Okay, here’s part 2 of my Hannibal-as-fairy-tales series, which I am now calling “Hanny Tales” because I am horrible. (They’ll all be tagged “hanny tales,” fyi, so you can just track that tag if you want to.) I wanted to talk about Hannibal as the…
The stag! Will as Tam Lin is brilliant, and the stag totally works with it!
Okay, warnings for some Hannibal grossness on this one, my peeps. If the ick squicks, you can press J on your keyboard to skip right on past to the next post on your dashboard.
Stags are classic fairy animals; they symbolize swiftness, cleverness, and the crossing between life and death (as a prey animal, they die so that others can live). They’re messengers from the otherworld, guides and lures—hunters follow them through the woods, only to find themselves stumbling into Faerie, where they either find what they need or find themselves trapped.
As a border animal, they’re shapeshifters—often it’s a form assumed by the fairies themselves, to take on the stag’s traits, but equally often the shapeshifting is done to someone involuntarily—men (and sometimes even women) are made into stags as a way of being taken captive by the fairies. Sometimes they are then hunted, and in a couple of the darkest fairy tales they’re even eaten. I remember one where someone was turned into a stag, only to be unwittingly hunted, killed and served by their own father at a feast.
(Incidentally, that doe that Garret and Abigail killed together? We always see that scene as a flashback playing in Abigail’s mind. Are we REALLY SURE that was ACTUALLY a deer?)
Will’s stag, now, is clearly a symbol of the Ripper for him; when it shows up, he (and the viewer) knows he’s bumping up against the patterns that represent the Ripper’s involvement. And though he doesn’t realize it yet, he also equates it (ultimately not coincidentally, of course) with Hannibal. Note that the stag started showing up not immediately after the first killing, but shortly after that, after the first time Will stopped to stare at Hannibal’s little bronze elk statue (the same one Hannibal later brained Tobias with).
So we’ve seen the stag act as a warning or herald of the Ripper’s presence. We’ve seen it lead Will to discoveries. Is it a guide or a trap, though? Calling it a sort of spirit guide would be obvious, but spirit guides are generally supposed to be on your side—whereas there’s always been, for me, a sense that the stag can’t be trusted. There’s a heavy menace around it that implies it’s not SAFE for him when it shows up, even though it’s in his mind. In the most recent episode, in particular, it’s hard to say whether it was leading him where Will wanted to go or leading him where the Ripper wanted him to go.
He’s so screwed, seriously; the encephalitis is one thing, but if the ‘Ripper’ corner of his brain is actually working for the Ripper, then Will really does have every problem he’s worried he might have. It means he’s got a serial killer nesting in his brain, and he cannot trust himself.
And if that’s true, then the stag serves as Hannibal’s animal totem (which is already implied by Hannibal’s fondness for them) and, in a sense, when Hannibal crosses the borders into the fairyland of Will’s mind he shapeshifts into the stag. And in more than one sense, Hannibal is turning Will into the stag. It’s a figment of Will’s own imagination, for one; and it’s him again because the stag is the Ripper and Will becomes the killer when he works. And if that stag really did lead Will where Hannibal wanted him to go, then it’s Will AGAIN—and totally in the shapeshifter/captivity/Tam Lin sense—as a corner of Will’s mind that Hannibal’s convinced to do his work for him and thus turned into that stag.