It’s a bit ironic that @ZooHannibal, the bizarre and weirdly funny Twitter account collecting Hannibal Lecter’s existential musings from a day at the zoo, is so pro-animal. You know, considering that the good doctor has such a predilection for feasting on human parts—the rawer, the better.
At any rate, the account (which was started in May) reads like an especially bizarre piece of fanfiction. @ZooHannibal’s random tour through the butterfly garden and marmoset enclosure brings us tweets on captivity, power, and feeding time, and even a message for his patient Will Graham.
We love how, depending on the tweet, Lecter is addressing either the other humans enjoying the zoo or the animals themselves—with whom he seems to have a better rapport than his fellow two-leggers.
And of course, it adds an extra, chilling layer to consider that Lecter himself will someday be a creature in captivity.
If you were to escape, tortoise, you would be forgotten almost immediately, invisible. It is your enclosure that makes you a god.
— Hannibal At The Zoo (@ZooHannibal) May 23, 2014
The dairy cow stands in mute witness. That we live on the milk of a captive animal is a terrifying collision of the sacred and the profane.
— Hannibal At The Zoo (@ZooHannibal) June 9, 2014
Your quarter doesn’t buy you a handful of food for the billy goat. It buys the forgiveness of all the billy goats you are unable to feed.
— Hannibal At The Zoo (@ZooHannibal) May 23, 2014
We visit the face painting kiosk not to obscure our human self, but rather to remove the human mask from the leering tiger within.
— Hannibal At The Zoo (@ZooHannibal) June 6, 2014
We are best measured not by our power but by our ambition. The marmoset and his grapes are tiny, but his secret malice towers over us all.
— Hannibal At The Zoo (@ZooHannibal) June 25, 2014
We love watching them feed the sea lions for the same reason that we love our fathers. The only alternative is terror.
— Hannibal At The Zoo (@ZooHannibal) May 23, 2014
Seldom can we take our vengeance on the one who wronged us. It was not you who called the alpaca a llama, but he will bite you all the same.
— Hannibal At The Zoo (@ZooHannibal) May 28, 2014
Will Graham can no more hide the killer inside him than this mother kangaroo can hide the joey in her pouch, squirming to escape.
— Hannibal At The Zoo (@ZooHannibal) May 24, 2014
So great.
[via Metafilter]
Photo: NBC