Can I please have some Piggy headcanons 😳🙏
piggy headcanons because i have many thoughts ab him 😭
• firstly i actually think piggy is older than most of the boys, around 13. not massively older, but enough for it to matter socially. part of my reasoning is how quickly he clocks jack’s authority and becomes visibly wary of him. i think jack reminds him of the older boys at school that he had to fag for (for anyone unfamiliar, “fagging” was a system in some british public schools where younger boys had to perform chores and errands for older boys, like cleaning shoes, making tea, running messages etc. it was framed as tradition and discipline, but the power imbalance often made it humiliating and sometimes abusive.). he recognises that hierarchy instantly, and more importantly, he recognises the kind of cruelty that can come with it.
• i’m very attached to scholarship boy piggy. to me he’s ridiculously intelligent, like genuinely brilliant. the kind of child where intelligence is not just something he has but the thing his whole worth gets built around. i think he knows he’s clever too, which is why i dislike when fandom flattens him into this purely meek sweet boy. piggy can be arrogant, judgemental and prideful. he knows he’s smarter than most of the boys there.
• his spectacles are also, in my opinion, the most expensive thing he owns. i think people underestimate what glasses would cost for a poor family in the 1950s, especially if his lenses are thick. so jack breaking them is not just violence, it’s the destruction of probably the most valuable possession piggy has, and with that his autonomy.
• i don’t think auntie is evil or abusive, but i also don’t think she’s great for him. i think she loves him a lot, but in a very overprotective and disabling way. she teaches him that his body is fragile and the world is dangerous. lots of “don’t run,” “don’t swim,” “don’t exert yourself.” she means well, but it shapes him badly. however her sweets are apparently elite so fair enough i guess.
• i personally headcanon piggy as having some sort of metabolic or endocrine issue because genuinely how are you stranded on an island with reduced food, chronic stress and increased physical activity and still described as fat throughout 😭 either golding didn’t care about realism or piggy has something else going on physically.
• career-wise i can really see him going into law, ethics, science or medicine. law especially feels very piggy to me because he believes so strongly in systems, procedure and civil order. but i can also see biology or medicine because piggy is one of the only boys consistently thinking about bodies and practical survival, like health, sanitation, food, water, rescue etc.
• i also think he has a pet pigeon. no i will not elaborate much on that. i just know in my heart that he has one. i also think he would absolutely recreate skinner’s experiments for fun and keep obsessive little notebooks on animal behaviour 😭
• name-wise i like bennett as his surname. i’ve seen peterkin for his first name and i like that a lot, but i also am fine nicholas. so in my head he’s either peterkin bennett, peter bennett or nicholas “nicky” bennett.
• i headcanon him as being from a poor rural irish background, or at least from an irish immigrant family in britain. i think that adds another layer to his outsider status because now it’s not just his body and class being judged, but potentially his accent and background too.
• this is a sad one, but i think his mother died giving birth to him and his father died in the war. the reason i think this is because of that line where he says “my dad’s dead” and then hesitates on “and my mum…” that pause always stood out to me. it feels like there’s something complicated there. i like the idea that he carries this horrible subconscious guilt of existing because his mother died for him to live.
• his favourite colour is hot pink but he would rather die than admit this.
• and finally, i think his favourite book is the great gatsby, but in the funniest possible way because i think he completely misreads it 😭
• piggy dreams of becoming like gatsby one day. rich, glamorous, reinvented, respected. he believes that if he becomes educated enough, polished enough and wealthy enough then the world will finally accept him. which is tragically ironic because that is literally not the point of gatsby at all.
anyway piggy bennett nation rise
