The reason why NBC’s Hannibal found such a huge female audience is because Fuller’s/Mads’ Lecter is not a male power fantasy: he’s a female power fantasy.
He’s not a broody snippy git whose appeal is assumed apriori and who in real life would drive away absolutely everyone he met (e.g. any sad manboy ever trotted out as a lead by Moffat).
He’s not an “aspirational” over-muscled hulk.
He’s not a fighter for ‘truth’ or ‘justice’ for whom bodies are just collateral on his path to heroic self-actualization
This Hannibal is the Head Bitch In Charge.
He is independent to the n-th degree. He lives to please himself and no one else. He is fabulous. He shamelessly geeks out over obscure and refined pastimes and shares them with friends. He is the Queen Bee of his social circle. He takes any excuse to treat himself, but he also has perfect self-discipline: gym is not optional. His time-management skills are superhuman. He can decorate and keep a house like Martha Stewart, hold down several jobs, and practice multiple hobbies daily.
(And what are his hobbies, aside from slaughter? Cooking, foreign languages, drawing, playing musical instruments and composing. And clearly clothes shopping. He is probably on first-name basis with the best tailors and cordwainers in town. Contrast with Will, whose hobbies are stereotypically masculine: fixing motor boats, fishing, playing outside with his dogs.)
Hannibal is not young, but he wears his age gracefully. He regrets nothing, like an embodiment of Piaf’s “Non, rien de rien”. His hair is perfect because he clearly spends time in front of the mirror styling it, not because the show’s producer wanted him to look effortlessly cool (*cough*Sherlock*cough*).
He never, ever loses his temper in public, as if he knows that the world/audience will not fawn over him for trying to assert himself through vulgarity, posturing, or volume – all the typical ways in which men like to hijack and dominate conversations.
He can dispatch a creepy stalker like Franklyn with a single neck twist, with no consequences. A sweet fantasy, indeed. If only real life stalkers were so easy to dispose of.
Hannibal’s victims – those who were not killed in self-defense or as ‘murder presents’ for Will – tend to fall into two categories: other killers who act like *they* are the baddest bitches in town (Gideon, Tobias, the mural guy) and people who disrespect him. Of those, there are surprisingly many. In fact, it seems like the very esteemed pillar of Baltimore society Dr. Lecter goes through life constantly being dissed. This is rather puzzling. Hannibal is a tall good-looking white gentleman who speaks like a professor, dresses like a count, and drives a Bentley that costs more than people’s houses. And yet something about him prompts many people, especially in the service industry, to be rude to him.
But he doesn’t confront these “pigs” (already a gender-loaded term, even though it gets applied to victims of both sexes) in a head-on, macho way. Instead, he bides his time and dispatches his prey through some kind of a sneak attack. His preferred philosophy of fighting is “feminine”: assume your opponent is physically stronger and don’t try to out-muscle them. (Even if his opponent is much smaller and weaker, like Chilton.) Subterfuge, ambush, sedatives – Hannibal wins his fights by fighting on his own terms. Nevertheless, if a man should come at him with a weapon, he defends himself with perfect adroitness: Tobias, Jack, Mason’s henchmen, etc.
Even some aspects of Hannibal’s relationship with Will would make more sense if he were female. In particular the issue of, well, issue. Hannibal is clearly Not Okay with Will having children with anyone but him. This is somewhat odd for a man, especially one who seems to have never wanted kids before this. But it makes sense for a woman just past menopause: fate finally delivered her dream partner, but it’s too late to have a family. And so Hannibal sets up the dominoes for Margot’s pregnancy to be terminated practically as soon as he learns of it. If he can’t have Will’s kids, then no one can. They may be adopted, but they have to be *theirs*.
It also makes sense that when Hannibal discovers Will’s treachery, he goes full Medea on him. Killing the man’s children is common to cultural narratives of wronged women all over the world. It’s often the only leverage they have over the men, the only way they can exact revenge. Hannibal can take much more than Abigail from Will, but she is the only thing he can take that truly matters.
Bonus exercise for the reader: imagine a version of the show where everything is the same, but Hannibal is played by Meryl Streep.
Or even just swap Mads Mikkelsen & Gillian Anderson places. Let her be Hannah Lecter; let him be Dr. Bennett Du Maurier, her wary shrink. Both the characterization and plot still work almost 100%.
Star Trek is radical in so many ways people often forget.
The future that liberals want
Okay, Star Trek is somewhat inconsistent on this.
But if you apply some worldbuilding you put two things together:
1. Replicators
2. “No money.”
Futurists call this the “replicator economy” and we’re already seeing the start of it.
If I was a little bit richer, I would have bought a 3D printer last year.
When you have a 3D printer, you can download things from the internet and make them yourself for the cost of the raw materials. I have a 3D-printed cosplay prop that I printed on a library printer. They charged me the cost of the raw filament for it…it cost me less than $2 for the actual object. Probably $3-4 by the time I add in the paint. It’s made of a biologically created plastic.
In the works: Creating 3D printer filament out of old plastic shopping bags. (Which cannot be multi-stream recycled, it costs a fortune). This means that it won’t be long before a normal household can make toys and the like out of plastic shopping bags.
A true replicator uses cheap raw materials and waste to make useful things.
Let’s imagine, as an interim step, that somebody creates a clothing replicator. You feed it rags and it creates new clothes, from patterns you download from the internet.
So, you have an old T-shirt. It’s fine, but for a small hole and the pattern having rubbed off. You feed it into your clothing replicator and out comes a new T-shirt with a new design. No, we don’t have this yet, but we can and probably will.
What, at that point, happens to clothing shops? Oh, yes, you might still buy some clothes – and handmade clothing, put together by an actual human, is still going to have a cachet.
But the clothes from your replicator fit you perfectly. You don’t have a size any more. Every X months you stand in a 3D scanner, it takes every measurement, and then sends it to your replicator. If you’re pregnant (assuming we don’t have ectogenesis) you can actually have it adjust your favorite dress to make baby bump room. Just like that. The most comfortable item of clothing I own is my pleather bodysuit. Not coincidentally, it’s the only item of clothing I own that was made to my measurements.
None of what we wear fits.
So…right. What happens to clothing shops? What happens to spending large amounts of money on new clothes while we throw old clothes away or give them to Goodwill?
The economy slowly develops to the point where the means of production really is in the hands of people: As individuals.
Star Trek technology means that if Picard wants a new suit, he just programs a clothing replicator to take his measurements and make him a new suit. Some people like tailors, so Garak gets to stay in business.
And eventually, if all you actually need is raw material and information, you don’t need to buy very much…
…and you end up with a society without money. It’s not “communist” in any way that has ever been tried before because, well, it requires the underpinnings of that technology. (Just don’t think too hard about where the Enterprise’s food replicators get some of their raw material).
You end up with the only valuable thing being information and the only valuable skill being art – but it doesn’t matter, because you don’t need to work for a living any more. TNG reflects the only valuable skill being art in many ways, in fact. Data’s painting. The chamber orchestra. Geordi’s hobby of designing holodeck programs. Everyone makes art, not because it’s the one thing machines can’t do, but because it’s the one thing humans (and others) won’t let the machines take over.
And that’s absolutely a future to work towards.
You end up with the only valuable thing being information and the only valuable skill being art
Well, and raw materials. And replicators. And energy. And physical space. And a wide variety of non-material goods like club memberships. And health care. And it’ll take longer than you may think to get completely away from growing crops because plants are really fucking efficient at turning sunlight into calories. And non-art valuable skills include everyone you need to run a power plant or a mine (which is probably just people supervising the robots doing the labor, but still), probably everyone you need to run a spaceship because unless we’re really stupid all our mines are on the moon and asteroids, a wide variety of engineers to collaborate with the artists on designing new replicator patterns, replicator repairpeople, park rangers, administrators, doctors, therapists…
Oh, absolutely, but what we see in Star Trek is mature technology, a society that’s already made that transition.
Also, they do still grow crops. Picard’s family has a vineyard, after all.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
#FullyAutomatedLuxuryCommunism
this is why we’ve been hoarding the plastic bags full of plastic bags for generations
This is finally done: a more concise description of demon summoning. This kind of handbook would probably have been given out to all the military cadet mages. For further reading:
This Tumblr user disappeared into the ether about two years back, which is a crying shame – would have been nice to see how this particular slice of world-building (and in turn, its combination of goopy body horror and clean, minimalist design) continued to develop.
You all, fools: *getting tattoos based on the ancient tattoos they find on bog mummies and the other ancient dead that for all you know will bind you to a forgotten god that now by all rights has a claim on your life for better or for worse*
Me, and intellectual: *doesnt fucking do that*
A forgotten god cannot run my life any worse than I am currently running it myself.
kototyph 