Eleanor Shalott

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Eleanor Shalott is the daughter of The Lady of Shalott, from the Tennyson poem of the same name, which has become part of the Arthurian Romance Tradition.

A self-proclaimed hacktivist, a staunch environmentalist, and fundamentally, yet another outspoken tower princess, Eleanor Shalott clearly wants more than what destiny has allotted her and thus aligns Rebel.

Personality
Eleanor Shalott is an isolated person.

She will tell you that she doesn’t like people -- not personally anyway. Human interaction, face-to-face, is very draining for Eleanor, mostly because she’s not used to it, and because she’s scared to step out of her comfort zone, she avoids it. You will find her in places that require a distinctive lack of human presence -- she’ll be out in nature, birding and boating, or talking to people through screens instead.

Still, to Eleanor, human beings are so fascinating from afar. She’s obsessed with human emotions, she’s obsessed with human nature. She doesn’t really interact with others, except through her screens, so she feels like she views her fellow humans from a third-person view, as if they’re more entertainment than real people.

Because of her lack of a close friend circle, Eleanor doesn’t have much of a healthy outlet for expressing emotions. Her pent-up anger often manifests as long text posts on internet forums, and she has an obsession with typing out all her emotions to maintain “authenticity and integrity”. This is done with the awareness that people tend to portray their perfect selves on the MirrorNet.

Eleanor only knows most people through their social media, and she has a tendency to judge them harshly on how they present on social media. Not in your typical superficial way, but with the belief that people are given the buffer of being able to choose what side that they show in social media. So if someone only shows how messy or self-destructive they are, Eleanor is ready to side-eye them.

Isolation and loneliness is dangerous. These two things, in combination, easily radicalise someone. Eleanor, who grew up isolated and lonely, is therefore easily radicalised. Through the MirrorNet, she has developed opinions, and gets easily swept up into echo chambers and circles. She will not admit to this, though.

It’s very easy for her to get angry over things. No matter what happens, she feels like she has to react with some emotion or response. It’s not merely the nature of how she grew up - in a very divisive, argumentative environment (the MirrorNet), but also the nature of a very fundamental belief of hers. Eleanor stands firmly by one thing: human apathy will destroy the world. If she has an emotion, she states it. If she has a thought, she voices it. To most people, Eleanor is regarded as incredibly blunt and often dismissive of other people’s emotions. Often times, this is written off as her being “too much of a tower princess, that she’s forgotten how to interact with others” (which, to be fair, is also very true).

Eleanor is also a huge environmentalist and advocate. I’ll touch more on this in her Interests section. Although she adores technology and is beyond thankful for how it shaped her life (she can’t imagine living without it, with technology being such a social and emotional crutch for her), her environmentalist beliefs mean that she’s very fearful about current developments in technology. For one reason, it’s just environmentally unsustainable. The other? She’s distrustful of corporations and the government. Technology, right now, she believes, supports both those things, and has a negative impact on populations’ privacy. She’s fearful of security and secrecy and how it’s slowly dying. Because of this, she has developed a sense of paranoia over her own personal information. While she wants to maintain integrity, she gets nervous about how easily she voices her thoughts and spills information.

It’s a balance, Eleanor reckons. How does one toe the line between being too apathetic and being too careless?

Appearance
Eleanor is an English girl of mixed Tamil and Chinese descent. She has dark red hair, often tucked underneath an iconic straw boater. She wears large round glasses.

Interests, Hobbies, and Skills
Profoundly environmentalist, casually anti-capitalism, and yet, a girl so embedded in her technology and MirrorNet media, Eleanor and her interests seem to be an enigma and a paradox within themselves. One thing remains clear, though. What Eleanor adores is what tends to isolate her and take her away from interacting with people, face-to-face.

Technology, the MirrorNet
Without many friends, with parents who were always too busy, and as a tower princess hexpected to be holed up in a room, it’s doubtless that Eleanor would become enraptured by technology from a young age. From chatrooms IRC-style to forums to social media… Eleanor became invested in finding human connection even without humans in her vicinity. In her childhood and in her current teenagehood, she jumped from pocket to pocket, circle to circle, despite to find somewhere where she felt like she belonged.

She picked up coding relatively quickly enough, and learned to build her own computers from guides she found on the MirrorNet. She would ask her parents for parts, they would oblige to keep their daughter entertained, and in her lonesome, she would develop the hobby to the point of obsession.

It was later in her life, as a young teenager, in which she would dare to access the Deep MirrorNet, armed with nothing but a sTORy browser.


 * Eleanor uses older/outdated forms of technology. It’s for the aesthetic, because she has a soft pining for the 90s, but also for security. They’re harder to hack and contain less personal information and tracking. Older technology is also more durable, which is preferable for a power princess.
 * One of her favourite devices is a translucent green gameboy.
 * She is 100% a Linux kid.

Environmentalism
Outside of the MirrorNet and how it shaped her personality, Eleanor is a huge environmentalist and advocate. She spent years in her isolated tower with beautiful views of natural scenery, only to see it get cast down for construction work. The rivers she rowed in and the streams she played in, she would see get polluted over time. After reading Faechel Carriage-son’s Silent Spring, Eleanor developed the belief that the fairytale world just slowly plotting their own demise, and that the system was just unsustainable.

Boating
Maybe it’s just preparation for her destiny, but Eleanor does love boating. She’d happily take a sail down a river, or enter a kayak or a rowboat… Being on the water is very calming for her, and it’s a pleasant way of experiencing nature by herself.

Other

 * Now that destiny is pretty much non-hexistent, she’s not sure what she wants to do with the rest of her life. Probably wants to do theoretical work regarding the fairytale hexonomy, and modelling money-matters with the infaermation technology she has.
 * Has a prolific slack-hexchange account.
 * Only posts cool things she’s seen boating on social media. Not much else.

How It Goes
So the Lady of Shalott is a little deviation from the main Arthurian Legends, but in short. There’s this Lady, she’s confined to a tower and not allowed to look outside or she dies. She only sees the outside world through a mirror. One day, she catches a glimpse of Sir Lancelot, gets the hots for him, gets into a boat to follow him, and sails across the Thames until she dies.

Read the Wikipedia page here.

How Eleanor comes into this
Eleanor is not the direct descendent of the Lady of Shalott, but rather a member in the previous Lady’s family/House.

Opinion on Destiny
Oh boy.

TBA

Parallels

 * The Lady of Shalott weaves, much like a spider weaving webs. Add this to the fact that in the world of Ever After, information technology is accessed through Mirrors (ie, MirrorPhones, or the MirrorNet) and how the Lady of Shalott uses a mirror to see outside.
 * Obviously, Eleanor was going to be inspired by the internet and other forms of information technology.
 * The poem focuses on isolation, and the Lady’s desire to engage with the living world. Eleanor explores both of these themes.

Quotes
TBA

Trivia

 * Eleanor is means “light”, and is a variant of the name Elaine.
 * The Lady of Shalott was originally based off the legend of Elaine of Astolat, so having Eleanor’s name be a variant of Elaine seemed fitting.
 * Eleanor is also a name commonly associated with some incredible female historical figures. Eleanor of Aquitaine is the most immediate one, but also Eleanor Roosevelt.
 * Shalott as a surname is self-explanatory.