hey, i’m nick! i like pygmalion and my fair lady a very very normal amount. this blog exists purely to contain my yapping so i don’t get set on fire by my poor poor insta moots.
please don’t follow me if you’re under 14 (i am an adult!). TERFs are also very unwelcome here. i’m not a henry/eliza fan at all personally, but i hate shipping discourse, so don’t bring it to my door! i think that’s about it :)
a few tags i use:
#elementary education: longer posts (yapping disguised as analysis)
#my art: fanart made by myself (mostly reblogged from my art blog, @kindest-little-fella-in-town !)
#pet artistic fancy: all fanart
#silly notions: asks/requests
#meme: miscellaneous funnies
#galatea (#galatea!henry, #galatea!eliza, etc.): posts about my pygmalion-inspired webcomic, GALATEA. (if you’re interested in reading it, you can find it here!)
(if i miss reblogging any galatea attacks btw you have permission to tag me into oblivion!!!! i love all of them to pieces but i’m not super active on my tumblr feed so i don’t see them!!!)
I'll tag the ones who have Tumblr accounts on here: @doodle-blight @kindest-little-fella-in-town @frankidacre @kimtiny @postcards-from-richard-nixon @thoughtfulsheeppoetry @chpxcrwy
Got any headcanons for how Henry was raised as a child? Imo he was defo a huge brat.
here’s an answer in doodle form, because this ask made my brain go crazy! (his mother is a SAINT.)
as for my deeper thoughts… oh boy, this is so hideously specific and has everything to do with my 50,000 other headcanons for him LOL. please don’t take my word as god here!
light CW for abuse (if you can even call it that. i don’t know the public consensus on it, but i do.)
i think his parents are some degree of separated. i don’t think his dad is abusive, but i think he was used to dealing with child-henry’s “fits” (read: early-1900s meltdowns) in the only way he knew how (read: physical restraint).
the sort of “last straw” episode which led to the separation in the first place (doubt he would have been any older than 6-7?) scared henry to the point of the intense, pseudo-freudian dependence on his mother that shaw talks about (his saviour!), which he obviously carries into his adult life as she continues to coddle him. he does not keep in touch with his father and, quite frankly, does not want to! he gets the occasional letter in the post and remarks very loudly that the house was in need of more kindling.
i also imagine henry very much perceives himself, sheltered rich boy he is, as abused to the highest and heaviest degree due to the nature of this restraint… which i guess isn’t technically wrong, but it’s an exaggeration, and a VERY silly one. he is absolutely the kind of jackass to try and go toe-to-toe with eliza “a-few-licks-of-the-strap” doolittle about it (hence his outrage when she accuses him of being capable of striking her), and on occasion (if he’s in a really terrible mood) pickering’s fucking war trauma, which is even sillier.
outside of that context, i think kid-henry was a little unsocialised freak. he got a name for himself amongst his mother’s servants by hiding in kitchen cupboards with heavy books every time guests came around. his friends were in youth as they are in adulthood (few and far between), and most potential friends were drawn away by his natural i’m-better-than-you attitude.
with his mother’s help, he managed to get exactly one date at the tender age of 16, during which the girl accidentally confused phonetics and linguistics, a mistake so egregious in henry’s eyes that it made him immediately walk out of the restaurant. his mother has tried multiple times since then to find a nice girl for her pathetic son, to no avail—though that’s probably a good thing, if we’re all being honest, that no girl would wind up forced to deal with him unprepared.
(oh, and i don’t think he had a brother. i think he made that up to scare mr. doolittle away! he’s got too much only-child energy.)
2) if pick proposed to henry, he would do it by asking him to decipher a note in the latter’s universal alphabet that says ‘henry higgins, will you marry me?’.
henry would decipher it immediately— and, before pick even got the chance to respond, would laugh and say, “christ, what an odd note! no idea who the devil wrote it— perhaps mother’s trying to set me up with another girl? what a tomfoolery, that she still hasn’t figured out i don’t care for women. throw it in the trash, would you, pick?” and pick would die inside
Headcanon: Henry is super smug about his linguistics knowledge but he quite literally only knows English. Meanwhile, Pickering is what Xiaoma wishes he was and is a hyperpolyglot
HC ACCEPTED,,, i raise to you that this is the REAL reason henry keeps shitting on karpathy. he’s afraid that the latter’s language skills are more in-line with pick’s fancies than his own are, and he’s afraid he couldn’t compete with that!!!!!!!