#maureen hcs

[thebohoblog]

Random headcanon #1

Maureen sleeps in a cow onesie, 100%

[anthonyampersand]

hello, @headlines-breadlines-blowmymind and I were arguing again, this time over the line “Maureen, this is not my bar mitzvah!” and whether that was the reason the fandom sees Maureen as Jewish even though as far as we can tell this is never mentioned in canon. Please give us your insight on this line.

i think this comes from a few places? first, idina menzel's family is jewish, i'm not entirely sure if she is but, yeah. she used to work singing at bar mitzvahs and weddings when she was a teenager... so, of course, actor-character fanon is a factor here.

then there's the fact that scarsdale, new york has a large, active jewish community. that line you mentioned (which is from the movie, so i wonder if this fanon has only gotten more popular since the second wave of the fandom?) implies that mark has known maureen since he was at LEAST thirteen, and they're of a similar age, which in turn implies that maureen's family probably lived in scarsdale, too.

you're right, though: maureen is never explicitly referred to as a jewish character in canon as far as i know. just mark.

[anthonyampersand]

"that time you got your period while i was going down on you after you assured me that you weren't due to get it until next week" is joanne's trump card in ALL of her arguments with maureen for fucking years

[anthonyampersand]

Have you ever considered Nonbinary Woman Maureen? It just popped in ny head, and I love it

yes! i usually think of maureen as being genderfluid but i can see her being nonbinary in general, yeah. especially a nonbinary woman seeing as she (in earlier iterations of the show, anyway) identifies herself as a lesbian, which tells me that she has at least some meaningful connection to womanhood. i would love to see content about maureen exploring her gender.

i’ve read plenty about her exploring her sexuality, but exploring gender is so different imo, and i think it would be interesting.

i’d also love to see how joanne would react to something like that. idk why but i’ve always thought of joanne as the sort of lesbian who has literally NEVER had any interest in any boy or man, ever in her life (i’d say “gold star” but like… bad connotations). like, i don’t think joanne would be remotely attracted to a trans man, regardless of whether they pass or not, because she’s got a hard aversion to men in general.

so it would be cool to see her and maureen navigating the weirdness that comes with having a partner who makes you question your sexuality all over again, because i’ve been there! and that’s not a story that i see enough of in media, even in fanfic.

maureen just strikes me as a feminist at heart. i guess that you can be a feminist regardless of your gender but idk… i think she encounters a lot of misogyny in her daily life and i think that femininity gives her comfort in a lot of ways. on the flip side, i think that she sometimes feels like her thoughts expand.. outside of that box, i guess. like, i think that in her questioning process, she probably originally thought that she wasn’t a woman at all because of her complicated feelings, and for a while “genderqueer” felt right and radical, but eventually she realized that it felt just as stifling and uncomfortable to deny her connection to womanhood as it had felt to adhere strictly to womanhood, and she resolves that she’s both. and that? feels absolutely right.

(side note, i can totally see collins and maureen getting drunk together and having lively, heated discussions about the gender binary and the ways in which it’s enforced and in which it’s harmful, and what gender means when removed from the context of the binary, etc. in public, with a growing crowd of confused, amused, and concerned onlookers. eventually they get thrown out of the bar for being just completely smashed and rowdy and collins passes out, so when mark and roger show up in a cab to take them home, mo is just kind of holding him upright with one arm around him and one bracing herself desperately on the brick beside her.)

[anthonyampersand]

Maureen

otp: mojo, by a very wide margin, followed by markeen

brotp: she and collins are UNSTOPPABLE together

notp: not sure i have one, honestly

fav thing about her: she says exactly what she means. there’s no pussyfooting around with maureen. not anymore, anyway. (i sort of think she may have been more inclined to be passive aggressive when she was with mark, but when she left him i think she gave up on that shit entirely. time to be bold!) she is who she is and she makes no apologies for it. maureen doesn’t feel the need to defend herself against people like benny who try to make her insecure, or make her seem like a bad person for making noise. she’s going to keep making noise anyways and FUCK YOU, BENNY, for good measure. 

[anthonyampersand]

it occurred to me for the first time the other night that when maureen and joanne break up on christmas, they've only been together a month? then they break up again just over two months into the new year. they get back together in without you (sometime in the spring), and break up YET AGAIN in contact, which i want to assume happens in the late summer/fall.

idk how much of the year they even spent together as a couple! where the hell was maureen living?!

[anthonyampersand]

more headcanon meme thing

MAUREEN JOHNSON:

her favorite dessert is chocolate mousse or ganache! she’s a fan of really rich foods, and chocolate is her weakness.

though school never held her interest, her best and favorite subject was art history, and psychology was a close second.

i wrote about her voice recently, here it is:

maureen speaks in a singsong way most of the time, without realizing it. when she was young, boys told her that she had an ugly voice because she was extremely loud. she has an abrasive voice and owns the fact that she’s got a big mouth, does a lot of shouting (because she’s excited or because she’s got something important to say), and even when she’s not shouting, sounds pretty much the same. on a low-high scale i’d say she’s aboooout in the middle, although… maybe you could call her voice high, if she’s genuinely excited, shrill especially when she’s upset. when she’s just trying to get people stoked, her voice stays mid-range even as it gets louder. she’s a mezzo-soprano.

her hands are average-sized, relatively feminine, and usually decorated with half a dozen fashion rings. she paints her nails; she used to love acrylics, but since she got with joanne she’s given them up (obvious reasons... lol). she thinks of herself as having fat fingers, and it’s true that they’re definitely not slender or delicate - her ring size is a 9 or 10, even though she’s on the slim side - she doesn’t have trouble fitting all those rings on her fingers. they do get stuck sometimes, though, particularly on her middle fingers.

maureen doesn’t want kids. she isn’t all that interested in them in general. my headcanon for maureen has always been that she doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body that’s not entirely focused on her cat, which suits joanne just fine. if she were tasked with caring for a kid, i think she’d do okay because she’s empathetic and kind, and in touch with her youthful side, willing to do embarrassing shit and answer questions that a lot of adults are uncomfortable answering, or don’t know how to answer... she doesn’t mind cleaning up after kids or letting them be emotional, even if they’re acting up. i think maureen might love other people’s kids - like, she’d absolutely babysit for her friends or neighbors - she just has no desire to have one of her own. (and joanne agrees.)

for breakfast, maureen would absolutely be the avocado toast kind of person. she has a lot of vegan recipes up her sleeve, her favorite of which is a vegan french toast recipe that even her friends can agree is delicious. (her friends are understandably wary of anything she makes because maureen is WEIRD and a little too experimental with her cooking)

maureen has an varied and eccentric sense of humor. she loves gay jokes and especially loves to make uptight homophobes uncomfortable with them. she used to love offensive jokes on principle as a teenager, but she’s gained a lot of perspective and has started to feel bad for it and try to make up for it in adulthood. now, maureen is more inclined to make people like benny the butt of her jokes. aside from that, she loves dirty jokes.

breaking maureen would be HARD. she’s tough as hell, and has always had a great support system. she can take losing jobs, losing material possessions, losing opportunities... she can even take losing friends, although it takes a toll on her. losing angel pushes her in a positive direction rather than a negative one. i actually think the only easy way to do it would be to take her family away - either by killing them off or taking their emotional closeness away. she’s always been a daddy’s girl and she values his support and his approval. if he ever cut ties with her for any reason, i think she’d lose her will.

her deadly sin has always been lust. i think her relationship with joanne might change that, though.

stealth is not among maureen’s skills. she’s loud and direct, at all times, including when she’s flirting. conversationally, she can’t resist taking bait when she’s trying to avoid a subject, so she’s pretty bad at keeping her own secrets and sometimes other people’s secrets, unless they’re really serious. i don’t think she’d ever make a good spy.

[anthonyampersand]

random maureen headcanons that i haven't probably ever talked much about:

she had a pet rabbit as a teenager, but had to leave back at home with her parents when she moved to the city; she and mark got together around the time the bunny finally kicked the bucket and he came home with her to help her lay it to rest. (possibly they got together Because of this, but i can never decide)

she and mark were best friends as teenagers because they were both kind of weird and lived next door to each other. mark used to come hide at her place when his parents were fighting. her parents mostly approved of him and gave them WAY too much unsupervised alone time, but though she and mark went back and forth having crushes on each other, they never actually dated or did anything together as teenagers.

she was a theatre kid in high school, and she used to drag mark to see all of the plays and musicals. he ended up hanging around during rehearsal, away from the actors because he was too socially anxious for that shit, and that's how he met the tech/lighting crew and learned how to do a lot of the stuff that comes in handy later when maureen starts doing performance art.

she has had a Lot of piercings, but by the time we see her in rent she's taken most of them out. basically the only thing she's never pierced are her genitals or nipples, and she's ALWAYS been curious about getting her nipples pierced, but joanne is grossed out by it so she turns down her only opportunity to get it done for free.

she had braces when she first moved to scarsdale (she likes to pretend that period of her life never happened, especially bc she wore her hair exclusively in braids at the time)

she has a huge fun sock collection, i.e. colorful socks, knee high socks, fuzzy socks, holiday-themed and novelty socks (like with googly eyes and pockets and shit on them)

when she first left home, she cut her hair suuuuper short and her mom fainted upon seeing it for the first time (mark's mom was horrified too)

she and mark's mom were actually relatively close for a while and she keeps in touch with her even when mark's not speaking to her - when they were together she CONSTANTLY nagged mark to call his mom back and tried to drag him home to visit their parents together.

joanne is her first proper girlfriend and she's super nervous when they get together because up until that point, she's had this internalized doubt - even though she's slept with at least three women - that maybe she just THINKS she likes girls, maybe she just wants to be counterculture, maybe she just wants to rebel against her parents expectations... so she's unsure and kind of at a loss throughout the first six months of their relationship??

the reason that she freaks out at their engagement party is that she and joanne actually haven't even been together a year, and she didn't mean to propose it just HAPPENED, and she's still dealing with all of these doubts that she's never been able to express properly to anyone and it's. it's a lot. she doesn't want to disappoint joanne and she's so scared.

she drinks beer when she's out because she doesn't hate it, but she never has beer at home. she complains when she goes to the loft and that's all they have in the fridge. "what are you two, teenagers?! not even any vodka?!?"

her friends know her as "that bitch who can put away two bottles of wine by herself"

has always had a crazy metabolism and been able to eat whatever she wants, makes everyone around her jealous. it's a big joke with her friends that maureen always has snacks at the ready, chips in her purse, etc.

goes through a phase where she won't buy any clothes from major outlets/brands and consequently wears basically nothing but very weird, often unflattering thrift shop clothing.

she's vegan, and has been a vegetarian since she was ten. she finally went vegan while she was with mark and he was vegan with her for nearly four years.

her parents still financially support her whenever she needs it because she's their only child and they're both wealthy and retired. she doesn't ever have to worry about paying her rent.

she's bounced from weird job to weird job since she came to the city, including working as a body/face painter at fairs/carnivals/events, at a candy shop at one point, a sex toy shop (it was inevitable), as a receptionist at a vets office which lead her to discover veterinary acupuncture (she was determined to do THAT for a living until she realized she had to be a licensed veterinarian before she could practice it legally), and briefly as a feng shui consultant (she didn't get a ton of calls but it was one of her absolute favorite short-lived careers, she met a lot of very cool people)

most people don't know this, but she has an associates degree in gender and sexuality studies which she got before she and mark reconnected and got together. it's part of what helped her solidify her identity as a bisexual woman.

her favorite shirt is this tacky scarsdale tourist t-shirt that mark got her at a gas station during their first month as a couple. it's a long story, but she had been doused in iced coffee and nothing else was open in the middle of the night, and they were walking home. it's light gray with a dark gray shape of new york state in the background, overlaid with "Scarsdale" in blue cursive lettering, and its horribly baggy on her, but even after they break up she still wears it to bed all the time as pajamas. it's oddly comforting.