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darchildre) wrote2013-05-31 07:37 pm
darchildre) wrote2013-05-31 07:37 pm
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Having run out of Game of Thrones that I can legally acquire and watch, I have been looking for a new knitting show. And have started watching Hannibal. (I have done so in a somewhat silly way - I started by reading cleolinda's recaps, then watched the episodes that are currently available on hulu and now I am watching the beginning of the season.) I'm very much enjoying it so far.
- This show hits my caretaking kink really hard and in a way that isn't like anything I ever really encountered before. This show is full of people who really really want to take care of Will (was there actually a moment in the first episode where Jack reaches out and adjusts Will's glasses for him? Did that really happen?) and tend to do so in ways that are completely detrimental to Will's health and mental wellbeing. This allows the act of caretaking - which I always find pleasing - to become in itself horrifying, which is just wonderful.
- I love the way the show handles murder, where we rarely see the killers actually killing and instead see Will doing it in flashback reconstructions. It feels less...prurient that way. I had avoided watching this for a while, because while I am a horror person and don't mind gore, I don't much enjoy watching people suffer and I was afraid we'd get a lot of that. In fact, we get a lot less of it than I'm used to from crime-based procedurals. There's a lot of bodies after the fact, but that doesn't bother me nearly as much.
- In fact - okay, this is one of those things that I always have a difficult time explaining to people but part of the reason that I'm a horror fan is that I find a lot of horrific images to be completely beautiful. (The other day, I was trying to explain the appeal of John Bellairs to one of my coworkers and mentioned the corpse whose mouth is sewn shut with cobwebs from Lamp From the Warlock's Tomb. I said something like, "And that's just gorgeous" and she laughed nervously. This happens to me a lot.) So many of the corpses on this show are beautiful in that way. The first episode I watched on hulu was the one with the angels and, just, wow. And the cello - I have not gotten over the cello. I had to rewind the bit where Will plays the cello in flashback a couple of times. I love how many times we're shown the beauty and utility of the dead human body on this show. I realize that I'm probably not supposed to interpret it that way, but I still do.
- The thing is, I would love to be both beautiful and useful after I die. The human body is so wonderful and there's so much you can do with it - why waste it just because the person isn't using it anymore? When I'm dead, there's just meat left behind. I'll be elsewhere or I won't be anywhere - I won't need the meat and bone anymore. I can be (and am) an organ donor, I could donate my body to science. And those are good and useful things. But I would love for parts of me to be furniture or book-binding glue or cello strings. Or dinner. (The problem on the show, of course, is that the beauty or utility is created nonconsensually and through murder. Which is obviously unacceptable and wrong. But, y'know, after I die of natural causes, you all have my permission to make use of the meat in what way you will, so long as it's done with respect.)
- This is probably the place to note that I don't have a cannibalism taboo. I mean, killing and eating people is legally and morally wrong and thus I don't do it, but I don't have that built-in thing that makes it squicky. (If there were a legal, moral, and safe way to eat human meat - I'm thinking along the lines of growing the meat in vats, a la Transmetropolitan - I would try it at least once.) This, alas, decreases some of the horror for me. The thing that bothers me about much of the cannibalism on this show is that it's done without the eater's knowledge. On the one hand, it is kinda funny but on the other hand, tricking people into eating things that you know they wouldn't otherwise eat is an unacceptable thing to do. If I had a friend who tried to trick me into eating beets, for example, that person would no longer be my friend and I don't have any sort of moral objection to beets. Tricking people into eating something you know they would find morally abhorrent is just terrible. And rude.
- This show hits my caretaking kink really hard and in a way that isn't like anything I ever really encountered before. This show is full of people who really really want to take care of Will (was there actually a moment in the first episode where Jack reaches out and adjusts Will's glasses for him? Did that really happen?) and tend to do so in ways that are completely detrimental to Will's health and mental wellbeing. This allows the act of caretaking - which I always find pleasing - to become in itself horrifying, which is just wonderful.
- I love the way the show handles murder, where we rarely see the killers actually killing and instead see Will doing it in flashback reconstructions. It feels less...prurient that way. I had avoided watching this for a while, because while I am a horror person and don't mind gore, I don't much enjoy watching people suffer and I was afraid we'd get a lot of that. In fact, we get a lot less of it than I'm used to from crime-based procedurals. There's a lot of bodies after the fact, but that doesn't bother me nearly as much.
- In fact - okay, this is one of those things that I always have a difficult time explaining to people but part of the reason that I'm a horror fan is that I find a lot of horrific images to be completely beautiful. (The other day, I was trying to explain the appeal of John Bellairs to one of my coworkers and mentioned the corpse whose mouth is sewn shut with cobwebs from Lamp From the Warlock's Tomb. I said something like, "And that's just gorgeous" and she laughed nervously. This happens to me a lot.) So many of the corpses on this show are beautiful in that way. The first episode I watched on hulu was the one with the angels and, just, wow. And the cello - I have not gotten over the cello. I had to rewind the bit where Will plays the cello in flashback a couple of times. I love how many times we're shown the beauty and utility of the dead human body on this show. I realize that I'm probably not supposed to interpret it that way, but I still do.
- The thing is, I would love to be both beautiful and useful after I die. The human body is so wonderful and there's so much you can do with it - why waste it just because the person isn't using it anymore? When I'm dead, there's just meat left behind. I'll be elsewhere or I won't be anywhere - I won't need the meat and bone anymore. I can be (and am) an organ donor, I could donate my body to science. And those are good and useful things. But I would love for parts of me to be furniture or book-binding glue or cello strings. Or dinner. (The problem on the show, of course, is that the beauty or utility is created nonconsensually and through murder. Which is obviously unacceptable and wrong. But, y'know, after I die of natural causes, you all have my permission to make use of the meat in what way you will, so long as it's done with respect.)
- This is probably the place to note that I don't have a cannibalism taboo. I mean, killing and eating people is legally and morally wrong and thus I don't do it, but I don't have that built-in thing that makes it squicky. (If there were a legal, moral, and safe way to eat human meat - I'm thinking along the lines of growing the meat in vats, a la Transmetropolitan - I would try it at least once.) This, alas, decreases some of the horror for me. The thing that bothers me about much of the cannibalism on this show is that it's done without the eater's knowledge. On the one hand, it is kinda funny but on the other hand, tricking people into eating things that you know they wouldn't otherwise eat is an unacceptable thing to do. If I had a friend who tried to trick me into eating beets, for example, that person would no longer be my friend and I don't have any sort of moral objection to beets. Tricking people into eating something you know they would find morally abhorrent is just terrible. And rude.