my lady, the tiger

— H of H Playbook, Anne Carson

very funny that when will imagines abigail he just puts her in his clothes. he doesn't really have time to think about that rn

will and abigail make me HOPELESSLY sad bc he honestly loves her quite unselfishly and doesn’t deliver on a gift that had more to do w him than her (and also that would’ve made her uncomfortable bc it was a lure) and he gives her so much space and what he wants is first and foremost for her to be okay. will’s ability to identify even with people who are terrible made the association between him and her dad so strong but it’s honestly surface level - will doesn’t want to own her or possess her or consume her to keep her from growing up, he honestly projects his own loneliness onto gjh more than he understands his need to Keep abigail. the surface association is there but it crumbles upon a closer look, whereas hannibal’s love for her is far less obsessive but for all the ways in which he has nothing to do with her father, he’s quite similar to him in that not only is he a cannibal but he has no interest in letting her leave and grow up, he wanted to make her in his own image and once she no longer served his purposes, he tossed her aside like she was nothing while will clung to her, desperately trying above all else to keep her alive 

#godddd godddddddd yeah#there’s this like. narrative i guess. within fan content that hannibal is Her Father Figure and then they just cut it off there#without making note of the fact that if he IS that for her it’s because he’s the exact same genre of abusive as her real dad#setting things up so that she’ll kill things or let things die. making it their little secret. making her need him#whereas will is…normal. will keeps his distance. will doesn’t make himself her father figure because he’s well aware she doesn’t need tht#he WANTS to be that for her he WANTS to fill the void he made in her life but he doesn’t actually do that bc she wouldn’t want it#he’s the guy that killed her dad. he knows that. he doesn’t try to convince himself he’s something else like hannibal does#there’s the little fishing scenes yeah but even there the picture of her he has in his mind doesn’t see him as a father or even as family#and to go even further i think the fact that it’s hannibal and alana and not hannibal and will that abigail has that ‘i see family’ moment#says a lot about how that family was. the manipulative father and the unknowing mother who ends up bleeding on the concrete#just…a lot. yeah. just a lot#hannibal

@divinizations sorry for stealing your tags but just. god.

gjh making abigail lure the girls in as opposed to just hunting them himself was a means of poisoning her relationships with other young women as much as it was keeping her close as his little girl. part of growing up means abigail makes friends and meets people who aren't dad, and gjh punished her for growing up by making her an active participant in the murders to keep her from maturing in that particular regard. it's interesting to note that there's nowhere in which any of abigail's fathers mention boys or her needing protection from them (except nick boyle but that's different). his protective obsession is never that some boy is gonna steal his girl away, but he's definitely punitive of her growing too close with other girls. her maturity is positioned as a threat not just to her father's control but also to other girls

after GJH dies, other people are convinced that abigail is a predator, and marissa sees "abigail's hunting" as a red flag she should've noticed. after her death, abigail confides in hannibal that when she dreams of marissa, she's not grieving her, she's afraid of her because marissa is going to tell abigail's secrets. by being close to abigail, she's punished seemingly from beyond the grave by GJH, and in a way she is. no young woman can come near abigail. only daddy can be close to her.

by making her lure them in and butcher them, gjh added a level to the horror of making her participate in her own consumption-by-proxy. he made her connect to them personally, lure them in, and strip their corpses and cut their flesh. and then she has to eat the girl that not a day prior she was sitting with and joking and making eye contact.

the "she was so pretty" "she is so pretty" exchange is the most telling of their relationship in my opinion. for him, it's about consuming abigail by proxy, but he doesn't intend for abigail to experience it that way, and she doesn't. for her father, he's not done with her and the "golden ticket" is still alive so she Is pretty. but abigail has already irrevocably failed her, and god, abigail thought she was so pretty.

she never sees the girls as the same as herself. her horror is always that these girls were separate from herself, she made them like her, and now she has to look her mother in the eye whilst eating their once-pretty flesh, all the while knowing her father is eating her in his mind.

the question abigail struggles with in her group therapy nightmare is what was so bad about herself that made her father want to kill her. from the outside, gjh is framed as a man who sublimates his murderous urges in order to protect abigail, but abigail hasn't been spared any murderous threat. she's been punished and blames something inherent about herself for it. and the dream confirms her worst fears: the girls also think she's rotten and deserves the punishment.

to extend this further, hannibal's love comes to her in the guise of acceptance but he makes it clear that although he's like her and she can trust him, she can't tell anyone else. her book deal with freddie is viewed as bad for her for multiple reasons, but primarily bc it'll expose her Secrets and then people will Know about her. hannibal also kills marissa, her only remaining female friend her age, and while abigail has the strength of conviction to blame her father for it, it still haunts her.

abigail is only allowed to interact unpunished with women if they're put in the role of "mom," and even then that relationship comes with the caveat that they must know nothing. one of gjh's cut lines is "don't tell your mother," which answers the question of how much louise knew, and it goes unsaid how dangerous it'd be if alana knew about abigail. of course, when alana does find out about abigail, abigail is implicated again by being the one to push her out the window. over and over, abigail's relationships with everyone but her cannibal fathers are poisoned by this idea that abigail is dangerous, particularly to other women

abigail hobbs + kyoto (copycat killer version) by phoebe bridgers [x]

i think the real tragedy of abigail hobbs is that no one wanted her for who she was. her father wanted her to stay his little girl. hannibal wanted her to be a killer. will wanted her to be innocent. she couldn’t be any of these things to all these men all the time and she died for it three times. and even if hannibal took her with him to Italy, she wouldn’t have been happy. even if will didn’t betray hannibal and they all ran away to the place hannibal made for them, none of them would’ve been happy. and abigail would probably still have died, just further away from home in a different type of kitchen.

the wound girl

whenever i think about how Hannibal knew Abigail better than any other adult on the show I just :'-) how he likely spent the most time with her, way more than Will and maybe even Alana. I think about how Mads said he doesn't think Hannibal ever lies emotionally, and that all he feels for the people around him is genuine and real, how Hannibal confesses to Will he feels a staggering amount of obligation to Abigail, how he compares her to Mischa, the only person he has ever felt love for other than Will and how he STILL. kills her.

Then this:

Experiencing emotions about Abigail Hobbs

She’s dead the entire story. She’s dead because her father keeps killing surrogates of her. She’s dead because her dad tried to kill her. She’s dead because Hannibal fakes her death. She’s dead because Hannibal kills her. No matter how many times I watch the show she is always dead even before the start. She is always dead and she will always keep dying.

1x03 || 3x09

"Hannibal takes her hands, gently, fatherly." I'M NOT OKAY

Cut by Catherine Lacey + Abigail Hobbs and her fathers