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tl;dr: I found Hannibal disturbing.
(My reasoning is under a cut because a. it's long, and b. as I have recently discovered, I personally find discussions of cannibalism profoundly unpleasant, and I don't want to inflict it on anyone else unless they elect to see it.)
I don't know if the internet will care but I find Hannibal really disturbing. (I'm sure someone in the Hannibal fandom will, but I'm not going to tag this post as anything Hannibal related, so hopefully I won't be hijacking any fan's appreciation of Hannibal by expressing my discontent)...
I say this having only watched the first episode, so my opinion is not a terribly educated one, but still... I find it disturbing, and I've finally figured out why.
It's because *every time* there was a dead female on the show I found myself thinking 'if this was real life, that female could be me.' (And then I was uber-squicked by the realisation that if that female *was* me, someone would be eating my liver.)
Now, normally crime shows don't do this to me (and I even managed to watch the first season of Dexter without any of these problems). ... I think reason Hannibal is so different is that it took a man with a highly disturbing desire to eat human flesh, made females his primary target, and then failed entirely to have a single strongly present female character in the show. Basically the show took you into a disturbing world where you only encountered women as victims (again... I only watched the first episode, and I know there was that female professor friend of Will Graham, but she was only there for ten seconds). More disturbingly, for me, it took you into a world where the female victims were killed so they could be eaten.
Women were reduced to being a source of protein and little else, and there was no female in the show to remind you otherwise. Even the way the police force dealt with the dead bodies did little to humanise them.
If you're going to have a show like this, then make the protagonist 'Wilhelmina Graham', and make sure that the viewer is constantly brought up against the fact that women are something more than cattle. (Maybe even make it really complex, and make *Hannibal* have to confront that realisation too.)
Do not make the females nothing more than victims who apparently are prey to men and their desires. The show needed a strong, complicated, but moral, female character to change the world from one where men were simply imposing their desires on women, to a world where women had autonomy as well. Men with disturbing desires are real, a world where women are nothing more than victims is not. Make the world the show takes place in *real* and I might be more inclined to give it a go.
If I'm watching a show that's making me think, at every turn, that the female victim could be *me*, I would like it to reflect the fact that I would fight back. (Or, at the very least, I would like it to show that I was something more than a pair of lungs that ended up being slice, diced, and pleasantly sauteed in Hannibal's kitchen.)
So, anyway. I found Hannibal profoundly disturbing.
That is all.
(My reasoning is under a cut because a. it's long, and b. as I have recently discovered, I personally find discussions of cannibalism profoundly unpleasant, and I don't want to inflict it on anyone else unless they elect to see it.)
I don't know if the internet will care but I find Hannibal really disturbing. (I'm sure someone in the Hannibal fandom will, but I'm not going to tag this post as anything Hannibal related, so hopefully I won't be hijacking any fan's appreciation of Hannibal by expressing my discontent)...
I say this having only watched the first episode, so my opinion is not a terribly educated one, but still... I find it disturbing, and I've finally figured out why.
It's because *every time* there was a dead female on the show I found myself thinking 'if this was real life, that female could be me.' (And then I was uber-squicked by the realisation that if that female *was* me, someone would be eating my liver.)
Now, normally crime shows don't do this to me (and I even managed to watch the first season of Dexter without any of these problems). ... I think reason Hannibal is so different is that it took a man with a highly disturbing desire to eat human flesh, made females his primary target, and then failed entirely to have a single strongly present female character in the show. Basically the show took you into a disturbing world where you only encountered women as victims (again... I only watched the first episode, and I know there was that female professor friend of Will Graham, but she was only there for ten seconds). More disturbingly, for me, it took you into a world where the female victims were killed so they could be eaten.
Women were reduced to being a source of protein and little else, and there was no female in the show to remind you otherwise. Even the way the police force dealt with the dead bodies did little to humanise them.
If you're going to have a show like this, then make the protagonist 'Wilhelmina Graham', and make sure that the viewer is constantly brought up against the fact that women are something more than cattle. (Maybe even make it really complex, and make *Hannibal* have to confront that realisation too.)
Do not make the females nothing more than victims who apparently are prey to men and their desires. The show needed a strong, complicated, but moral, female character to change the world from one where men were simply imposing their desires on women, to a world where women had autonomy as well. Men with disturbing desires are real, a world where women are nothing more than victims is not. Make the world the show takes place in *real* and I might be more inclined to give it a go.
If I'm watching a show that's making me think, at every turn, that the female victim could be *me*, I would like it to reflect the fact that I would fight back. (Or, at the very least, I would like it to show that I was something more than a pair of lungs that ended up being slice, diced, and pleasantly sauteed in Hannibal's kitchen.)
So, anyway. I found Hannibal profoundly disturbing.
That is all.
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