For @pinimi, because he asked me to elaborate
The question of whether Hannibal is good queer rep is one I’ve done a lot of thinking about, because a lot of the time taking a villain and making them queer is a method of subtly saying “queer people are evil”.
Hannibal the show manages to avoid that though, in several pretty cool ways that manage to actually make it a good choice. I imagine that’s largely because Bryan Fuller is himself gay and so understands how to portray queer characters in a respectful and relatable manner without playing into unfortunate stereotypes.
With Hannibal, we actually get almost the exact opposite of that. Is Hannibal visibly unusual? Yes. Is he queer? Yes. But those things are used as methods of making him endearing and relatable. We connect to Hannibal through his love for Will—if he didn’t become a Gay Disaster, he’d be way less likeable. We see him in his ridiculous suits and no one in the narrative laughs at them or says “we should have known, look at him he’s so weird”. Instead it’s just a quirk that’s generally not seen as negative, both inside the story and by the viewer. It’s the difference between “what a creepy weirdo” and “what an endearing dork” and, from a narrative perspective, they remain firmly on the Endearing Dork side.
So instead of taking an iconic villain and making him queer to make him creepier, they took an iconic villain and made him queer to make him more human. And that’s a kind of queer rep one almost never sees.
Generally speaking when a character in media is canonically queer, that’s the whole Point of their character. It’s the thing that makes them stand out from other characters, and if you were describing their character to someone unfamiliar with the media, it would be natural to reference them as “the gay one”. Even in other genre media, there’s a sense that being queer is a distinctive standout trait, which can be uncomfortably othering. In real life, queer people rarely exist in isolation, and while for many of us our sexuality is an important part of our identity, it isn’t how we’re defined.
Hannibal the show manages to dodge this in two very effective ways.
First of all, Hannibal isn’t the only queer character. He and Will aren’t the only queer couple. Having more queer characters enables the show to have more leeway in terms of healthy portrayals of queer relationships—we don’t have only one couple that has to represent he shows entire opinion on queer people. In a show where there are only five or six regulars, three of them end up in same sex relationships and Margot, the fourth main queer character, gets a lot of screentime and important storylines. We have Alana and Margot’s incredibly healthy and beneficial relationship to hold up in contrast to Will and Hannibal’s unhealthy one, and so the takeaway doesn’t end up being that Queer Relationships are Unhealthy, just that queer relationships can be good or bad or whatever, like any relationships.
Which brings us to the second point: this is a show with four queer characters, and absolutely no storylines that revolve around them being queer (I’m not including their love stories in that, because the love stories don’t revolve around them being queer, they’re told just like any love story would be except that the characters are the same gender). They’re characters with lots of interesting and complex traits, who happen to fall in love with someone of the same gender.
They manage to find a great balance wherein the characters’ queerness is acknowledged (like the scene I talked about yesterday) and yet it doesn’t become a Big Deal in an othering way.
It means a lot to me to see a story told where queer characters are allowed to be people outside their sexuality and yet not be written as if they were straight people. It means a lot to me to have a show where queer love is written as something that is a force of good in people’s lives instead of just a source of pain. And it means a lot to me that this ridiculous queer horror romcom exists.
y e s !
All of this, yes, this is why it works so well. The relationships are portrayed as relationships, and they just happen to be same sex.
