#benny hcs

[anthonyampersand]

i think my point is that benny is the most vanilla person in their entire group

[anthonyampersand]

Ok this is a kinda long one but I absolutely love your hcs so: BENJAMIN COFFIN for Benny if you don't mind?

oooooooooooh, this could be fun. i never mind :L feel free 2 send me as many asks as you like

BENJAMIN COFFIN:

benny has pretty severe spring allergies, which he and mark bonded over when they roomed together in college. mark had it worse, but they used to share big boxes of allergy relief meds and bitch together about how they couldn’t wait for summer to start. in the spring, benny’s always a little off his game because he’s so doped up on meds. so far he’s successfully managed to hide this fact from his wife and her father.

interacting with children does not come easily to him, and while he wants them in theory, he secretly dreads the day that allison gets it into her head that she wants a baby. later in life i like to think that benny’s personality will probably calm down a little bit, and he’ll grow genuinely fond of kids, and have a few of his own. i think at that point he’d make a really great dad… just not before that.

little known fact, benny makes a mean cinnamon roll. he’s a fiend for cinnamon rolls. his mom always used to make them for him in the mornings when he was a kid. he teaches mark how to make them, too, and how to doctor up the store-bought kind from a can to be fucking delicious.

he’s got an odd, dry sense of humor. a lot of sarcasm. it gets awkward at times because he has a tendency to joke with people he’s not “there” with yet, which makes even mark wince.

his best school subjects were accounting and english lit.

his favorite dessert (besides cinnamon rolls, which he doesn’t really consider a dessert) is whoopie pie.

he loves himself a little more than he should, sometimes, but he’s not entirely without self-awareness. i’d say 8/10 on average.

swimming isn’t really something he’s ever taken the time to do, although he does know how. mark used to bug him to swim laps on weekends when they were both procrastinating on writing their term papers, and he only acquiesced like one time.

what would it take to break benny… interesting to think about, because in all honesty, benny has never faced a terrible amount of hardship in his life! i think that he thinks himself more resilient than he actually is. if he were actually faced with the shit that his old friends deal with on a daily basis (beyond poverty - benny has been poor before, maybe not as direly as them because he wasn’t around post-roger’s diagnosis, but yeah), i don’t know how he’d fare. the closest i think benny has ever come to breaking is probably when he realized that mimi was at rock bottom, and when he lost her, fearing that she may have died on the street somewhere. i think that benny would make it through divorce, although it would definitely be hard on him, but… i think what would actually BREAK him is probably the death of a close friend, or a lover. he has a lot of sympathy for collins when angel dies even though he hardly knew her, and was certainly never friends with her, because he’s terrified of something like that happening to him. losing mimi was almost impossible for him to swallow. i think if she had never turned up (alive), he might have had an actual breakdown, lost everything. losing mark is also something that he loses a lot of sleep over even though he’ll never admit it. they were very close, at one point, and though he’s let his marriage take over his life and lead him away from his friends, he misses mark terribly sometimes, and fantasizes often about leaving allison and going back to live in the loft, however shitty it is, just to be with his friends. he fears losing mark, losing roger, losing collins. those things? would break him.

benny is fucking AWFUL at impressions, and magic tricks (a brief but intense obsession that mark couldn’t talk him out of), both of which collins is genius at. he’s both terribly jealous and constantly in awe of him; collins used to show him up all the time at parties, it was almost like a running gag.

[anthonyampersand]

benny coffin is bi, tentatively starts to come out while he's in college, and then goes right back into the closet when he enters the professional world (partly because his fiancée and her father are both rampantly homophobic and he can't even allude to the fact that he's been with and felt for men in the past, let alone put a label on himself.

[anthonyampersand]

I know you said (a while ago) that you think that after the events of Rent Benny would become friends with the gang again and I totally agree! Do you have and hcs on how you think he sorta rejoined the gang? Like, slowly, kinda awkwardly? Idk I just love the idea of them all becoming friends again

oh god yes

ok so in nytw there’s a lyric spoken by roger “benny was a dilettante, then he met a debutante” which is the basis for most of my headcanons about him being interested in art before he met allison and got into the business track

my other headcanon is that he met mark in college, probably as his roommate

he has sort of decent intentions when he goes into business. he has the influence of his former friends - collins and maureen especially - and he does attempt to reconcile his desire to be comfortable/secure a future for himself, and to try and help the homeless and other people in need, the starving artists, the addicts, etc.

benny’s not a complete asshole. he just thinks that he can do both. he thinks that he can make some sacrifices along the way, not understanding (or not wanting to) that those aren’t HIS sacrifices to make, and maybe he doesn’t know what’s best for everyone and shouldn’t be trying to make those decisions.

so we know that benny and allison aren’t exactly a great couple? like for starters, he cheated on her after they were already married, and then (i assume secretly) supported mimi through her attempt at getting clean and paid her medical bills, etc

so iiiii think that benny is already regretting his chosen path at the beginning of rent, and continues to doubt his choices all the way through to the end. he pays for angel’s funeral and goes off to get drunk with collins afterward - something i’m SURE his wife would not approve of. and he does seem to have a serious sense of responsibility and affection towards mimi.

after rent, we know his wife has removed him from the east village… presumably because she found out about mimi.

i think their marriage deteriorates from there.

i think, within the year, they file for divorce, and benny finds himself finally in a position to do what he’s wanted to do for years… and go ask his friends if he can move back in with them.

the group is not the same as he remembers, but they ARE still his friends, and they know him. and he knows them.

so when he gets over himself enough to come to the door and grovel, mark and roger accept him back with minimal fuss and things begin to settle back into a very old sense of normalcy that they’ve all missed.

benny COULD afford his own place, but nobody mentions it.

i think collins might also move back in with them - now that he has no one else to live with, nowhere else he really needs to go, now that his friends are finally all back in one place - and then all five of them (mimi included) would probably move to a new apartment, which actually has heat, somewhere in brooklyn.

i don’t think that roger and mimi would last as a couple. after they breakup, i like to think she might give it a shot with benny again, properly this time. idk.

benny puts his degree to good use. he does things the hard way, instead of marrying into connections, instead of making sacrifices that aren’t his to make. he and joanne go into business together with her handling the legal end and him handling the finances. they advocate for the homeless and give out loans to the people who need them most, help them into better situations, start up new housing projects in the lot beside the old building. (benny’s art was architecture, before all of this happened, and he’s still got a knack for it, so he participates in the designing of the buildings too)

things look up, and benny doesn’t feel consumed with guilt every night when he goes to sleep.

[anthonyampersand]

benny is much easier to hate in the demos/nytw, so i’m kind of glad that he’s less of an overt greedy asshole in bway. i think it’s more realistic that he actually did think he was doing his friends a favor than it is that he just suddenly turned into a capitalism machine after being friends with them for years, and (according to roger: “benny was a dilettante, then he met a debutante”) also having an interest in the arts himself.

[anthonyampersand]

honestly tho i prefer to believe that benny spent the entirety of the year trying to figure out how to get his friends back because he was miserable without them and was slowly realizing that he had made mistakes in how he thought about things, and treated other people.

like... idk, i can see how it evolves throughout the show. he starts out very stubbornly believing that he can just do them a "favor" whether or not they like it because he knew best what was good for them, and they didn't need to have a say.

but fast forward and you get to angel's funeral. he pays for the whole fucking thing. he goes off and drinks to her honor with collins, because that's what collins needs and he knows it. he pretty much finds himself forgiven at last. or at least that's how it seems.

ik that there's more after that, like i know that the thing with mimi muddies the water a lot, but in the end i really think that the true animosity is gone. by the end of canon he's kind of out of their immediate lives... so it's up to him if he wants to reenter the group.

i could definitely see them never really speaking to benny again, of course, but i can ALSO see him being quietly forgiven and their friendship reforming much softer and stronger than it was before. idk.

i just really think that benny had learned something over the course of that year. i don't think that he could have come out of it magically unmoved or unchanged...

and maybe it's the optimist in me but i LIKE to think that the happy ending is possible. that their friendship could be mended finally.

[anthonyampersand]

of course benny wears a turtleneck though... he's exactly the type of a person who would wear a fkin turtleneck...

[anthonyampersand]

benny: "how's your project? goooood. how's your project? goooooooood." 

how much do you want to bet that he turned to mark first, then roger, and said this with a patronizing smile without listening to what either of them were saying back to him. 

his cute little artist friends... so hopeless. he's really doing them a favor, he thinks, they're just too artsy to grasp it. they will someday though.