

my favorite show is sherlock starring bonkadonk clamberdouche and morgan freeman

miss-nerdgasmz:

What ship do you think I’m the child of?

#oH FUCKING YES #PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE I’M SO CURIOUS #CROSSOVERS COUNT BTW LIKE IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A STANDARD SHIP OR ANYTHING#WHICHEVER PEOPLE YOU THINK MADE ME

hannibalfalling:

Okay Hannibal fandom let me explain you a thing. I’ve seen a lot of discussion on the tag about how it’s disgusting to empathize with Hannibal, how people don’t understand why anyone could/would be a fan of a character as cruel as Hannibal, how people are upset by these silly posts about Hannibal, etc etc. Putting aside how killing has been quote unquote glorified in media since literally the first extant written works, the thing you must let me explain you is this: fiction relies on empathy to engage readers/viewers. We like to consume media about characters with whom we empathize. We don’t like to consume media about characters with whom we absolutely cannot empathize. (Ever wonder why all main robot characters have or replicate human emotion, as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Battlestar Galactica, Iron Giant, etc? It’s because a robot with no empathy bores the audience.) The focal character(s) in any fictional media must necessarily be capable of engaging the reader’s empathy. The audience must feel the focal character’s emotions, hopes, dreams, desires, fears, so on and so on. This is Writing 101.

So a TV show titled Hannibal must necessarily create Hannibal as a character for whom we can feel empathy, or else the viewers won’t give a fuck. It’s true that Will Graham is one of the main characters, and that we sometimes see Hannibal through Will’s eyes—but we don’t see the entire show through Will’s eyes. Whenever Will Graham is absent from a scene, Hannibal becomes the focal character, and the audience has got to attach itself to him, instead. So all of the scenes with Franklyn, with Bedelia, with Tobias—all of those killing-and-cooking scenes in Sorbet—are scenes in which the audience is attaching itself to Hannibal as the focal character. If people don’t feel any emotional engagement with Hannibal’s triumphs, failures, irritations, etc, they don’t enjoy watching the show, or at least the parts of the show in which Hannibal is the focal character. That empathetic reaction isn’t going to happen across the board—not every person feels engaged with every work of fiction. But it’s absolutely natural—ultimately the aim of the show—for the audience to feel empathetic towards Hannibal.

Moving on to the fandom… Let me explain you another thing. People adjust the way they speak based on where they are. There are a few vaguely academic things I could say here, but it’s pretty much a given: you talk with your boss differently than you talk with your friend differently than you talk with your mother, so on and so on. There’s a very particular—deceptively ‘loose’—manner of speaking that’s common in certain parts of fandom tumblr. You know what I mean—‘alskdlskdf;fds; my babies omg’, ‘r u srs?? bitch i might be!!!’ etc etc. When people do this, they’re translating their internal, wordless thoughts and feelings into a ‘language’ that fits their social surroundings. This type of interaction is common in tumblr fandoms, and these types of posts are made about every character, killer or saint; in certain circles, this type of interaction is expected and encouraged when discussing media. So when someone watches the scene in which Hannibal gets stood up by Will, and they make a tumblr post that says, ‘hannibal my cannibal bb u look so sad’, they’re taking their appropriate, understandable—in fact, predesigned—emotional reaction to a work of fiction and converting it into a manner of speech that will best connect them to their peers. It does not signify a complete and all-consuming lightheartedness or lack of ability to deeply engage with and criticize media.

Can it be interpreted differently by people who are used to a different style of discourse? Absolutely. There’s a huge gap in understanding—there’s also a huge gap in perception of morals, in perception of the distance of fiction from reality, etc, and there’s a lot more going on than I can explain in one tumblr post. But I do think that people who believe that the Hannibal fandom in general is glorifying/supporting/appreciating the actions of serial killers, both fictional and real, are either blind to or willfully ignoring the type of social interaction and expression of engagement w/ media that’s actually going on when people make those casual, silly tumblr posts.

Tl;dr everyone take a load off, everything will be fine.