application ♢ tlv

[versusnurture]

User Name/Nick: Anne
User DW: trustme_imthe
AIM/IM: N/A; trustmeimthe
E-mail: tavrosno[at]gmail[dot]com
Other Characters: Marquis de Carabas; Alex Summers; Cassel Sharpe; Maladicta

Character Name: Abigail Hobbs
Series: NBC's Hannibal
Age: 18
From When?: After Hannibal kills her :( damnit Hannibal why you gotta play that way :(

Inmate/Warden:

Inmate. Abigail played an integral part in her father's career as the Minnesota Shrike, serving as bait for the girls he killed; she has also killed on her own and carefully covered up her crimes. While she has definitely been twisted by manipulative people in her life and was influenced by them to commit crimes, she is also highly manipulative in her own right. Underlying all of these issues is a history of severe trauma, culminating in near-death at the hands of her father and actual death at the hands of her surrogate father figure. She needs to cope with her trauma in a healthy, ideally non-murderous way and figure out a way to jumpstart her life without manipulating those around her.

Also fuck you Hannibal.

Abilities/Powers: No powers; she's baseline human. However, she is an excellent hunter.

Personality:

Abigail Hobbs is not actually a fractured person. She knows pretty well who she is and what her place in life was, at least up until the tumultuous death of her father, Garret Jacob Hobbs, also known as the Minnesota Shrike. However, she often seems frail, fractured, and weak. This is because she chooses to portray herself as weak to varying degrees - because, at her core, Abigail is just as manipulative as her father was, though for very different reasons.

Highly intelligent as well as highly manipulative, Abigail continues to use her father's training as a "lure" - bait for the girls he intended to kill - in order to put on various masks that fit each interpersonal relationship to her purposes. For example, she is sweet, frightened, and distant when she speaks to her assigned psychiatrist, Alana Bloom; intense but vulnerable with her father's killer, Will Graham; and crafty, testing, but mostly honest with her new father figure, Hannibal Lecter. She commits to these masks flawlessly, without a slip, and seems to delight in perplexing those she interacts with - how can one girl be so many different people at once?

The answer is, because it's to her advantage, so she makes it happen. Abigail has three primary reasons for manipulating people in the way described above. First, she will sometimes manipulate people for manipulation's sake. She has an intense curiosity about people and what they will do when pushed in this or that specific way. Although this is to a much lesser extent than Hannibal, there is an unmistakable air of playful curiosity when she attempts to manipulate certain people, a sort of impish, what-are-you-going-to-do-about-this attitude.

Another reason she manipulates people is for self-defense. By her reasoning, if others can't tell which version of her is the "real" one, they can't hurt her. Admittedly this is both a faulty theory and one that has canonically been proven false (thanks Hannibal), but she still uses this kind of smoke-and-mirrors false-self act to confuse those around her and escape their scrutiny.

The third reason she manipulates people is to maintain control. In the course of her life, in particular the last six months, all control has been wrested from her hands. She can't exert control on other people physically, she's not quite clever enough to play the kinds of mindgames that Hannibal does, but she can change the way that others perceive her by making herself seem like someone she's not. For example, if she acts weak, she will be underestimated. This controls not only the other person's perceptions of her, but to some extent their actions.

Abigail's trauma history obviously affects her thoughts and actions in a major way. She has a history not only of emotional abuse and manipulation by her father and surrogate father figure, but her father forced her to lure in and butcher a slew of girls who looked just like her, then eat their flesh. Not only that, but she had to do so in the knowledge that they were stand-ins for her, that he was killing them so he wouldn't have to kill her. This experience was so damaging to her that she blocked out the majority of the related memories, which only returned in bits and pieces after her father's death. Her trauma was further manipulated by Hannibal, who knew an interesting psyche when he saw it and redirected her confused emotional attachment to her father to himself via psychic driving and hallucinogenics.

Hobbs's killings, by their nature, required not just a hunter but bait, and Abigail was that bait. She was therefore essentially trained to lure people away with strangers, to make them trust her effortlessly, to manipulate them into thinking whatever she wanted them to. It's not surprising, therefore, that she turns to manipulation as a defense mechanism after her father's death. However, it's easy to forget when you're looking at her that she has a very well-hidden instinct to react with violence, whether psychological or physical.

It should be noted that Abigail is entirely conflicted on the nature of family. She grieves her father, but she doesn't entirely blame Will for killing him; she thinks her father is an evil man, but loves him anyway and is automatically drawn to Hannibal, who is much like him in many way; she mourns her mother's death in an abstract way, but seems almost numb to the reality of it. It's safe to say that Abigail's existence as part of a murder family was normalized enough during Garret Jacob Hobbs's life that she's uncertain how to grieve for, think about, or move on from her family in an age- and situation-appropriate way.

Which, again, was a sweet opportunity for Hannibal. He was able to isolate her fear of family, expertly manipulate her so that she felt she could trust only him, and position himself deliberately as a father figure. While Abigail wanted in a major way to separate herself from the family that had been so damaging to her, she just couldn't entirely, and so just switch her emotional dependency and vulnerability from Garret Jacob Hobbs to Hannibal.

Abigail considers herself to be culpable for her father's crimes. Since she was an accomplice, she feels an incredible, inescapable, and haunting feeling of guilt - which is legitimate, except for the fact that she tries to either a) manipulate others by utilizing said guilt as a wepon or b) manipulate others by pretending not to feel guilty at all. Additionally, her guilt often shows itself as a paralyzing fear of getting caught (which, again, is exacerbated by Hannibal's influence). She wants to cover up any and all sins related to her father's crimes, to the extent that she'll hurt people who threaten to blow that cover. This paralyzing fear also causes her to make snap decisions, often violent and/or just really not good decisions, such as gutting Nicholas Boyle. While Boyle's death was at least partially self-defense, it was also based on intense fear of being vulnerable again, being forced to do things as bad as what her father used her for, or worse.

In sum: Abigail's greatest fear is being helpless and vulnerable, a fear that comes full circle when Hannibal proves himself not to be a support, but another great manipulator. This is the ultimate thing that Hannibal takes from her - not her life, but her power and her agency, and this is what she'll have to gain back first on the Barge.

Which brings us to the fact that murder makes Abigail feel powerful. Although she does feel incredibly guilty about it, she was basically saving her own life in helping to kill all those girls, because if she didn't, her father would kill her. Therefore she associates murder, paradoxically, with self-defense and with life. Violence and even murder are ways in which Abigail can keep herself safe - one of the very few guaranteed ways she can keep herself safe. Because even if she's not the biggest or the strongest or the smartest or the meanest, if you kill someone? They don't fuck with you again.

Barge Reactions:

Abigail's initial reaction to the Barge will be one of shock. She's not going to get over her death quickly by any means; she'll likely perseverate on it and keep to herself, thus making integration on the Barge something of a struggle at first. Ultimately, though, she will go the route of subsuming her trauma rather than dealing with it and will pull up an illusion of gregariousness and average-teenagerhood. (Which will just serve to make her problems worse, but. That's just how she do.)

She'll show (mostly genuine) curiosity at the workings of the Barge - its structure, internal politics, and interpersonal relationships - and will seek to understand them, because in understanding she sees her only possibility of control over her new and overwhelming environment. In essence, she'll be taking notes for a decent while and will probably treat people with equal-opportunity curiosity because, despite the fact that she's baseline human, she has seen some horrors BELIEVE YOU HER.

Path to Redemption:

There are three primary reasons Abigail makes poor life decisions: 1.) She has experienced years of trauma, compounded by near-death and actual-death-plus-dinner service experiences; 2.) She is highly psychologically susceptible and easily manipulated, in large part as a result of this unresolved trauma; & 3) She maintains an excellent facade of normalcy (or, indeed, whatever kind of facade she'd like to portray) in an effort to keep dangerous, manipulative forces out while not addressing the aforementioned trauma.

So, going down the line.

1.) Abigail will need some kind of regular professional/semi-professional help. She's fucked up in the head and needs to do something about the fact that yeahhhhh her dad was a serial killer and she kind of helped him do the serial killing, yes, true. The trick here is that when she died it was at the hands of a man who was both a father figure and a psychiatrist, with the annoying result that she is now even less likely to trust anyone who approaches her and utters the words mental health. So thanks for that, Hannibal. Her needs would best be served by someone who is able to get close to her neither as a friend nor a parental figure nor a professional - someone disattached but not, you know, reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter in any way.

2.) Essentially Abigail will need to come to terms with the fact that she both craves support and closeness and a dad who is not crazy and that she is now hypervigilant about closeness in every way, which makes her susceptible to manipulation by the shadiest dudes. In truth, this will probably need to be hammered in repeatedly and she may have to learn from her mistakes by making them one or two times more.

3.) Abigail will need to strike a good balance between being too giving with her trust and not giving enough - and, once again, finding a way to be close to people without manipulating or lying to them. She perceives this as a way to keep herself safe but fails to realize that when she's lied and presented different faces to different people, she's driven away those who'd protect her and attract those who would hurt her.

All of which can be easily summed up in the simple point that Abigail must deal with her trauma and re-learn how to be social without being either used or isolated, or else she is highly likely to go off the deep end in a bad way.

History: the life & times

Sample Journal Entry:

[Abigail's voice quavers, as though she's uncertain of the connection, like someone making their first long-distance call. She starts out firm and then peters out into uncertainty, the tail end of her first sentence almost a question.]

My name is Abigail . . . Hobbs.

I'm not sure how I got here, but I'm here now. [A pause; who to ask for?] I'm looking for Dr. Alana Bloom. She's tall with dark hair. She was supposed to check in with me this morning, but instead I'm here.

Are there - [And here she inserts a little more tremor than necessary into her voice, because she doesn't know what else to do right now - ] Are there letters home? That kind of thing? How does this work? Because I need to talk to my dad.

Sample RP:

Abigail chooses to jumpstart this process by keeping a journal. That seems like the kind of thing her warden will want her to do, whenever she gets assigned. It'll be easier to just hand this off - here, take it; it has everything I've been thinking for the last two months; I hope it's helpful; I really do want to graduate.

The problem, as always, is that what she's writing isn't the truth. It's accurate in a lot of ways, close enough to the truth that she can remember it easily, wrap the thread of it around her finger for later when she will be questioned about it. But these aren't her thoughts and feelings. They're the thoughts and feelings of a girl who happens to look a lot like her.

Wind-chafed. Plain but pretty. Mall of America.

Maybe these are things that Marissa would be thinking here and now, if she had ever played a part in killing someone, cutting them open, honoring them. Maybe Marissa would be sad.

Abigail isn't that sad. She's not sure what she is, other than mystified: mystified that she died, mystified that she's still conscious, mystified that a place like this exists at all. Shocked and confused that after evading Crawford for so long she fell into the trap of a predator who wasn't supposed to be a predator. She had twisted her ankle in the dark like some pathetic girl in a fairytale, running in circles right into the monster's arms. One of the old fairy tales, the pre-Disney ones with the ugly endings.

(Parents misunderstand the reason those stories used to be popular. It's not because they were violent in a violent time. It was because they were just. Poetic. Right.)

There is a point at which Abigail decides to spend her day as Marissa. Their mannerisms are similar enough and Abigail is new enough that she doesn't think anyone will notice. If they do, though, she'll just say she's turning over a new leaf, trying to be more positive and open, spend time with the rest of the population.

If the mood strikes and someone seems primed for it, she'll tell them that she's pretending to be her best friend, the one who was mounted on antlers the way her father used to kill. She'll say it with a smile; she'll watch them react, then walk away.

The act is easier than the truth by now. Which suits her just fine.

Special Notes: controversial dish, veal