For Fans of Check, Please! A Webcomic about Hockey, College, and the Frequent Baking of Pies
Itty Bitty Headcanons
We've talked about it some in our re-reads, so Little Boy Bitty has kind of been on my mind lately. I mean, look at this boy:
What do you think it was like for him when he was little?
So here's this sweet, gay kid who loves to bake and figure skater and he's smack dab in the middle of the south with a football coach as a father. He's mentioned being locked in the closet overnight by the football team and how high school was such a nightmare. What were his formative experiences? Any romance and/or hookups at all? Friendships outside of that with his mother?
I wonder if the Bittles were church goers. Being a high school football coach can be part and parcel of being involved in the community in other ways, going to church chief among those. How difficult would that have been?
What I really want to know is his current relationship with his father. We don't know nearly as much about Coach and his relationship with Bitty as I'd like but he seems to think his dad is still embarrassed about the Peewee football incident. I wonder if that's indicative of Coach's overall view of Bitty and where he's at in life or how much of that is Bitty being an unreliable narrator?
Ugh, poor Little Bitty. Thank goodness things get so much better later!




I don't think Coach B is still embarrassed about the Peewee football incident - I think it might have blended into the fabric of his disappointment corner, but I don't think it's something he thinks of much re: his son.
I do think he's not the most accepting person. Even with Bitty being an unreliable narrator, it wouldn't be surprising if he was less than positive about the LGBT community - he might even have made remarks in the past that caused Bitty to keep quiet about his orientation.
Prior to Samwell, I don't think Bitty would have hooked up with people back home (please, surprise me, Ngozi!), but who knows really? Maybe there was one guy he couldn't keep his eyes off of, a guy who was happy to kiss Bitty...
He doesn't really mention HS friends, but then again, why would he mention them in his baking blog? I thought he might have mentioned HS friends to his uni friends, but I can't really recall??
Then again, people fall out of touch after HS.
Agreed on Coach. Esp that he's most likely not the most accepting person. Bitty says his mom is his best friend - I wonder if it's kind of unspoken between them that he knows that she knows, and she's just letting him take his time until he can find a way to come out to Coach.
Bitty seems so sociable; my head canon is that he definitely would have had at least one or two people (probably girls? most of the guys his age were straight af or at least said they were) he was super tight with. We just haven't heard about them yet.
Maybe there was a cute boy during those skating days he pined for but was waaay too scared to have ever made a move.
OMG if he had an ice skater boyfriend (he was a sk8r boi, he said see you later boy... :'()
lmao!
Also all the possible terrible teen heartbreak and angst noooo.
THE ANGST! I would feast on it, while crying.
Bitty has commented that there are more straight guys in figure skating than you'd expect (actually a judge at one point admitted to scoring Johnny Weir lower than he deserved because he didn't want someone that flamboyant to become the face of the sport, 'people will think we're all like that'). What if Jack wasn't the first time he'd gotten a crush on a
straight boyboy he believed was straight?omg! Isn't that what he said when he and Jack were baking? Never fall for a straight boy?
It did happen before, oh no, poor Bitty!
Bitty was coming into Madison with a lot of strikes against him.
If there were any high school friends he cared to catch up with over Christmas break, he didn't tweet about it, but did tweet about how he and the football players just couldn't relate to each other in any meaningful way. The male jocks probably weren't actively beating him up after they moved, but apparently still did view him as some kind of alien. His hockey team was co-ed, though, and girls playing hockey probably got the same kind of side-eye as boys figure-skating, baking, and listening to Beyoncé - "It's just not ladylike, even if they're not hitting each other!". If I had to guess there were a couple of the girls on the team who kind of bonded with him over outsider status?
All of this is excellent. I do like your idea better that maybe he had a couple of hockey team friends.
And being the child of a coach, teacher, preacher would be a nightmare anyway, even without the expectation of athletic success.
Bitty strikes me as being very sure of his sexual identity. I wonder if he pushed all thoughts of dating to the side, saw it as something he would do in the future, at college. Having all that you've listed working against him, maybe dating was just not worth it.
Although he must have had his crushes.