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cry-ptidd · 14 hours

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A Few of My Favorite Pip Headcanons

I love Pip he’s such an underrated character in Hellsing canon and I wanted to leave some of my fav HCs here and have an excuse to ramble about him. Not all of these have basis in the actual canon some are just random ideas I’ve had floating around in my head.

Also disclaimer- not all of these are original because a lot of people on Tumblr have already come up with cool Hellsing headcanons so please comment below if I mention one of yours in this post! I’d love to add links to your headcanons in this post if you have any for Pip!

He’s way smarter than he lets on. Not in an academic sense but in street smarts sense. Traveling from place to place as a mercenary he has probably picked up on a lot of different little things most people might not if they don’t regularly travel, like different pieces of cultural information from people he’s worked with. Probably knows several different languages or at least important words and conversational phrases in other languages from different jobs he has taken with the Wild Geese. All this general knowledge comes up in random moments in random ways that no one expects. Pip’s sarcastic and joking demeanor often makes people forget just how smart he is. He’s probably the type of person you could drop into the woods in the middle of nowhere and he will be able to find his way to the nearest town with little difficulty.

Has his faults but generally speaking knows when to stop being a lecherous jackass. He likes to tease people in his strange way but over time has become aware of what lines are lines you should not cross. Living around men like him all the time probably makes him lose his sense at times and he hasn’t got the strongest grasp on social decorum. I imagine there is a big learning curve with Seras where she would get genuinely angry and snap at him for some of his behaviors and Pip would have to learn to back off and apologize. She allows him and the Wild Geese to get away with a lot but not everything and has become better at standing up for herself over time too. Pip can still be a jackass but at the very least tries to make up for it and apologize when it goes too far because he does genuinely care about the people he keeps close.

Pip does not agree with common military doctrine and philosophy. He’s not generally philosophical by any means and doesn’t like to get involved in all that existentialism but doesn’t agree with how the militaries run things. Being a mercenary and being a soldier are two different things in their fundamental reasons for fighting. Pip says he fights for money though I also imagine he vets who he’s about to work with to avoid getting himself and his men into any major international trouble. The military tells you to follow orders without question and if they say a person is your enemy you are supposed to believe it unquestioningly. This doesn’t sit right with Pip. Over the time spent as a mercenary fighting on all sides of conflicts he’s come to see the world in shades of grey and people as complicated beings capable of both good and evil so the black and white thinking required from soldiers puts him off and he sometimes runs into conflict with them alongside his men. ((This is entirely my HC! There’s really no basis for this in canon but Pip is a major character in the fic I am writing and my oc is a soldier so they go back and forth about this quite a bit so I wanted to throw it in here.))

Grew up in rural France and had to move around a lot because of threats against his family. Things only really calmed down after his father died and he moves in with his grandfather out in the countryside. He lived in an area where there was a large subsection of people who spoke English so it was easier to learn and pick up on. I imagine both his parents and later grandfather stressed the importance of learning English because of all the opportunities it opened up knowing it as a language. (I know fandom wiki says he was raised in America by his grandfather after being orphaned but IDK if that’s fact or not so this is my own HC.)

Hates the popular French cities like Paris, thinks they are all extremely pretentious and can’t stand staying in them for very long. The only things he thinks they are good for is the food, drink, and pretty girls. Other than that he prefers to stay in smaller towns when in France having a nostalgia for them growing up in a rural area.

Never really has lived in one place for very long / probably hasn’t lived in a proper house since he was a child. I just can’t really see him actually living in a home anywhere. It makes more sense to me that being a mercenary he’s lived more of a vagabond lifestyle. Probably travels around with the other Wild Geese for extended periods of time and probably stays at the encampments or accommodations that their clients provide or are operating out of. (I imagine that it is in part of their contract to cover it.) So they are all used to staying in a wide variety of various conditions from military style bases to out in the middle of deserts and forests which was why staying at the Hellsing estate came as a shock. Maybe after assignments he occasionally crashes with one of his fellow mercenaries at their place or maybe somewhere within his own family but not a place he owns directly.

Probably lives out of a tactical backpack or some variation of rucksack. I imagine Pip doesn’t have very many possessions of his own probably things that are more practical like clothing or things that are very sentimental but easy to carry from place to place. Probably being methodical about what he intends to keep on his person for extended periods of time.

Doesn’t buy new clothes everything is either thrifted for cheap or happens to get a lot of old dead stock military surplus clothing. ((I would like to think his scarf has some special significance behind it and he’s had it for a very long time.)) The suit he was wearing on assignment with Alucard and Seras in Rio is probably the first new nice thing he’s worn in a long time. It’s not that he doesn’t like nice clothes but in his line of work he doesn’t see a utilitarian use for them.

This seems to be a more popular headcanon but I also like to think that he doesn’t mind wearing dusty desaturated pink. His men give him shit for this and like to tease him but he couldn’t care less cause he likes the color.

Probably like a lot of soldiers and just in general from having a rough time as a child has some form or trauma or PTSD but it’s very easy for him to mask and he doesn’t let it interfere with his work. He reads as the type of person who wouldn’t talk about it but you can gather this information from hearing old stories of jobs going south and gauging how the other members of the Wild Geese react.

Sometimes suffers from Phantom Eye Syndrome (PES) (link here) it’s a condition similar to Phantom Limb Syndrome (PLS) but it’s specifically related to losing an eye. The aspects of PES I imagine might apply to Pip are phantom pain or general sensation. PES is a rare condition not nearly as common as PLS with amputees but it can happen. Perhaps at some points he still experience phantom pain even though he lost his left eye and it can manifest in having similar pain to the day he lost it or severe pain like migraines. Since losing an eyes is a very traumatic injury when this condition is acting out it might trigger bad memories. Usually it’s something he’s quite good at concealing and fighting through but those who have been around him long enough know how to read the signs. Maybe he even becomes irritable on these days.

Related to losing his eye, Pip has difficulty aiming often overcorrecting his shots either too far to the left or never far enough. He pulls his shots to the right because it’s his good eye and his depth perception was skewed when he lost the other. His aim is not atrocious by any means but the further away a target is the harder it is for him to hit accurately resulting in a lot of close quarters combat or having his men do the long range fighting for him. I imagine he also shoots higher calibre rounds to compensate for his aiming ability if they will be thrown into a distance combat situation.

Wears that bandage over his nose because it’s actually covering up a scar. Maybe it’s a scar from when he lost his eye and looking at it reminds him of the incident (an maybe coming too close to death). So he covers it up frequently and pretends it doesn’t exist. I imagine it’s this scar specifically and not scars in general he probably has a lot of them and they don’t bother him at all it’s only that very specific one since it relates to a traumatic experience. (I also loved the idea of this being there cause Seras broke his nose lol but it stays on too long during canon for me to believe that so had to improvise.

I’m also part of the bisexual Pip propaganda team here. You cannot tell me that shoving a group of men out into a desert or some other wasteland in the middle of nowhere for perhaps months on end won’t result in at least a fraction of curiosity. Pip probably wouldn’t outwardly identify as bisexual but I could see him certainly not being entirely straight under every circumstance and leaning towards being more loose with his sexuality. He’s an opportunist and although he’s got a type he likes to go for he’s not above making exceptions.

His name is short for something else. I’ve seen many people suggest that it’s a nickname and I also like this idea.

Plays guitar. This is actually based off cover art from a manga chapter so it’s got basis in canon. I could definitely see he plays guitar. Maybe not so much anymore because he and the Wild Geese are busy trying to get contracts and make money but, when he has the opportunity to they can sometimes get him to play. He never learned how to play the “proper” way. Don’t ask him to read sheet music he couldn’t tell you the first thing about it and may only have the most basic grasp on the different strings and frets. He learned how to play by what sounds good and a lot of experimenting or watching others play (maybe street musicians or in bars). Maybe was once a musician himself that traveled between bars playing for tips but never decided to pursue a career in it because it was always a secondary hobby to mercenary work.

Well those are all the ones I have for now! Sorry for any lingering typos, I try to edit these but it’s really late when I work on this post and I’m pretty tired these days. If you have anything to add lemme know! I love chatting about Hellsing stuff.