#queer rep
i’m so sick of people saying hannibal is bad queer representation because he’s a villain.
queer coding villians is a problem because their queerness is written to be the reason they’re evil. it’s an adjective used to make them more lecherous, more sinful. this is a huge problem, but if you conclude that problem by saying ‘villians can never be written as queer and the only good lgbt rep we can have are pure, morally perfect characters’, you’re completely missing the point.
hannibal is a fantastically written queer villian because his queerness has no influence over his sadism. him being evil has absolutely nothing to do with him being queer. he’s evil because he murders, manipulates, and cannibalizes people. he’s queer because he’s in love with a man.
as opposed to classic queer coded villians, hannibal being in love with will is seen as the only truly good part about him - that he’s capable of love, rather than simply violence.
let us have queer villians. queer antiheros. queer morally-gray characters. queerness in fiction being accepted only when it’s in relation to absolutely perfect gold-hearted characters is ridiculous. ‘good queer representation’ isn’t isolated to morally good characters. good queer representation is when a character’s queerness has no hold over their moral compass at all.
Let’s not forget the range of queer expression in the series. None have clean hands but who tf does on the show? Every main character except for the least (or most, she’s polarizing) liked character has legitimate blood on their hands (and she arguably has blood once removed).
Hannibal - We have I’m literally the Devil in an Ugly Suit That I Look Sexy af in But You’d Look Like a Couch. The original villain of the show, and like Satan, he tempts, he twists truths, and he does not make those horses drink even if he led them to the water. He finds what can be corrupted and plucks that string like he’s playing his harpsichord (or therimen omg the nerd). He puts people into situations just to see what happens. He sends Will after a serial killer (arguably to punish him, and if so for A: rudely interrupting his dinner, B: kissing Alana Bloom, or C: all of the above including the see what happens bit) then mourns his possible loss, pettily killing his patient to punish the serial killer who wanted to kill him (no one liked poor Franklin) before openly killing the sk and calling in the FBI as a victim who fought for his life. He has tears in his eyes when he sees Will didn’t die. He’s a complex character that Mads’ plays as legitimately Satan in a person suit, pansexual (with a description attached that sounds demi but is not explicitly stated so is imo atm), and genuinely in love with and attracted to Will Graham. If you take Word of God (WoG from here on) then you also have to accept into canon that between Will turning him away in season 3 and the hours he spent outside Will’s house in the cold, he was crying. Mads and Hugh also wanted to kiss pre swan dive and Bryan had to be the “reasonable one” and say I think it’s overkill (pun intended). Because to the cast and crew, it was officially out in the world in season 3, Will just had to accept it. (Also tangentially connected: because Hannibal is played as a fallen angel, Mads also played him as not being a cannibal. He is the inverted Tantalus, a demigod feeding men to men. He is a hunter and farmer, feeding his carefully chosen prized hogs with feral swine he himself hunted and took down. Hence all the pig comments.)
Will Graham - he’s an odd duck. I’ve personally heard no word on if he’s bisexual or if he’d even identify as anything. Bryan Fuller used queer to describe most of the aspects of the show; as a gay man, he uses queer as the umbrella term for whatever orientation that’s non normative. You have to watch unrelated Bryan interviews and speeches to get that much, as he’s been fighting to get just one out out gay couple for 20 odd years. I believe ST:D was his first gay kiss on screen, though Hannibal might have had his first official queer couple (and no it’s not Hannigram). (I just realized ST:D’s initials are std…) Between his on screen attractions/ actions/ known relationships, we have no proof of former mlm relationships. He has romantic feelings for 2 women during the show and sexual attraction for 2 (Alana was confirmed as romantic, Molly was confirmed as both, Margot was presumed a sexual attraction - at the very least, she was a willing hook up on both his and her ends). He probably is sexually attracted to Alana at least in season 1 as well; he called her desirable, but that was also in/during an admitted bid for normalcy. I think he mentioned qn ex girlfriend at one point but I’m not positive. Hannibal is his only confirmed male prospect. All that being said, if you asked Will to label himself, I think he’d get annoyed and leave the conversation. He has a very pronounced dislike of labels, and it feels like it could spread to most hard to define corners of his identity. A much more common identity than many in community give credit too, btw, I know several “Im just me” orientated individuals. A queer Gen X woman I’m friends with defined herself as that but said queet can be used for simplicity. Will is interpreted by a lot of straight viewers as canonically straight and then they get confused and or surprised by season 3. The whole series was a courtship with a lot of weird break ups. Hannibal has a couple retaliatory relationships while genuinely having feelings at the same time (one must never forget he’s a hedonist as well). Will’s morality is odd, coming and going like the tides. He’s autistic by admission, and maybe he’s other things as well. He has intrusive thoughts that his job is to dive into. Over time, his distress over his intrusive thoughts recedes and he takes more interest in them. Perhaps this is an expression of Folie a Deux as Hannibal as a concept seems to be the blanket that covers his distress over said thoughts.
Margot Verger - possibly the only on screen verbally confirmed labeled character. She’s a lesbian, easy as that. Let’s address the accused lesbophobia in the room: yes she has sex with Will Graham. The show and Bryan Fuller received some criticism for this, but the fact is, if a lesbian chooses to have sex with a man, isn’t it important to be supportive of that and not police it? She appreciated Will as a friend and thought him a good man (considering her alternatives especially). He used him to get pregnant in a way that wouldn’t alert her controlling, abusive, monster of a brother, thinking him off the radar enough. And she almost got what she wanted (Hannibal was determined to take away every child Will ever had, that’s a different story). Besides, that entire sexual kaleidoscope scene was pretty much an orgy, crisscrossing relationships between current happenings, past desires, and future outcomes. Her morality is fairly consistent. She wishes to protect innocents, but she’s willing to put off doing the “right” thing (in her mind at least) until she is not ruined by the outcome. It isn’t even a lack of integrity as she is up front about her motive (except to her brother and occasionally to people she wishes to use, which she is not sorry about because it leads to her greater purpose, such as using Will). She justifies the murder of her brother and frankly so does the audience. However she doesn’t turn a blind eye to murder indiscriminately, wanting to save Will. She also helps free Hannibal because he gets her and Alana what they need and want (the means for IUI/IVF - I’d personally guess IVF - and Will’s life). Once she has her son, she leaves it all behind an seems to live a normal life aside from her marriage.
Alana Bloom - two on screen relationships, one a tryst with Hannibal that ends in attempted but ever promised murder, one the results in her carrying her wife’s nephew and son to term. The Vergers were weird. In the beginning she has unwavering morality and fights tooth and nail for what she believes. This leads to unfortunate blind spots sometimes. She most likely has the most societally acceptable morality and integrity in the first 2 seasons (discounting the lab rats, who I’m not getting into here) and it’s only changed by the traumatic experience of near death, brutal rehabilitation, and a deep, twisting betrayal. Her transfigured morality extends to her partner and later wife, Margot and Margot’s vendetta against her brother (again, most view this vendetta as completely justified). Her trauma led to her plotting murder, manipulating Mason Verger to utilize his resources - greater than hers and lacking scruples - committing murder, she claims purgering herself to give Hannibal a solid insanity defense (so she could keep an eye on him), and ploting and conspiring to commit/orcastrate premeditated murdering a dangerous bid that endangered law enforcement.
So we have 4 major queer characters that vary morally (as much as the show allows), two with shifting morality. It’s limited to a degree but also greatly varied in expression, reaction, and characters.
For a murder show that had to get so aesthetic with murders as to be on prime time network, that’s a good chunk of representation. Hopefully abstract more than literal, but still.
If in five years tumblr decides that The Owl House was A Bad Show, Actually because of problems that were directly caused by a homophobic studio cutting them off at the knees, I’m going to scream.
Legend of Korra got attacked because Korra and Asami “only held hands in the last shot,” despite the uphill battle the writers waged against Nickelodeon to give us even that much.
Steven Universe’s final season gets remembered in the most bad-faith way possible because the crew risked everything to get the first-ever queer wedding in a kids’ show, and got penalized by the network because of it.
Adventure Time gets panned for “waiting until the very end” to make Bubblegum and Marceline canon, despite the fact that they couldn’tget the network to allow it until after the wedding in Steven Universe (hey! look at that! STEVEN UNIVERSE BEING IMPORTANT TO OTHER SAPPHIC SHIPS GOING CANON, fancy that!).
She-Ra gets accused constantly of being “toxic representation” despite the sheer number of queer people who fought tooth and fucking nail to get it to happen at all and put their entire soul into representing themselves honestly.
The Owl House crew has directly cited Steven Universe and She-Ra for paving the way. Lumity would have never fucking happened without the milestones made by others who came before.
I am beggingpeople to learn about the history of queer representation in television, and I am beggingpeople to stop holding queer media to infinitely higher standards than any other type of media.
LESBIAN PLAYLIST
Hi I’m back from the dead at 1am to provide you with a 7 hour playlist of wlw songs
Bruce saving a couple from a mugging and letting one of the men kick around their now-unconscious attacker (Legends of the Dark Knight #54). I thought this was a fun and amusingly in-character action scene to take up space while Alfred goes on an exposition monologue.
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