bonearenaofmyskull:

Thank you! You’re very sweet, and you don’t need to feel like you have to justify a visit to my inbox with a question. That’s just to help me understand what I’m supposed to do with requests for meta and how to direct my responses. But if people just want to say hi, they don’t need to “earn” that by asking a meta question. 🙂

But in answer to the question that you did come up with, I’d say that my general impression of what I’ve heard about this season is that it is very ambitious. It’s already made by a whole army of perfectionists and people who take their craft really seriously, so by and large, as long as it maintains its ambition—as long as it’s pushing the limits of the stories it tells and the paths of the characters and the technical and artistic team that put it together—I think it will continue to be successful and receive critical praise.

I do think that critics are fickle and there are going to be a few who maybe didn’t like Hannibal as well as their contemporaries, who are going to be motivated by Hannibal’s continued acclaim, if it has it, to want to argue with it more vocally than they have in the past. The more people who are enthusiastic about something, the more people who aren’t enthusiastic about that thing will want to scratch their itch and complain about it. It’s human nature. So I would expect to see less universal acclaim this coming season, and a few critics coming out of the woodwork to possibly lambaste it.

And I think that as long as the show has acclaim, there are going to be those who pose moral arguments against it. This is also human nature. Generally, those I’ve seen in the past have not really grappled with the complexity of the show very well. I’m not really sure what take they’ll have on it next.

I think the fandom often struggles with the show’s ambition and fluidity, to be honest, and doesn’t always adapt well to change, so with a new season of big changes coming, I expect some people who were happy to be disgruntled, and some who were disgruntled to be more so. 

As far as viewership goes, that ball’s in NBC’s court, and I’ve never tracked summertime ratings, so I don’t know what will happen there.

Personally, I imagine I’ll be reasonably satisfied, as I’m not real particular about the details, as long as the execution makes sense and feels right at the time. I spend a lot of time speculating on this or that, but I’m not the kind of person who minds particularly if they do something different than what I wanted (there were torturous things I would have liked to see them do with Will in the asylum last year that they never did, for example, but I’m content with where they took it, even though it went in almost the opposite direction), though, like anyone I’m certainly pleased when I’m proven right or get what I want (such as with Will seducing Hannibal by convincing him that he was becoming the killer that Hannibal wanted to see in him).

The one thing remaining that I have some vague concern about is the Red Dragon section, in that all the details we’ve gotten so far have sounded like they’re taken really directly from the books. Blood black in the moonlight, tigers, pie eating (though you can’t reasonably expect Bryan not to be all over a scene with pie in it, let’s be real), eating paintings…. Hugh Dancy was right when he said that that some of the audience (me) would find it disappointing if they do the book stuff too faithfully after how they’ve played so fast and loose with the novels up to this point. However, I remain optimistic because the only details we’ve gotten have been all as relates to Dolarhyde himself, either because Bryan is fully aware he’s got a big star with a rabid fanbase and he’s trying to make the most of that, or because he’s just that enthusiastic about getting to the Dolarhyde thing. But what that’s meant is that we’ve literally had almost no details about what this part of the story is going to mean for any of the existing characters, and that’s where most of the opportunity for interesting change is. I’m fairly certain Bryan will find a way to make this part of the story about Hannibal and Will (especially with this “Will sees Dolarhyde as a Hannibal he can save” business), just as he’s made every other part of the story about that, so I’m not too worried.