some general hcs for my this... ginger........ I'm kidding don't jump me
includes: after the events of LOTF, some slight Jack x childhood bsf!reader (wc: 877)
Jack Merridew who kept his spear even after being rescued. He says it's for remembrance, that he would want his future kin to use him as an example; but it's truly because he can't accept how things have ended. It was to remind himself what he's done, how much of a monster he is, and that he can't let go that easily. He's still weak on the inside, he can't properly face it.
His body laid on the soft mattress of his bed, eyes on the ceiling just so he could avoid looking at the rotting piece of wood. It felt like something was pulling him, to try and force him to turn and look at the spear. He tried so hard not to, but he always ended up staring at it for hours; tears would fall down his unmoving face, eyes dull and surrounded with dark circles.
Jack Merridew who couldn't make anymore friends. Sure, he still had his choir, and he would try to convince everyone and himself that he was still the same cocky, Jack; but something unspoken had already shifted inside him. He never admitted it to himself, but ever since the island, he's never approached anyone else because he didn't want them to get hurt by him too.
Jack Merridew who always hung out the washroom of his academy. Washing his face with water for almost 13 times, trying to scrub everything off. It was also because he didn't want to make it obvious that he was crying, using the water as an excuse while he tried to forget about what had happened. He would shake there, gripping the edges of the sink as he hyperventilated, running off to get into an empty toilet stall to hide himself.
Jack Merridew who couldn't look at anyone eye to eye anymore. His shoulders dropped, voice slightly shaky if you listened hard enough during choir practice. He didn't even want to look at Maurice, always just looking straight through people or his eyes were looking up. He'd say it was because his head hurt, but it's been a month of these migraines of his. Nobody dared to question it anymore, partly because they didn't want to hurt him and also because they were scared of him.
Jack Merridew who didn't talk to you anymore. If you were a boy, it was because he was scared of doing to you what he did to Simon. You were one of the last few things he cared about, and he didn't want to compromise that. If you were a girl, he didn't bother paying any attention to you. Girls are gossiping about what happened to us, he would say to the others. To the others, it seemed like he was upset at the girls for doing that; to him, it was truly because he was conscious about your opinion on him.
Jack Merridew who cried at night because people were scared of him. He knew what he did, he knew the lengths he went to, he knew he couldn't blame them for it. It still hurt, though. A child being deprived of proper attention from his peers had a huge effect on them, a child being the subject of horror had worse effects. He always tugged on the hem of his polo at school, trying to make himself look calm and collected while he heard every little thing they said about him.
Jack Merridew who pretended you didn't exist. His mom would invite you over for dinner along with your family, and he would briskly eat his food so that he could escape the social setting. He couldn't face you too, knowing that your view on him had changed. He would hide in his room, locking the door behind him as he slid down the wood, crying. He couldn't force himself to interact with you at all, knowing his blood stained hands.
Jack Merridew who started hearing voices whispering to him, some sounding like Simon, some sounding like Piggy, some just someone whispering to him. He would imagine blood all over him, all over his surroundings actually. He knew it wasn't real, so why was he having a panic attack? He would be shaking in his place, curling his fist and trying to steady his breathing.
Jack Merridew who could only cry to you when he finally couldn't take it anymore. He didn't want his parents thinking lowly of him, and you had always been better at listening, even if all he did was cry. It was pure, raw rage mixed with grief, his sobs almost primal as he gripped on you tight for support. You didn't care anymore about the pain, because you knew his was worse.
Jack Merridew who finally started paying attention to you, even if it was silent stares and eating together at lunch. It wasn't much, but it was a lot of progress for someone who had gone through what he did. The beauty of being a child meant blissfully accepting things as they were, trying to live your life to the fullest with your peers. Even if you hadn't talked about it properly, you knew you'd be there for him when he was finally okay with it. Even if it took years.
with jager tinted glasses on, how do you think roger would react to jack have a crush on reader/giving reader a close amount of attention that he gives roger?
if not that oki too bc idk how you feel about jager loll (i saw these posted on ao3 first, youre so good n realistic in your writings of the lotf boys!)
roger (lord of the flies) + gender neutral reader.
word count: 3,400+
slight jack merridew + reader. this is novel roger, and does not follow bbc roger's personality! this took me a month to write, almost cried because this fic was so difficult — i didn't account for how hard roger's pov would have been. warnings for canon-typical violence! roger doesn’t realise he has a crush on jack or that anything he’s doing is abnormal (it is). can everyone be really nice to me and interact with this because it took me forever. also, really excited about getting new flies in the fandom, hi!
Roger lets it pass the first time because nothing about it appears aberrant. Jack is a creature of appetite, and not just for meat. Praise fattens him. Attention, however meagre its source is, is taken in like air. Roger has seen him preen under the gawping admiration of boys he wouldn’t otherwise bother to remember. A grubby littlun, nose running unchecked, might be indulged for a few minutes if he supplies enough breathless awe. Jack is not discriminating when the offering is sufficiently fawning.
So at first, you aren’t anything more than another mouth open in wonder.
But you linger around longer than he had anticipated. And Jack does not grow tired of you.
The first irregularity.
Roger notices it as a discomfort, a small pebble in the shoe of his observations that he can’t dislodge without removing it entirely. Where the others rush toward Jack in noisy clusters, Roger’s attention is quiet, acquisitive. He inventories things, measuring them until he figures out what to do.
You’re not anything special. This second irregularity bothers him more than the first.
Maurice stands to Jack’s right, a customary broad, gap-toothed grin splitting his face with the easy affability that has always made him tolerable to the others. He doesn’t think much of Maurice but Maurice is competent; Maurice understands instinctively when to laugh and when to shut up. He earns his place without striving for it. You, by contrast, seem to possess neither instinct nor skill. Your grin — irritable in its enthusiasm — echoes Maurice’s closely, but without the ballast of earned belonging. It looks borrowed on you, ill-fitted. Your tongue-in-cheek remarks, when you offer them, incline towards a careless impertinence that, in any other instance, would invoke swift discipline.
And yet Jack gravitates towards you.
The rest of the camp recedes into ambient noise, fire crackles, a littlun whines and someone jostles past with a holler. None of it matters to Roger.
What matters is that Jack is speaking to you.
And not just that — he’s putting on a performance.
Not delegating instruction, or delivering the curt, utilitarian directives he employs when bossing around the others, but speaking in a way that suggests that you’re an audience worth captivating. He recounts the hunt: a reconstruction shaped for dramatics, broad in wild gestures, and elevated in pitch. He lowers himself, demonstrates the stalk before the inevitable lunge at an imaginary animal. His hands carve shapes in the air, delineating the pig’s imagined path. It’s a crude pantomime delivered with a relish that indicates he’s embellishing events instead of actually recounting them, exaggerating the smaller parts to put on a good show.
You’re wholly absorbed in whatever he’s putting on. You lean forward like the sheer proximity would enhance the image he is fabricating, your eyes tracking every movement with a hungry intensity.
“I can’t believe I missed it,” you bemoan. “I should’ve been there!”
Jack grins and readily agrees, “You should’ve been there. You’d have seen. It was perfect.”
“…Will you go again?”
Jack nods resolutely. “Of course, I will! First thing tomorrow.” Then he waits to see your reaction.
“Then I’ll come too!”
There is nothing in your tone that mitigates the force of that declaration, unshaped by the usual caution: you don’t temper your desire to fit the expectations of the group when you declare it so plainly.
There is a ripple of reaction, a sharp bark of laughter, a mumbled remark, but Jack doesn’t dismiss the proclamation.
Instead, he appraises you. And this is where he expects Jack to say no, you’d only slow them down. Jack isn’t the sentimental type, he doesn’t invest in what doesn’t serve him.
But he doesn’t, what he says instead is—
“Perhaps,” Jack says.
Perhaps.
A door left ajar, and you beam at it as though it has been flung wide.
Roger decides he’s seen enough to know that this isn’t a passing anomaly. There’s a clear pattern and it needs to be dealt with accordingly.
—
Roger isn’t impulsive, so he doesn’t seek you out with immediacy. Curiousity is a slow accrual of pressure with him. He watches you over the course of the afternoon, noting unremarkable details that could collectively amount to something.
When the others shoulder the pig, you take your place among them without protest, but your hold slackens sooner than theirs, fingers adjusting, readjusting, the strain finding you a little early. The carcass swings with its own weight, and you lag by a fraction, never enough to warrant comment, but always enough to be recorded by Roger.
Your contributions arrive, they aren’t absent — not when not contributing to the structure Jack had was a surefire way to earn his ire, so you narrowly avoid it. You give what’s required and no more, your effort tapering at the edges where theirs seems to hold fast.
You complain as the others do, your voice wriggling easily into the general litany, the interminable drag of it all. The grievances are communal, you don’t stand apart in your diatribes any more than you do in your labour.
And you laugh too easily.
This, Roger finds especially vexating. Your laughter spills out at the smallest provocation. And yet Jack doesn’t seem to mind. If anything, your laughter appears to encourage him, to draw him further into his own performances.
You listen.
Is that it, then? Is that what Jack likes about you?
Roger’s head inclines slightly, he isn’t convinced. He’s quieter than you, when it counts. Doesn’t cut in, lets Jack run on without interruption, without having to fight for it.
You don’t do any of that.
It’s a nuisance, is what it is.
—
By the time he approaches you, the camp has thinned into its evening configurations. The fire has burned lower, its earlier exuberance reduced to a steady glow. The littluns have drifted toward sleep or quiet whimpering. The older boys linger in loose, half-drifting clusters, their bodies slack-limbed and food-dulled, energy seeping out of them into a sun-drunk listlessness.
You are alone, sitting a little apart from the others, sequestered on a large boulder and looking at the unfurling chaos from above. You are picking at something — a stick, perhaps — stripping it of its bark in absent-minded strokes.
Roger watches you for a moment before making his presence known, he doesn’t announce himself, but interposes himself into your line of sight and waits.
You look up.
“Roger,” you greet, lips curling into an amicable, tempered smile. There’s a modicum of confusion present too, like you can’t figure out what he’d possibly want from you.
Uncommunicative by nature, he remains silent, considering the sound of his own name in your mouth.
You have returned to your mindless task of chipping away at the remnants of bark. Once again, you look entirely ordinary.
And yet Jack will seek you out tomorrow.
Roger knows this with a certainty that feels, in its own small way, like a warning.
“Come here,” he says.
You look up, startled, then squint slightly as though trying to determine whether this is a request or an order.
“Why?”
Roger does not answer. He turns and walks.
There is a pause in which you might decide not to follow. He does not look back to check. The outcome interests him, but he won’t go out of his way to court it.
A moment later, he hears you shuffle behind him.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
You leap up to your feet, and follow him, keeping your pace. Roger adjusts his stride minutely, to ensure you must exert yourself to keep up.
The path he takes isn’t one the other boys favour. It veers away from the well-trodden routes that connect fire, shelter, and shore, slipping instead into a denser part of the island where the undergrowth thickens and the light fractures into uncertain patches.
He stops.
You nearly walk into him.
“We’re here.”
Then he steps aside.
The pit is not immediately visible. It is obscured by a careless arrangement of branches and leaves, a half-hearted camouflage. Roger nudges the covering aside with his foot, divulging the dark hollow beneath.
It is deeper than it first appears.
You peer into it, frowning.
“What is that?”
“A pit,” Roger says.
“I can see that,” you reply, a flicker of irritation imbues itself into your voice. “Why is it here?”
He shrugs.
“There are traps round here.”
You crouch at the edge, leaning forward to get a better look. The light does not reach the bottom cleanly; it gathers instead in dim layers, the canopy of trees above shades it, casting an illusory depth.
“There’s something down there,” Roger says.
You glance up at him.
“What?”
He points.
Your notice of it arrives only after an uncertain adjustment of the eye. There, at the pit’s lowest hollow, rests a small and only partially revealed object, its presence obscured by the close embrace of packed earth. From your vantage it withholds any clear form.
“What is it?” you urge again.
“Why don’t you go and see?”
You blink.
“You want me to climb down there?”
“I should have thought that obvious.”
There is a silence in which the request might congeal into something more obviously unreasonable. Roger watches your face, waiting for the refusal, any instinctive self-preservation that should assert itself any moment now.
Instead, your mouth inches into a half-smile.
“That’s it?”
He feels like he must have frowned.
You grin, similar to the unguarded one you offer to Jack. It catches Roger off guard.
“Alright then,” you say.
Before he can figure out a way to respond, you swing your legs over the edge and begin to lower yourself into the pit.
For a moment, Roger just watches.
You descend with an awkward determination, your footing uncertain but persistent. The sides of the pit are not smooth; roots protrude, offering precarious handholds. Dirt loosens under your weight, falling in small cascades that patter softly against the ground below.
Roger doesn’t offer assistance.
You reach the bottom with a muted thud, knees bending to absorb the impact. For a second, you remain crouched, orienting yourself, then you straighten and look up.
“Well?” you call. “What am I supposed to be looking for?”
Roger does not answer immediately.
There is something about the way you stand there, confined within the circumference of the pit, that sharpens his attention. You look diminished and contained.
“Just pick it up,” he says finally.
You roll your eyes and turn to locate the object. It takes you a moment, but then you crouch and retrieve it, brushing away the dirt.
“It’s just a rock,” you say.
There is a note of disbelief in your voice, you had clearly been expecting something more.
“Bring it up,” Roger says.
You look up at him.
There is a beat.
“Help me up, then.”
Roger makes no move to help.
You stare at him.
“You need to help me,” you reason carefully, voice wavering. “How else am I supposed to get out of here?”
Another silence.
“Very funny,” you say, but there is no humour in it.
Roger does not respond.
You wait.
Your voice follows him, rising, shifting from irritation to something harsher.
“Roger, don’t— you can’t be serious?! Roger!”
—
Roger doesn’t think about the time much on the island, it’s not like it matters much. But it’s long enough for the light to shift, for the heat to dull into something less oppressive and sweltering.
When he returns, it’s with no real sense of urgency.
The path is the same. The undergrowth does not resist him. The pit reveals itself as before, its careless covering disturbed.
He approaches the edge.
And pauses.
You’re not where he left you.
He lifts his dark gaze, scanning, his attention unspooling into the dimming island. The horizon is in the act of undoing itself, light seeping away like a secret reluctantly surrendered. Tree trunks conspire with shadow, bleeding downwards into the earth until the ground becomes indistinguishable.
Then, from somewhere behind him:
“You’ve got a lot of nerve coming back.”
Your voice.
Roger turns.
You stand a few feet away, besmirched with earth and sweat. The evening light finds the streaks upon your skin and the dull sheen of exertion. In your hand, the small rock is still clutched, a token wrested, your fingers close round it.
You look apoplectic.
Not the petulant irritation he has seen flicker across your face before. Your eyes are bright with it, like a bolt of lightning with nowhere else to go.
“How did you get out?” he asks.
There are scrapes along your arms, dirt ground into your skin, evidence of effort that must have been prolonged. The sides of the pit are not easily climbed. It would have required determination. He should have accounted for how persistent you always were.
There isn’t much left to say. Roger never has a lot to fill the silence with — that’s usually left up to others.
He is curious when you take a step toward him and then another, and then you’re sprinting towards him and he belatedly registers alarm.
You close the distance in a single rush and drive both hands into his chest. The impact jolts through him; Roger stumbles back, feet catching on a gnarled root half-buried in the soil. He goes down awkwardly, the air knocked loose from him.
The rock is still in your grip.
You raise your hand, lancing it down. Roger rolls, narrowly avoiding the blow, and the stone scrapes empty air. You lunge after him again anyway, face tightened with indignation.
You manage to land a hit this time.
It’s not a large rock, but it doesn’t need to be. The sound it makes is enough. Roger cries out, an involuntary sound, and something in his expression fractures into a thin, venomous sneer.
He catches your arm as you draw back for another strike and twists. Pain flares hot and immediate, but you refuse the instinct to let go. Your grip tightens instead, knuckles tightening, even as the strain forces a sound out of you that is closer to shock than anything coherent.
The rock falls out of your hand.
You are shaking slightly, still carrying the aftershock of a paroxysm of anger that hasn’t been properly expelled from your body. Your breath comes quick and uneven, unable to settle into anything you can control.
You look nothing like you did earlier, standing at Jack’s side. Nothing like the rapt attentive, cheeky figure you present yourself as.
A shed carapace implies growth with the creature outgrowing its old constraints. But this feels more like being flayed, the outer layer gone with nothing to replace it, left with a sensitivity that is intolerable and a barrage of sensation that arrives amplified. The torrid heat is unbearable against your skin, the ground bumpy under your feet.
You are now left wordless and furious and trembling with rage.
Roger lunges for the rock and you dive to where it is, already prepared to intercept, your hand crashes down over his with such a blunt force that his knuckles are driven straight into the dirt, skin grinding against soil, your fingers locking over his in a grip that is more of a refusal to concede even the illusion of him having it. He jerks, the motion ricocheting back through you so that the two of you are tethered by this contested rock, the object shifting, chafing between your palms. It never settles in one hand, as if it resents being claimed at all and then, you relinquish it abruptly.
Your hand leaves the rock mid-struggle and finds him instead, surging upwards into his hair, closing there, a fistful wrenched tight and yanked, hard enough that his head snaps back violently, his body dragged after it too unprepared.
He barges, an attempt to break the stalemate through impact. You answer immediately, hurling back with equal disregard for form, the exchange devolving into unadorned, a contest of refusal to lose, each of you endeavouring to impose direction on the other without the courtesy of any actual fighting technique. He tries to turn, to slip the axis of his body out from under your hold, but every effort is interrupted, each yank forcing his body to comply with a trajectory he wants to avoid, his hand is still clamped around your arm, nails digging deeper and frantic now, more punishing, as he tries to peel you off piece by piece.
You refuse to yield to him, not when he started it. You pull again.
And this time it works.
You drive him.
It’s hardly efficient but there’s a relentless, forward insistence that denies him the time needed to recover, each step you force him into is misaligned, his attempts to brace undermined by the lingering imbalance, his shove back lacks the foundation it needs to matter.
He’s off-centre now, irretrievably so, his off-kiltered body doesn’t answer him with his earlier precision, each correction compounds the error instead of rectifying it. You see it happen: the resistance thinning and his footing giving way beneath the constant pressure you refuse to ease up on.
And you don’t hesitate, not even for a second.
You give him one hard shove, everything in you thrown behind it, an unbroken act of force that leaves no room for you to think on.
He goes down awkwardly, it happens too fast.
Roger lands badly.
The impact jars through bone, a blunt, internal shock that steals the air from him more effectively than any blow. For a moment he doesn’t move, the shock keeps him rooted, body folding in on itself in the abyss-depth of the pit. He feels numb for a while, conjuring up an emotion takes its time.
His tongue presses, once, against the tender rise on the inner wall of his cheek where you’d struck him. A trace of iron seeps across his palate, there’s no gush of blood, only the faintest metallic taste. He holds it there a moment longer than necessary before letting his tongue withdraw, leaving the swelling to continue its discreet ascent.
Roger gets to his feet, with no urgency, one hand brushing dirt from his thigh while the other hangs loose at his side. His leg answers with a low, stubborn ache, lodged deep and spreading, dulling rather than sharpening. He shifts his weight once to settle it, then again, until the discomfort folds into the rest of him and is no longer worth attending to. He doesn’t bother calling out for you. He already knows you’re not there.
He finds his footing in the shallow grooves cut into the sides, the marks crude but serviceable, each one holding just enough to bear his weight. His heart strikes hard against his ribs, a rapid, insistent knocking. So Jack had not been humouring you.
He hauls himself upwards with controlled effort, arms tightening, shoulders drawing in. His breath comes quickly, short bursts escaping one after another, his eyelids flickering with an involuntary energy that borders on anticipation. The dirt gives slightly beneath his hands, loose and shifting, disturbed where yours must have scraped and pressed in search of hold. He digs his fingers in deeper, as if he could excavate your fingerprints from the soil, he imagines the same dirt under your nails from when you had clambered out as there is in his.
He sinks his fingers deeper into the wall of the pit, past the friable crust into the denser, cooler earth beneath, where the soil yields with a reluctant give and then holds him there. The grooves are unmistakably yours, each one a record of effort from your earlier clambering. He fits his hand into them, aligning palm to hollow, fingers to the shallow impressions left behind, like the ground still retains the warmth of your tightened grip.
The dirt works its way under his nails, settling into the same narrow crescents, the same spaces where yours must have gathered as you hauled yourself up. He considers that briefly, the shared grime and the matching traces. His thumb presses into one of the deeper marks, testing its shape, testing the amount of pressure and doggedness it must have taken to carve it there.
For a moment he doesn’t move. His hand remains planted, claimed by the impression left behind.
a bunch of random roger headcanons because why the hell NOT. everything you read is canon because he actually told all this 2me personally :'
roger is 100% an only child, who has a VERY normal family who love him. his mum and dad probably just think roger is too clever and mature to be into all the rough and tumble games boys his age get up to. his parents don’t suspect that he’s a little shit outside of home at all + both happen to be under the impression that he’s a little angel
occasionally has weird frog blink twitches where he blinks one eye at a time + his voice happens to be very deep for someone who is so small, whenever people hear him speak for the first time they’re always confused
his nails are genuinely DISGUSTINGGGGGG, he bites them down so far to the point where they’re constantly raw and bleeding it’s really nastyyyy + he’s a compulsive skin picker and has all these small little scars all over his body because he genuinely cannot leave a blemish alone.
^^ when roger was really little he used to flick his scabs at people when they weren’t looking because he found it humorous. nobody else finds this funny tho it’s actually just really odd and nasty….
when he was little, he was one of those kids who had an terrifying amount of grip strength like Ok. Sure :| YES he’s literally SIX YEARS OLD and scrawny as fuck but he can open a jam jar by himself !!!!!!!!!
has a sweet tooth but only for the really hard boiled sweets that only old people eat that cut the roof of your mouth
reads a lot of very dry factual books. things like anatomy diagrams + maps. maybe about animals ??????? tbh i don’t really think he’d like fiction or poetry because it relies too much on emotion which he finds emotions sometimes to be very messy….and confusing for him so he wouldn’t really dabble into fiction… (idk why i put hc hes literally a sociopath Girl WHATEVER)
maurice once walked into the dorms and found roger laying like a corpse, which is how he normally sleeps. flat on his back ^^^ it would have been normal and nothing 2 worry about but his eyes were wide open. poor maurice thought he was roger was having a vision and almost called for a master. roger was actually just asleep with his eyes open like like a LITTLE FREAK.
rogers fav saint is st. sebastian, he likes how still and peaceful he looks in the paintings even though he’s full of arrows. he told his mum once in passing that he liked the “patience” of the saint (he actually just likes the iconography of things being pinned down and unable to move but shhhhhhhh shhhhhh…….)
wtf i really need to start proof reading. he thought ROGER was having a vision oops.*******
for context, i hc roger to have aspd, and when i researched it, a common experience that popped up repeatedly was that in childhood, people with aspd would describe seeking extreme tastes/sensory experiences to counteract their chronic boredom.
so i present to you, what roger consumes...
🤢 victory v lozenges
had chloroform and ether in them, and had an eye-watering burn of chemical-grade menthol, deep bitter liquorice, and linseed oil. they also left a gritty taste in the back of your throat when you eat them
🤢 jellied eels
chopped up river thames eels boiled in a spiced broth😍😍
as it cools, the natural proteins from the fish bones congealed into a thick, cold, slimy grey aspic jelly wrapping around the fish..
you have to slide it into your mouth, and spit out the eels vertibrae💀
🤢 liquorice sherbet dib dabs
this flop was made by pairing a stick of salty, bitter, slightly rubbery black liquorice with a packet of incredibly sour, fizzy white chemical sherbet powder...
as you dip the wet liquorice stick into the bag, the sherbet reacts with your saliva inside the packet, creating a gritty, foaming, cement grey sludge that tastes simultaneously hyper sour and bitterly salty
🤢 rare steak
this one isnt necessarily disgusting to eat- steak is nice. but when you cut into a rare steak, a deep red liquid pools onto the plate (myoglobin, just a protein mixed w water)
but this looks a lot like blood...and the unseared red centre looks completely unfinished
🤢 cough candy
these were gorgeous little balls, in a nice jar loking very pretty. but when you ate one, instead of orange or strawberry, your tongue was aggressively assaulted by a heavy, punchy wave of herbal aniseed, menthol, and clove oil
and cuz the 1950s version didnt use any modern artificial flavorings, it relied on highly concentrated, raw essential oils
the vapor was so strong it would immediately cause your eyes to water and shoot a freezing hot sensation straight up into the sinuses💔
🤢 tripe and onions
i present to you, the rubbery, honeycomb-textured inner lining of a cow’s stomach, slowly boiled in milk with onions until it turned translucent and soft😌
this shit smells STRONGLY of an alive cow...and its rubbery as fuck...
🤢 herbal twists
this horrible sweet is packed with horehound (from the mint family and VERYYY bitter) coltsfoot and hyssop...
to keep the sweets shelf-stable in large glass jars, they used heavy amounts of unrefined sugar and glucose, meaning the sweet had a deeply rustic, slightly burnt molasses background flavor underneath the bitter weeds
and it tastes like dirt, damp autumn leaves, and grass...the botanical oils in it meant it made this peppery burn at the back of your throat
🤢 pressed ox tongue
when sliced, you can clearly see the giant taste buds and rough texture of the cow's tongue staring back at you from your sandwich...
it has an incredibly strong, metallic iron taste
🤢 floral gums
these tiny, colorful, translucent domes look like harmless gummy drops
but ohh, the lies.
they were made using a heavy hand of gum arabic (to make them hard and incredibly dense) mixed with real, raw botanical flower oils like geranium, rose, and lavender...
meaning these fuckers taste exactly like a mouthful of liquid perfume or premium hand soap
because they are SO physically hard, you cant even chew them, you have to suck them for ages as they slowly bleed heavy, perfume oils into your mouth💔
🤢 brains on toast
this is calf or pig brains gently simmered, fried in a pan with butter, and smeared over a piece of white toast😔🥀
this has an intensely mushy, soft, custard-like texture with a deeply metallic, mineral flavour...sooo uhh enjoy i guess💀
🤢 parma violets
this was made with chalky binding agents like stearic acid and magnesium carbonate, heavily scented with violet-flower extract oil
they taste exactly like an elderly relative's bathroom smelled, with a heavily artificial, sweet, floral perfume profile
🤢 mock banana sandwiches
fun fact bananas were still an exotic luxury in the early 50s!
but because they were viewed as super duper chic, to copy them, people boiled parsnips until they were soft, mashed them with sugar, and added a single drop of artificial "banana essence" flavoring.
this resulted in a gritty, starchy, sugary root vegetable paste that had a taste i can genuinely only describe as betrayal
🤢 navy lozenges
originally given to ww1 trench soldiers and sailors to boost morale and keep them awake, these hard black lozenges historically contained OPIUM💀 to numb physical pain and suppress coughs
i think roger buys the actual authentically vintage ww1 crusty old ones too...
🤢 black coffee
the british coffee market in the early 1950s was dominated by two things, neither of which yielded a clean cup of black coffee:
1) camp coffee: this was the most popular "coffee" choice in households! it wasn't beans, rather it was a thick, brown, syrupy liquid essence made of sugar, water, 25% chicory extract, and only 4% dried coffee extract..
if you drank this black with water, it didn't taste like coffee, it tasted like a strangely burnt, intensely sweet, medicinal weed juice💀
2) robusta (instant coffee): robusta beans are much easier to grow than arabica beans, but they are naturally twice as caffeinated, twice as bitter, and possess a distinct, harsh flavor profile often compared to burnt rubber or wood💀
the standard method of serving coffee in cafes was to brew a massive glass jug of drip filter coffee and let it sit on an electric hotplate for hours...
as the water slowly evaporated out of the jug all afternoon, the coffee cooked over and over again.
by the time it was poured into a cup black, it was a thick, volatile liquid that tasted "as black as soot".
another fun fact- it was acidic enough to give you instant heartburn and left a heavy, tar like bitter coating on your tongue💀
🤢 aniseed balls
this has layers of boiled sugar wrapped around a single, real rapeseed or aniseed seed at the absolute center, they were heavily infused with aniseed essential oil
these do NOT taste sweet... they tasted intensely of pungent black licorice, accompanied by a sharp, peppery, medicinal burn that intensified the closer you got to the middle
but it stains your mouth teeth and tongue bright red
🤢 baking chocolate
this has pure, unsweetened 100% raw cocoa mass and cocoa butter, with absolutely zero added sugar, milk, or vanilla...
in the 50s, this was brutally bitter, dusty, and completely dry.... taking a bite results in a dusty, chalky explosion of pure bitterness that completely sucks all the moisture out of your mouth, leaving you coughing on bitter brown powder...
every lotf shipper likes to torture simon. i see your creepy abusive toxic buzz rogermon and i raise you the concept of maurimon. maurice the funny jester boy and simon the sensitive quiet kid. at least as friends. isn’t that cute and heartwarming??? hop on
○ Roger definetly had an ant farm back home in England. He was strangely attached to it
○ If the lotf boys lived in modern times, Piggy would be the BIGGEST Quora user
○ One of Ralph's biggest interests is boats, like the big warships his dad wouldve worked with in the navy. He owns countless books about ships and begs his dad to take him to see the navy boats
○ Jack rarely ever took his choir hat off on the island
○ Jack and Roger both have HORRENDOUS posture
○ Maurice smacks his lips like crazy when he eats. The poor boy cannot bring himself to chew with his mouth closed and it drove Roger crazy during their feasts on the island
○ Jack's singing voice deteriorated a lot while on the island. Once back in England he became obsessed with training to get it back
- played bloxburg occasionally, always offered to be the dad in random roleplay servers and genuinely got upset when the kids were misbehaving and usually left afterwards from frustration
- tried tye-dying shirts with a kit he got on his birthday and had no clue how to do it correctly so it just looked terrible. his dad was disappointed to say the least when he saw 3 plain white shirts ruined because of this dumbass kit
- thought the bee movie script was funny asf before seeing it EVERYWHERE, now he finds it annoying
- makes “relatable” tiktoks that somewhat get views but the choir makes fun of him for it
- bumping ‘stay’ on his headphones 24/7
- has those decorative vines up in his room
- is locked IN on roblox arsenal
- tried watching DSMP but didnt find it entertaining so he quit almost immediately
- disliked it even more after his voice was being compared to tommyinnits
- would watch tiktok POV videos and get upset when there wasnt a second part but unrelated videos posted instead
piggy
- extreme denier of those tiktok fairy / shifter accounts and always goes in the comments replying to everyone thinking its real telling them its fake and provides all sorts of evidence to prove it, and the og poster would reply to him with a video so obviously fake to counter him and he would FUME
- had a time limit on tiktok from his auntie so whenever he was locked out of tiktok he went to youtube and watched tiktok compilations instead
- actually liked watching those gacha life tiktoks where the audio repeated 2000 times because the audio was too short for the length of the video
- has BEEF with the game piggy on roblox because everyone kept comparing him to the game and peppa pig ever since
- tried doing the renegade once and never again
- takes zoom class VERY seriously
- STOCKED on toilet paper
jack
- would make among us lobbies with simon, maurice, roger, robert and bill and would always have to repeat the code 5 times because someone kept mishearing it. would (begrudgingly) invite ralph and sometimes piggy so they could have a bigger lobby. everyone FEARS roger being imposter cause hes the only good liar there so he always ends up winning
- tried to make a minecraft SMP, failed
- has an ego boost whenever he sees his zodiac sign being in the “dangerous” or “scary” category in those astrology tiktoks
- plays tower of hell but gets SO mad while playing he ends up quitting 5 minutes in
- would laugh at cringe compilation videos
- has a slender avatar on roblox and gets bullied for it
- has a green screen zoom background and thinks hes the coolest for it
simon
- cottage core + mushroom warrior
- LOVES his nintendo switch and always plays animal crossing on it, with some mario kart from time to time if ralph or piggy wanted to play
- cavetown, clario, alex g, and ricky montgomery was constantly playing on repeat
- loved frogs, and bought THE frog bucket hat but never wore it
- led lights EVERYWHERE in his room
- wattpad reader, will never admit it
- makes beaded bracelets for his friends which they usually dont wear and just sit atop of their shelf at home
- tried out the “alt artstyle” and kept on sketching too hard so whenever he made a mistake it was impossible to erase and he ended up with lead all over his bed because of it. took him 2 hours to complete a headshot and he wasnt satisfied so he just threw it away
- yes, do not enter is written on his doorway
maurice
- wanted to join the hypehouse SO BAD, learned all the trending tiktok dances and posted them on his tiktok account that got around 14 likes max, besides from one, which got 2k likes and he bragged about it all the time
- plays adopt me and scams people with roger with the good old ‘trust trade’
- he once got scammed on adopt me and he cried over it, and he never told a soul because he was embarrassed
- does all sorts of stupid shit in online class and thinks hes hilarious for it
- thinks YTPs are the funniest thing ever and shows them to everyone in the choir, to the amusement of no one (especially jack)
- adored flamingo and wore those troll pepsi can avatars on roblox. again, he thought he was funny for it
- dueted peoples singing challenge videos on tiktok
- savage love on repeat
- rickrolled everyone in sight
- “sussy baka”
- loves those felicia and patrica roblox vids on tiktok and sent them to roger saying “they are so us 😌😌✨💅” and roger never replied
roger
- absolute discordian
- stays up all night watching twitch streamers, usually corpse ( he thinks corpse is the tuffest shit ever )
- scams people on adopt me with maurice except he doesnt play adopt me, he just thinks kids crying over their virtual pets is funny
- mother mother listener
- got a skateboard because he liked the design on it, but couldnt actually ride the skateboard so now it rots in his closet
- drinks monster TOO much, has made a monster can gun and acts like its his original and niche idea
- thinks those cringe pov skits are tuff. ian boggs follower
- has a mask with an unusual design on it and thinks its mysterious and cool
- likes playing flicker on roblox but is always bored whenever hes on the good side
samneric
- their parents always bought them fidget toys and they LOVED them
- would always fidget trade with each other and do tiktok skits of fidget trading
- “abc for cute kids” on bloxburg
- have converses with matching beads on the laces
- does troom troom pranks that fail mostly
- doing EVERY trend involving two people together
- “send this to your bestie” videos
- loves playing kahoot games together
- think fairy comments are the funniest thing ever
