pre-island maurice headcanons:
maurice recounts stories with the discipline of a dog chasing three rabbits at once. every anecdote is derailed by some vague ass detail that’s seized his attention en route. he’s laughing before he even reaches the funny part and he’ll dissolve into helpless wheezing halfway through a sentence, forcing everyone to wait while he attempts to recover. this continues for a while until everyone just starts laughing at him laughing/the absurdity of the situation.
maurice is a bully, but he doesn’t register it as such until it’s too late. it tends to reveal itself in retrospect, in the crumpling of someone’s face. he pushes things too far without noticing the point at which they become nasty. afterwards, he just feels guilty. it’s not playful ribbing either, he fully partakes in the bullying alongside jack, he just doesn’t think much of it until someone is visibly upset.
maurice is very aware of jack’s flaws. he recognises the exaggerated lies (occasionally choosing to believe them anyway) and the leaps in logic that somehow pass unchallenged by everyone when jack delivers them with enough conviction. yet he rarely contradicts him. partly because he understands jack’s sensitivities and instinctively frames things in ways that preserve his social dignity. and also because he genuinely thinks highly of him. his disagreements are heavily sugarcoated and he beats around the bush with any criticism he has. by the time maurice has finished buffering his opinion, the objection has become so cushioned that it doesn’t even register as one [ex: “I mean when Jack says you can be frightened because people are frightened anyway that’s all right. But when he says there’s only pigs on this island I expect he’s right but he doesn’t know, not really, not certainly I mean’]
speaking of exaggerated lies: jack lies to make himself look good and maurice adds stray details onto the story that has jack looking at him with an expression that is both pleased and incredulous. if jack saw something moving in the trees, maurice embellishes it by describing the sound it made, and an estimated size of it. maurice laughs at jack’s anecdotes and jokes even when he doesn’t find them funny because he knows that jack just wants a reaction (also why i think jack went to roger for validation during that one scene, but i digress).
maurice is really good at making points and would probably be a good member of a debate team if he were interested. he isn’t. jack and piggy, on the other hand, have the temperament for it, the need to turn every disagreement into something that needs to be resolved properly in their own myopic ways. maurice’s way of framing arguments is more appealing because it never ever sounds like he’s forcing you to stay and listen. it just doesn’t feel like being held in place by someone else’s certainty, you feel like you have an option and the right to express your own opinions. jack and piggy both have that quality in different forms.
stops in the middle of nowhere so whichever choir boy is lined up behind him walks straight into him. he has very little spatial awareness, but he’s good at geography, so people assume it’s intentional rather than absent-minded.
when he was younger, maurice would pick up phrases from his mum and his aunties without really understanding the boundaries they belonged to. things like “she’s got a face like a smacked arse” would slip out, and the grown-ups would howl as if it were the cleverest thing they had ever heard. people laughed at the time, but as he got older, the novelty wore off and everyone just didn’t think it was cute anymore and he’d get told off for being rude.
hates HATES awkward silences — he’ll make small talk with people he doesn’t like just so no one has to sit in them. it makes him uncomfortable. he’s willing to set aside personal grudges to break tension in a group, but that same instinct means he sometimes avoids pointing things out if it risks making things awkward.
loved playing with dolls with his sisters, but the habit quickly got stomped out after jack found out about boys playing with “girls’ toys” and made it something to be mocked. jack wouldn’t even need to target maurice specifically, the threat of becoming the next object of ridicule would probably be enough.
him and simon both remember tiny details about people, but people only think it’s normal coming from maurice. he slips them into conversation so casually, with the right timing and social context, that people don’t notices how much he’s retained and are pleasantly surprised about it and feel special. but god forbid simon does it 😭 he’ll mention something out of the blue and people are weirded tf out: “why on earth does he remember that? that’s so odd.” they don’t think of simon as someone socially close enough for that kind of knowledge to feel natural, whereas with maurice everyone assumes he’s being friendly.
he gets put next to shy or introverted students, to help them contribute more to class discussions, and it works because he’s amicable with everyone. sometimes makes fun of them, but because he’s in class he doesn’t take it too far because he knows he’ll get done for it. he has a way of making it seem like the shy student is talking a lot, when in reality he’s just talking enough for the both of them (and probably over them too).
titsay
annaxmalina
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ellievsbear
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