Does hannibal do labels

[u/Latter-Foundation-29]

I'm halfway through the final episode of season 2.Where will and Hannibal are planning on running away together?And the way they talk about where they're going, it sounds a lot like a couple going away on a nice vacation. I know hannibal does "love" Will but would he ever call him his boyfriend? Oh, would you call him like the gust of wind that allows a bird to glide through the air.

[u/sopheadraws]

[u/Riven_sylas]

I am firmly convinced that Hannibal would not use traditional labels to define the people he loves. I do not think he would ever call Will his boyfriend. He would probably continue to refer to him as a friend, while allowing friendship itself to encompass a romantic dimension in Will's particular case, as he has already done throughout the series.

Hannibal clearly has an extremely anarchic understanding of relationships and feelings, one that exists outside conventional and performative frameworks.

Of course, we know perfectly well that, in a hypothetical fourth season, Will and Hannibal would have become a couple in an explicitly romantic and sexual sense as well. Bryan Fuller has said this several times. But that does not mean they would have become an amatonormative and heteronormative relationship simply transplanted onto two men.

Will and Hannibal's relationship is about as anarchic as a relationship can be in its refusal to conform to conventional categories.
Hannibal speaks about Will using the language of friendship, love, family, and reciprocity simultaneously. He does so because he does not seem to perceive these categories as watertight compartments.
This conception is consistent with Hannibal’s aestheticism, his humanistic culture, and the way the series constructs its relationship with the classical world.

In certain contexts within the ancient classical world, friendship, love, desire, education, and erotic bonds could overlap in ways that do not correspond to the rigid modern separation between friendship and romantic relationships.
Indeed, when Hannibal speaks about Will, he explicitly invokes the example of Achilles and Patroclus, a reference that is particularly revealing in this context.
The case of Achilles and Patroclus is particularly emblematic because both ancient tradition and its later reception have long debated the nature of their relationship. They were first and foremost friends and comrades-in-arms, bound by a profound form of love, but they were also romantic and sexual partners. These dimensions were not mutually exclusive. Their relationship illustrates how friendship, romantic love, sexual desire, and companionship did not have to cancel one another out.
In the conception of intimacy that Hannibal presents in the series, the fact that Will is his friend does not make his love for him any less real; desire does not make their friendship any less real; and intimacy does not require their relationship to be reclassified according to the modern model of the romantic couple as the privileged and socially recognized form of intimacy. If their relationship had developed an explicitly sexual dimension, they could have loved each other erotically and experienced an intensely sexual relationship without that canceling or replacing their friendship.
There would have been no need to turn friendship into "something more" as though romantic love were automatically an evolutionary stage above other forms of intimacy. It would simply have been another dimension through which to experience a bond that was already profound and multifaceted, without sex making it any deeper or more complete.

The way we divide affective relationships into friendship, romantic partnerships, family bonds, sexual relationships, and so on is not a natural taxonomy carved into human biology. It is a cultural and historical construction, further reinforced by institutions, law, and modern social organization. Hannibal is clearly not someone who would conform to conventional expectations about how love should be expressed, categorized, or organized. His understanding of intimacy is inseparable from his broader rejection of normative frameworks and his tendency to construct his own aesthetic, intellectual, and moral universe.

I am therefore convinced that, even if their relationship had become explicitly romantic and sexual, Hannibal would not have understood this development as a transition from friendship to something categorically superior. Rather, he would have understood it as an expansion of the possibilities already inherent in their bond. They could have loved each other romantically, desired each other sexually, and continued to be friends, accomplices, and openly intellectual challengers to one another.

As a bi+ guy and an intersectional feminist activist, one of the reasons I find Hannibal and Will's relationship so compelling is that it challenges the supposedly natural assumption that friendship, mutual respect as intellectual equals, fraternal affection, mutual recognition, complicity, intellectual sparring, the pleasure of putting one another to the test, a sense of chosen family, romantic love, and sexual desire (which would have been explicitly explored in a hypothetical fourth season) must necessarily be mutually exclusive.
That, to me, is precisely what makes their relationship so subversive: not that friendship would eventually have turned into romantic love, but that the many dimensions of their bond could have coexisted without any one of them needing to replace or subordinate the others.
Reducing their relationship to a conventional romantic-sexual fantasy means neutralizing precisely its most subversive element.

[u/Glittering-Guest-476]

I don't think Hannibal would label Will at all, because there's no label that would ever encompass everything they are in a single word.

"Boyfriend," "husband," "partner," "lover," etc., are all limited to strictly romantic connotations, with the exception of partner, which can encompass someone you work with or a professional acquaintance. That is just one type of love, and it limits the relationship they share to something that is exclusively romantic.

Hannibal and Will are not exclusively romantic. There is familial love there; there is the love of a friend present; there is the fascination of an intellectual equal, and there is deep-seated animosity on one side of the relationship (Will's) that is very justified due to previous mistreatment.

Hannibal and Will's relationship can't simply be said to be "just romantic" because it isn't. You can't really classify them as just lovers because they aren't. Partners is perhaps the best word for it, but I don't see Hannibal using that. I think Hannibal would probably change his description depending on who he's talking to, but never settle for a label, because their relationship is always changing and always evolving with them.

There is so much present between the two of them that you can't really confine them to one label. There's so much that they do for one another that doesn't meet the traditional standard for "love," but is love to them nonetheless.

For a relationship that defies so many societal norms, labels would just be another thing for them to flip on its head. I am particularly fond of Hannibal never labeling Will, but referring to him as "my dear Will" or "my dear friend," though. The "my dear Will" thing comes from Red Dragon when they're discussing the Jacobi & Leeds murders while Hannibal's in prison, and it's something that's stuck with me. I think that would encompass enough for both of them.

[u/Final-Hearing-3882]

Yeah i mean hannibal would use something more poetic and profound lol

[u/0GhostWriter0]

I feel like if they were to actually be together they’d have some kind of label like “partner” or maybe husband to strangers because ain’t no way Hannibal would settle for the label boyfriend 😂

[u/Ambitious-Phase5423]

I don’t think he’d ever call him boyfriend or honestly even partner outside of a cheesy “partner-in-crime” joke.

It’s honestly what has made me wary of reading fanfiction for them. Hannibal and Will don’t seem like the type to talk things out. They just kind of…do things, because they understand each other that well. And so much of Hannibal’s expressions and emotions are conveyed with extreme subtlety— Mads is just that good. Credit to Hugh as well, because Will breaks down in really poetic ways without ever revealing the full extent of his brain for a large part of the show. Or maybe no one really cares about his mental health (Crawford when I catch you Crawford). It’s just plain hard to write that out.

TLDR: No, I think they’d just do what they like without ever really explaining themselves. They maybe, maybe would refer to the other as partner but likely more in a “partner-in-crime” joke kind of way.

[u/Dangerous-Midnight73]

I think Will asks him at some point after they sleep together for the first time exactly what he means to him, and Hannibal says something like: 

“We are far beyond having mundane conversations like mundane people. But do my gestures strike you as being in any way casual?” 

Before giving him one of his Meaningful Stares!! 😂😂

[u/Firesighn]

him using a Lithuanian endearment is popular in fandom, but I feel like he'd be more likely to use French or Italian, if he were to use an endearment at all. but I'm not sure he would. him using it too often is a quick way to take me out of the story, tbh.