As Season 3 of Hannibal progresses, Dr. Lecter continues to reveal bits of information about his past to Bedelia and to the audience. He used to keep snails in his garden for the firefly larvae to eat, he tells her, so that they could feast and grow into delicate creatures. The process of consumption is obviously something at the heart of Hannibal, but the ways in which Lecter talks about them or expresses them take on different meanings in different contexts (often, he is simply eating the rude—but not always). I imagine Hannibal considers himself akin to his firefly larvae, having grown into the similar kind of delicate creature that he must see himself as. Other than the flashbacks of young Hannibal copying La primavera into his sketchbook, we have no way of knowing what Hannibal looked like before he became Hannibal the Cannibal, but one might wonder if the…
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