you-dropped-your-forgiveness:

bakasara:

No but can I make a serious observation about this? Because it’s easy to joke that Fuller failed in his original project but I don’t think he did.

Fuller’s original plan was to explore platonic (as in nonromantic and nonsexual) male friendship in Hannibal, right? The point of this should’ve beent to create a deep and affectionate amical love that was different than the many male friendships you see on TV and in real-life where, especially in the american model, there’s this normalized pretense of detachment. Fuller has unsurprisingly gone on record saying that he thinks bro culture is gross. That’s what he wanted to do different in his show, and that’s also why he cared about heterosexual!Will Graham. Will was supposed to be a straight character that’s far from a dudebro, who isn’t concerned with not looking gay, is emotionally available in a friendship with another man, ok with being vulnerable in it, and displays gestures of tender amical affection.

But, hear me out. Dudebro rituals and affectations are all built around the goal of distancing yourself as much as possible from the concept and the practice of male homosexuality, intended both as sexual intimacy and as same-sex romance. Dudebro culture revolves around creating a false dichotomy in male relationships between amical behaviors on the one hand, and romantic/sexual feelings and behaviors on the other. That’s artificial because in reality the two virtually always mingle, even for people we genuinely only want to be friends with. Holding hands, for example, can be both amical and romantic. But where for women it’s more acceptable to blur the line, for men much less so. In short, dudebro-style friendship is centrally preoccupied with A) exorcising the threat of homosexuality/homoromanticism, B) prevent as many chances as possible for homosxuality/romanticism to happen.

The contrary of this is also true, though. A model of friendship that’s more tender, intimate and full of gentle touch as means of affection, is a model that actively entails the blurring of lines and admits the existence of male/male romance and sexual desire. It’s a model in which those are recognized as possibilities that are not entirely other than the practices found in friendship. Homosociality and homosexuality have lots of contact points and intersections in this model; there’s nowhere near the same complex system designed to make sure one doesn’t tip over into the other as there is in dudebro-style friendship. The ‘risk’ (by dudebro standards) of ‘becoming queer’ is ever-present, but more than that, it’s actually much easier to ‘slip’ into queerness.

That’s the whole point. When you construct a friendship like that, unlike what happens in dudebro culture, it’s a friendship constructed on the premise that it could turn romantic, and it’s a friendship whose practices are much more blurred with typical romantic practices. Nothing is stopping it from happening if not other factors (prefer the person as friend only, no attraction, rational decision, etc.). A factor could also be incompatible orientation, like if say at least one of the people involved were straight, but this slippery model of friendship is still based on the premise that currently identifying as an incompatible orientation doesn’t necessarily dispel the chance of evolving into romance, and still has a mode of displaying affection that easily blurs with romantic. That’s why dudebro culture is so afraid of it, suddenly there’s no safeguard. And with Hannibal and Will’s relationship, Fuller absolutely succeeded in creating a friendship of this type. Hannibal and Will are never concerned with policing each other’s gestures or their own to not ‘look gay’, and long before any realization that they’re in love they show affection in ways that can both be amical and romantic (e.g. covering the other with a blanket for comfort, touching hands tenderly…). And simultaneously they were written as coming quickly to share a deep, layered intimacy that is normally non-existent or mistified in dudebro-style friendships. Theirs is simply a slippery-type friendship that at some unclear point tipped over into romance (and likewise might tip over into sexual intimacy later).

So whether he realizes this or not, it’s not that Fuller failed in his original plan but rather it’s that, exactly like he wanted, he created a friendship that by design entails a certain romantic/sexual fluidity no matter what you identify as at the moment. And that simply happened to carry a previously heterosexual-identifying character into queerness because of how that possibility for fluidity came into being for him.

good points