Anonymous asked: Gosh, you like a lot of the same things as me and seeing all your stuff about everything makes me happy! Hellboy and his cat fam are one of my favorite things about the movie, also when he's talking to the dead guy he brought back.
LISTEN BUDDY I know you didn’t ask for
headcanons about Hellboy but also no one ever talks to me about Hellboy so here
are some headcanons about Hellboy (and Liz and Abe).
A: what I think realistically
Let me tell you the story of how a firestarter
first met a demon
Liz is an eleven-year-old girl fresh off
the accidental incineration of a square block and the accidental manslaughter
of thirty-two people. BPRD swoops in to
grab her out of the foster system because she tells one person—the very first
firefighter on scene—that it was her,
that the fire just exploded out of her and she couldn’t stop it. The firefighter writes her off as a scared,
traumatized kid, but the arson report is inexplicable and BPRD can’t, in good
conscience, take the chance that the incident might happen a second time.
Their concerns are immediately confirmed
when an agent, unused to working with children, brusquely informs Liz of the
deaths of her grandmother, her parents, and her baby brother. The agent gets away with only second-degree
burns, by dint of one of his comrades tackling Liz with a fire retardant
blanket.
Liz, on her own insistence, is placed
alone in a fireproof room, and she refuses point-blank to allow anyone else
inside.
“Well,” Hellboy says, absolutely
unconcerned, when one of the agents guarding the door tells him all of
this. “Lucky I’m fireproof then.”
It takes him three months and fifteen
occasions of having some part of his clothing scorched away while he sprints
back to Liz’s fireproof room with her tucked close to his chest, but by December,
Liz sits at the table for Christmas dinner.
She’s a tiny little slip of a thing in Hellboy’s hulking shadow, but she
stays glued to him the whole night,
murmuring responses to his deep voice. The
handful of agents invited by the Professor are shocked to learn that their
silent, grave charge can actually smile.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
There is a HANDSOME betting pool on how
long every new agent will last, with a timer that is helpfully started by the
agent at the reception desk the moment a new recruit comes through the door. The record is fourteen seconds from entry to
end of bet, so fast that no one even had time to put money down—the floor
started to move, and the young man hurled
himself off the platform, landing sprawled on the marble while the agent gave
him a disdainful look. As new agents
last longer, the pool grows, and while reupping one’s bet IS allowed, the catch
is that only one person at a time is allowed to bet that the agent will
stay. Generally it requires a round or
two of reupping before someone’s ballsy enough to put money on a permanent
assignment, but there have been one or two times that someone (…often Hellboy)
has been reckless and it’s paid off.
Some highlights of the pool include Liz’s
uncanny ability to predict (and precipitate—for some reason it’s more unnerving
to watch an otherwise normal person burn down a building than to see a visibly
strange person do visibly strange things) exact departure times, Hellboy’s
tendency to either bet ‘five minutes’ or ‘they’ll stick around’ with no
discrimination whatsoever, and the fact that Abe isn’t allowed to bet anymore
since he placed a bet over the comms exactly three minutes before an agent
quit.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Hellboy learns when he’s three years old
that people don’t just die in battle.
Sometimes they just die. He lives on a military base, he knows that
death happens, he just. It comes as a
shock that it can just happen, even
though he knows it in theory. One of the
administrators suffers an unexpected heart attack and Hellboy—about the
equivalent of an eight-year-old, and already standing as tall as his father’s
shoulder—clings to Professor Bruttenholm’s sleeve throughout the funeral, in a
way that he hasn’t done in almost a year.
“Father,” Hellboy says afterward,
unusually subdued. “Will you die someday
too?”
“Yes, my boy,” Trevor says, because he doesn’t
believe in lying to children. “But not
for a long time, I hope.”
Hellboy nods quietly to himself and sits
there in silence for a few minutes before he speaks again.
“Will I?”
“We don’t know,” Trevor says, bending to
kiss Hellboy’s forehead. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
Almost sixty years later, Hellboy is
sitting at his father’s grave, kneeling on the ground in the pose of someone
praying, one hand clenched tight around his father’s rosary and the other
tracing the words on the stone. And I shall fear no evil, reads the
simple inscription. Trevor Bruttenholm, Beloved Father and Mentor.
It has been over ten years since Hellboy
noticed any sign of aging in himself.
Even if he did die, of old age or of injury, he knows where his father’s
soul is now, and he doesn’t know if he’d even be allowed in the front
gates.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is
shit so I believe it anyway
Oh, I don’t know…I mean, the great thing
about the fantasy noir style of the Hellboy universe is that you can justify a
lot. But one crossover I haven’t seen
but would really enjoy the hell out of would be a crossover between the Wonder
Woman movie and Hellboy. Diana hears
stories about some supernatural shenanigans happening during World War II, but
she’s neck deep in struggling to do something, anything to stem the tide of bodies so she’s not around. A couple decades later, she almost walks straight into a huge man with horns and
bright red skin and a friendly smile at an archeological excavation, and
Hellboy tries real hard not to blurt out “Oh my God, you’re Wonder Woman!”
They hang out. It’s good.
They never meet up on purpose, but they run into each other every few
years, despite Diana’s firm refusal to get involved with BPRD or any other
official government organization, and Diana is delighted to meet Liz when she’s
just Hellboy’s shy, quiet teammate and even more delighted to meet her when she’s
Hellboy’s fiancée. Also, Abe likes Diana
because she can think in a bunch of different languages and teach them to him
rapid-fire.
Also I’m still really enthusiastic about
that one Animorphs/BPRD crossover I came up with one time?
