Character Base

• Character Name: Will Graham
• Age: 34
• Canon (Date/Year Released)/Canon Point: Hannibal (2013) / Post S2 Finale.
• Items Coming Along: Glasses, handgun, clothes, dog - Winston
• Content Warnings for Character: so many; murder, mutilation, gaslighting, abuse, gore, vore

Character Background

• History: wiki link
• Core Relationships:

Hannibal Lector - initially his therapist, meant to be a point of stability, eventually he became Will's abuser and closest friend. Beyond that, he's been told he's in some version of being in love with Hannibal - whether that's romantic or platonic isn't specified. It gets real weird, fam, and it's super intimate.

Abigail Hobbs - she became his surrogate daughter after he killed her father. She's one of the two most important people in his life.

Alana Bloom - she started out as his friend, but the relationship devolved after he was accused of murder. He was in love with her, up until she started gaslighting him & falling victim to Hannibal's manipulations.

Beverly Katz - arguably his closest friend and colleague on the team, the only one who believes him or sees the human side of him when things get dicey. Her death pushed him over the edge into going full-blown righteous wrath.

Jack Crawford - his boss, who pushed him past his breaking point but eventually relented and began to trust Will's decision-making.

Character Personality Through Key Moments

(2+) Positive Experiences:

Intelligent

"-and I would argue, the smartest person in this room," — said of him by the FBI prosecutor trying to get him the death penalty after being framed for multiple homicides. Will Graham is wildly intelligent — both in the sense that he's well-read and well-educated, as well as being emotionally intelligent. Just because he doesn't enjoy socializing (he expresses his disdain with a dry, "that may require me to be sociable") doesn't mean he doesn't pick up on social clues and know how the people around them will react — quite the opposite, it's his job to know all of that. He can look at unrelated bits of evidence, reconstruct someone's entire mindset, and then play counter to it like a game of mental chess. That's exactly what he does in season two, in fact.

He demonstrates social intelligence in a much more down-to-earth way during his early relationship with Alana. We get the opportunity to see them walking together, bantering, talking about their love lives, making jokes, and generally behaving like someone comfortable interacting with a friend and colleague. He demonstrates none of the aversion to eye contact or outright rejection of politeness we see in his interactions with people like Chilton, or even Hannibal initially. He even shows some remarkable grace and understanding when trying to navigate the complicated, tumultuous grounds of a quasi-romantic relationship with her, which is kind of like the boss fight of interpersonal dynamics.

Protective

Will is fiercely protective of the people he cares about. Once he commits to someone, such as in the case of Abigail Hobbs, there's almost nothing he wouldn't do to ensure their health and (if possible) happiness. We see it initially flair into being after he finds out a particularly classless tabloid journalist has been taking interest in working with Abigail to blast her story to the world — it leads to a confrontation wherein he says, "It's not very smart to piss off a guy who thinks about killing people for a living." Threatening a reporter who already hates you and giving nary a single fuck about the consequences is some serious defensiveness.

This only escalates over time. After the body of Nicholas Boyle was found, it came to light Abigail had killed him and Hannibal helped her hide the body. His immediate reaction upon learning this was to criticize the body having been hidden, "evidently not well enough." This implies that his priorities here were not to the law, nor to the ethical & moral reprehensibility of murder — though he still disapproves — but rather fierce concern over the possible fallout that could come down on Abigail.

This progressively culminates in one of the sketchiest moves he's ever made in his life — after spending months working with the FBI to get Hannibal caught, their intimate friendship lead to him tipping Hannibal off at the last minute. Right at the last possible moment, he tells Hannibal to flee in order to protect him from capture.

Empathetic

If this one isn't obvious, I don't know what to tell you. Not only is he capable of it, he actively demonstrates it. If you don't count the insight into the pack of stray dogs he's taken in, we first see it with Abigail and the profound guilt he feels for having taken her father away from her. He immediately tries to help fill that void in her life, it's pure instinct, his very first impulse. Time and time again he returns to her to try and relate to her, and every conversation they have seems raw and genuine — at least on his part.

We see it more excessively with any person who strikes him as a victim of someone in a position of power taking advantage of their vulnerabilities. In season two, a man with brain damage is used as a scapegoat by his social worker, and that social worker is the first person Will almost kills of his own volition. We see Will going out of his way to have a private conversation with Peter, and we see how clearly he relates Peter's disorder with his own prior cognitive disabilities.

Another great example is simple, but profound — after finding out Jack's wife attempted suicide, we see Will quietly going to visit Jack in his office. Jack is obviously hurting, Will can feel it, he can feel that it's the wrong time to push, but he still has the drive to show support. He splits the difference, and says, "I’m gonna sit here until you’re ready to talk. You don’t have to say a word until you’re ready, but I’m not going anywhere until you do."

(2+) Negative Experiences:

Manipulative

When stuck in the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Will Graham was able to pull the strings of those around him with absolutely no resources, no power, no real influence to speak of. He manages to achieve his goals or bend people to suit his purpose using nothing more than the right combination of words, or the right incentive. It takes all of two minutes for him to bend Chilton into a tit-for-tat agreement by offering up his mind to be studied, playing into Chilton's desperate desire for renown in his field. He tried subtly selling the appeal of the offer two or three different ways before he felt out the perspective that found an in — in this case, his victim's ego. He then continues to use this throughout his time in the hospital, wielding it as a tool to get another prisoner moved into an adjacent cell near him, as well as casting a serious shadow of doubt in Chilton's mind over Hannibal's innocence.

The entire second half of season two revolves around Will manipulating Hannibal — masterfully, considering how wickedly intelligent and insightful Hannibal is. He uses everything from subtle changes in wardrobe to subtle changes in speech, habits, and fake admissions about shifts in his perspective — distributed slowly and purposefully over a believable period of time — in order to coax Hannibal into trusting him. He plays on Hannibal's ego and his desire for connection in order to get him to let Will into his world, and he's successful. It takes a seriously masterful manipulator to accomplish something like that; one has to practically become a chameleon, or do a Robert Downey Jr. and method act the shit out of it — sans the sick AF Marvel money.

Wrathful

Will doesn't have a quick-flair temper; he has something far more dangerous. It's an icy-cold, righteous, insidious thing that plots and plans, patiently waits, and then executes that plan at the precisely perfect moment. It may take weeks or months, but if he's grievously wronged, you can bet your ass he's going to find a way to get some retribution for it. After we find out Hannibal murdered Beverly, Will's first attempt at retribution was to put him in the crosshairs of his number one serial-killing fan. When that didn't pan out, he didn't give up — the wrath kept burning in him, and we get an entire half a season of Will playing 5D chess with Hannibal in order to get him caught and arrested for his crimes.

What really sells it is Will could have just killed him. He had the opportunity, he had the ability to get away with it, he had a gun in his hand and outright said it would feel righteous to pull the trigger — but that wasn't enough. He wanted to out Hannibal, too. He wanted to air all his wrongdoings to the world, put him on blast, and then lock him in a cell for the rest of his life. That's pretty next level, fam.

Bitchy

Catty, snarky, snippy, take your pick — they're all pretty interchangable for him.

Dude's straight up bitchy, unrepentantly. He'll get sassy and rude toward anyone he doesn't like if the mood strikes him, and he tends to dislike people very easily. He'll outright tell strangers — Hannibal for example, in this case — 'I don't find you that interesting'. It isn't typically something he does wholly unprompted; Hannibal earns Will's barbs by trying to psychoanalyzing him on first meeting. All the same, Will wrote him off in less than ten minutes and immediately became Dick Mode Central.

He dislikes Dr. Chilton, and so we see him irreverently calling the guy Frederick to his face — frequently in the most condescending possible manner. He finds the tabloid journalist Freddie Lounds tasteless, and the first time she introduces herself properly (tone pleasant, "Special Agent Graham, I never formally introduced myself, I'm Freddie Lounds.") he completely brushes off her outstretched hand and comes back at her with, "Trying to salvage this joke from the mouth of madness?"

He even turns this attitude on Jack once (at the beginning of his stressful descent into cognitive fucked-uppedness) by snapping, "You're the head of the Behavioral Science Unit, Jack. Why don't you come up with your own answers if you don't like mine?" Outright demonstrating disrespect in front of a team of his colleagues, at an active crime scene. It's peak default bitchy at it's finest.

Deer Country Attributes

• Canon Powers: Will doesn't have any supernatural powers, but it may be worth mentioning his Sherlock-y empathy disorder. I'll have an opt-out and communications post to avoid metagaming.
• Blood Type: Paleblood
• Omen: North American Bull Elk
• Blessed Day: August 7
• Patron Pthumerian: The Patron Pthumerian of the Unknown
• Blood Power Manifestation: Will's power will manifest as an extension of his canon disorder. His imagination is so absurdly real he's gotten lost in it; now he'll be able to bring that out of his head and present it in the form of hallucinations for other people to see, or use the telepathy aspect to plant them directly into someone else's head. Likewise, his ability to take on the mindset of others + the extreme vividness of his dreams will eventually branch out into him visiting the dreams of those individuals, or skimming the surface thoughts. It'll all be very dramatic and pretentious laden with too much metaphor that I hamfist into tags.

Writing Samples

One: narrative; stockholm syndrome, suicide, death
Two: dialogue; murder, grooming, drug abuse, predatory behavior toward minors

The Player

• Player Name: Em
• Player Age: 29
• Player Contact: rifting
• Permissions: Here.

Link to your reserve for this character: Here.