This is an awesome ask, thank you! I wasn’t planning on it, tbh, but it’s a grea

This is an awesome ask, thank you! I wasn’t planning on it, tbh, but it’s a great thing to bring up. And, lulz, it’s good that you don’t mind me going on at length, because THAT SHIT IS HAPPENING IN 5, 4, 3, 2, HERE WE GO.First of all, if anyone needs to catch up, here’s all the meta. (Haha, there’s a lot, sorry.) Secondly, if anyone wants, there's a good roundup of the ways different versions of the ballad handle this and a number of other social variables in the story–is the sex consensual, how frowned upon is Janet’s pregnancy, is Tam Lin a human or a fairy, how did he end up with the fairies, what’s his social status (if human) as compared to Janet’s, was she considering an abortion, etc. Starting from the rape scenario and leaving all the characters cast as I already have, certainly I agree that there’s potential for Will’s reaching for help ending up becoming harmful–for one thing, that’s exactly why Alana’s avoided falling into a romantic relationship with him thus far. (I was TERRIFIED he was going to accidentally hurt her when he followed Gideon to her house.) I think the intense emotional and psychological abuse Hannibal is engaging in is very easy to compare to rape (especially because many abusive relationships involve non-consensual sex of varying degrees of obviousness–though of course not all abusive relationships are sexual).I talked about Abigail in terms of Tam Lin recently, and said that she wasn’t my favorite candidate for a Janet role because while she is in need of saving/saving herself, and she has a delightfully straightforward way about her public persona that reminds me of Janet in the ballad(s), she makes a terrible anchor to the “normal world” or human reality, being a deeply liminal character herself. I did come up with one workaround for that, which is that if we read her as Will’s “child,” she can play the role of Janet’s unborn child, the existence of which is essential to Janet’s ability to save Will; the unborn child would, presumably, have something of a divided nature hirself once zie was born. This would point us prooooobably back toward Alana being the one doing the saving, since Abigail explicitly visualized her as a mother.  However, I firmly believe that any decently-drawn character can be interpreted in more than one way at once, and in this context, she actually works pretty well as someone that Will would hang onto or reach out to in an attempt to steady himself, and who could be terribly harmed by his actions. In that case, it works because while we know she’s a deeply divided character with a lot of ties to the “fairyland” parts of the show’s world (I have a changeling post brewing), as far as Will knows–and/or is willing to believe–she’s still a normal, decent girl who’s been through some horrible shit. Obviously, his discovery that she killed Nicholas Boyle undermines that, which also undermines her (mostly involuntary, it seems) ability to anchor him. This is why Hannibal, in their conversation about the murder, emphasized her innocence, her need for protection, their paternal responsibility toward her–he’s trying to keep Will attached to her above and beyond his attachment to the truth. This comes back around to my initial problem with Abigail being a terrible anchor, though; at the same time, it also reflects the Fairy Queen’s statement that if she’d known what Tam Lin was planning, she’d have turned his eyes to wood (so, unseeing) and his heart to stone (generally, unfeeling, but in this case I’d say hardened against his better instincts of justice and truth). In either case, signs point to Will/Tam not getting saved, which would be a perfectly legit subversion of Tam Lin canon. After all, we know that in Red Dragon canon, Will’s going to save himself, and I posited in that same Janet post that you could read him as having a Janet contained within him as a different part of his personality; one side of himself saving the other. (He’s an intensely grounded character when it comes to the literal ground, to nature, after all. I have more to say on that, but it belongs to another forthcoming post.) So that could work, too.On top of all that, thinking of things in these terms brings me to a sort of secondary reading where Hannibal’s still the Fairy Queen and Abigail is Tam Lin: in one version, Tam Lin is taken by the fairies as a child because of the actions of his stepmother (Garret Jacob Hobbs, in this case). I don’t know if that would make Alana, Freddie, or possibly even Will (for whom she doesn’t seem to have much time right now) a Janet for her, but it’s fun to play around with.Basically, in order to discuss the comparison in this light in a way that remains at all stable in my own mind rather than splintering out into a thousand possibilities–which is okay! Certainly it’s fun–I think probably I have to recast the story. Hannibal becomes Tam Lin, and Will becomes Janet. (I thought about this arrangement when I first wrote the meta, btw.)When we do that, Hannibal becomes a hungry, otherworldly figure with whom a girl (i.e., potential victim–and Will has been presented as vulnerable in a way we almost NEVER see a male protagonist presented in media, especially horror or any kind of “genre” media) cannot have contact without losing something important, whether it’s a (usually symbolic) possession or her innocence. I think it’s obvious that Will’s innocence, whatever remained of it, is being pretty thoroughly destroyed. Janet’s wearing a specifically green (i.e., fairy-colored or fairy-attracting) mantle when she goes to the woods reflects Will’s liminal and vulnerable nature. Carterhaugh, the dangerous place where Tam Lin dwells and where Janet boldly goes despite warnings, becomes the role Will took on when he agreed to help Jack; you can also construct it, somewhat more metaphorically, as the crime scene. Not any crime scene in particular, though I have a lot of thoughts about the mushroom people and fairy rings (also for another forthcoming post, augh I mean the world, space, ethos, feeling of a crime scene. For Will, a crime scene is place whose “air is smeared with screams”–which, when I think of it, reminds me of the knight’s ghastly vision in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”Tam Lin as the guardian of Carterhaugh maps on to Hannibal as a kind of border figure, someone faerie (and in some versions, Tam Lin was born a fairy) but guarding a kind of border between human and fairy worlds; except that rather than keeping people out, he (Tam Lin and, by extension, Hannibal) is sucking victims in through abusive intimacy.I haven’t read the books, but I’ve seen a line going around from people who have that has Hannibal saying, “I happened. You cannot reduce me to a set of influences.” A Tam Lin who is systematically raping or otherwise compromising girls for his own benefit is one who's happening, and in my mind he’s much more a Hannibal than he is a Will. If it’s systematic, it’s intentional, and even if Will ends up harming someone (well, someone less deserving than Gideon) in the midst of a cry for help, intentional isn’t what that harm will be. -- source link

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