Endlessly Fascinated — According To The Hannibal Wiki Will Is 33 As Of...

bonearenaofmyskull:

my-dear-dr-tenma:

thank you!! I just tend to be skeptical about the wiki considering it hasn’t updated any info on Will since S2 and lists Bedelia as Hannibal’s wife ?? lol but if he is 33 (the wiki said 34 when I checked) I imagine that wouldn’t count for S3 since Will’s page hasn’t been updated and idk what his age is in the book but I think it mentions late-30’s? I could be wrong but either way Hannibal is still a Sugar!Daddy 👈😎👈 hahaha

Okay but seriously someone should update the wiki and put Will as “Murder Husband” instead of “Unknown” under Hannibal’s relations ;)

Will is “nearly forty” in the book. I think it’s reasonable that he might be the same at the same point in time in the TV show, but if someone has seen something from the scripts (not the props, which are a contradictory mess) that suggests otherwise, I’d entertain it. Until then I’m going with “nearly forty.” I have no idea where people on the wiki get stuff from.

I should probably have added this before but forgot to.

The line Hannibal speaks at the end of the first season: “At a time when other men fear their isolation, yours has become understandable to you. You’re alone because you are unique” is lifted from Dolarhyde’s midlife crisis in the book and doesn’t make much sense interpreted as any other way but a man approaching midlife, even with Will. That implies he’s closer to forty even in S1 than he is to early to mid- thirties.

It gets funnier because of the Chiyoh-Hannibal thing if for no other reason than you need to have a certain minimum distance in age between Hannibal and Will just to justify the nature of their relationship, let alone the fact that Mads does look like he’s at least ten years older than Hugh. But even if you age Chiyoh up from Tao Okamoto, her age and situation sort of implies that Hannibal is a little younger than Mads–say, 45 around the start of S3, which would make him a more-or-less believable 48 by the end of the series, although it tries my suspension of disbelief to buy him as 43 or 44 at the start of S1. The midlife suggestion from S1 for Will could maybe pass as early as 37 in my book (which was Hugh’s age at the time, or close enough), which might make him as old as 41 or 42 by the end. Which is stretching the limit of my ability to believe ALSO, but there it is.

Of course time runs strangely on Hannibal (and is all the more ironic for that given that it twists and turns in mighty convolutions but Hannibal can still never reverse it, try as he might), and I don’t think we should take this all too literally, and we could even imagine that time runs slower at places like the Lecter estate, and in Hannibal’s home (and probably Bedelia’s) and maybe on Will’s boat or his home in Wolf Trap, but not at Molly’s, and Lord knows the timeline for S1-S2 doesn’t make any sense at all, even if there is an ice age going on in this particular Fullerverse.

However, if we DO want to take it literally and just take the limits of age and birthdates to make Hannibal go from 43 to 48 over the course of the show and Will go from 37 to 42, then the age difference between them is just six years.

What’s interesting about this is that in the books, Hannibal was born in 1933. Will’s birthdate isn’t given, but Red Dragon takes place in 1978, when he is “nearly forty,” if we take “nearly forty” to literally mean 39 years old, then he would have been born in 1939…making the difference in their ages in canon be just six years.

So whatever weird cloud of impossible fortuitous circumstance that was floating around Bryan Fuller’s head when he created this show and then threw all logic, caution and sense to the wind when he decided to write weird-ass storylines and cast whomever he wanted in whatever role he wanted and fuck it all, he still managed to make them end up being the same distance in age apart that they are in the canon.

Not that I’m buying it, because it’s all impossible. But whatever. It works.