the bird of antisocial introversion.*SPOILERS*

[spookythings]

any thoughts on the countess? being the dunce that i am, i have once again managed to miss something the first 500 times around.



i never noticed before that she was standing in the bathroom, right outside of the stall where meg is being dealt a puncture wound by diana. why is she there?

i'm unable to think of any good theories as to why she'd be present at such an intimate moment. i'm not even sure why this is important to me. obviously the three of them make up the heirarchy of the red rose aristocrats, but seeing as how diana can't stand either of them, meg possibly doesn't like eleanor (aiding diana in the killing of her bird and then wrapped it in her clothes), and eleanor apparently doesn't care for anyone, so what is the purpose of her presence there? anyone else?

furthermore, why did she take her clothes off in the first place? we see either diana or meg (in the trailer) tying a piece of string around an orange bundle (the bird in eleanor's dress), as blood seeps through the fabric, but how did they get hold of her dress? steal it while she showered? wait until she changed into her nightgown? but then why would she change into her nightgown to go searching through an airship? or take a shower when the hunt was on? if my dog turned up missing, bathing be damned, i'm not going to rest until i find her.

ALSO: any ideas on why eleanor neither flipped out nor cried when she found her beloved bird of happiness turned bird of bloody demise? and in the absence of laundry detergent, how did she get the stains out of her dress? was that bird just a toy, like the goat and the mermaid? i don't see why it couldn't have been a real bird, she was carrying a real cage, and birds are almost certainly easier to obtain than goats, mermaids, or pigs, and wendy managed to get a rabbit while jennifer located a dog. and at the end of the bird chapter, instead of there being a bird toy, it was eleanor's clothes.

anyway. thoughts, theories, etc. welcome, please.

[Princess Meg]

I think her purpose in the opening to be outside the room where Diana and Meg are was really just something the creators had to throw in. Like they have to include Eleanor somewhere, so they decided next to the stall where Diana reposition herself as a rank higher than Meg. Just to show that these three girls are all tie in together as the Duchess, Countess, and Baroness.

In the opening, we see Meg tying up the bird because the sleeves approximates Meg's clothes, instead of Diana's.

I really don't pay much attention to storyline details, but I'm just going to assume that if this takes place in the Orphanage. Meg and Diana both stole Eleanor's toy bird while she was sleeping, hence the nightgown. So they hid the toy bird in the boxes and Eleanor woke up maybe from noticing that her toy was missing. [She probably went to sleep with it and that is how they stole it.] And knowing how much Eleanor loves birds, I doubt she would take the time to change out of her clothes -- she wants to find it.

I think her reason for not flipping out was the reason she understood about her position in the Red Crayon Aristocrats. Seeing as how they mistreated animals and such, one wouldn't be surprised to see if it goes arounds and happens to you. Also Eleanor is an introvert, she is quite reserved in her emotions. So she just probably doesn't show it as how Diana cried when Hoffman was wondering about his koi and how Meg cried seeing her love letter torn up. She mostly bottles up her feelings to herself.

I dunno if what I said has helped much, but that is how I saw the situation.

[jackdyce]

Theories on this...

1) The trailer shows her relationship to Diana and Meg. Because she's so introverted, she is on the outside looking in on Diana and Meg's friendship.

2) The bird is a part of her personality - when the bird went missing, part of her disappeared with it, as represented by her dress.

3) The bird wasn't real. Jennifer makes it pretty clear in the January chapter that there was never a real red bird. Eleanor always just walked around with a toy red bird in her cage. Hence, when the bird was the gift of the month, Eleanor had no problem giving it up. She wasn't upset because it wasn't a real bird, plus she probably knew the Artistocrat Club well enough to know she'd get the bird toy back.

4) Jennifer, in her dream-affected memory, imagined the bird being real - at no point did any of the Aristocrats steal or kill a bird in the game's reality. It's not the only instant that is dramatized in the dream world - Wendy didn't really care too much about the rabbit, and when it ran away she wasn't too sad.

[spookythings]

thank you princess meg, yet another thing i missed: sleeves!

you've lost me just a bit though: if its only a toy, why hurry to find it? and why would meg and diana mention it dying and then expect eleanor to have a reaction to it? you even say that eleanor may not have been surprised, given that everyone there has a penchant for animal cruelty. if eleanor's bird was indeed a toy, then certainly there would be no reason for her to go bonkers, but diana and meg wouldn't have expected eleanor to react to the possibility of her bird being dead if it were never alive in the first place, right? but they were clearly miffed when eleanor remained impassive after the discovery.

really liking jackdyce's theory on eleanor's cold exterior isolating her from her cohorts. reaally liking it.

i do think the bird may have been real though, for the reasons i stated above. and i have a thought on the trailer, and why a great deal of the scenes weren't included in the game, which may support my 'the bird was real' idea:

the entire game is the fragments of jennifer's memory being pieced back together. the things we see in the trailer are most likely things that weren't in jennifer's memory, and therefore they wouldn't make sense in the game. jennifer couldn't have spied on meg and diana in the stall, because eleanor was there. she wasn't involved in the three girls drawing the pig picture. she wasn't involved in their coffin making. i'm tired and can't remember anything else, but those will be sufficient. as i was saying, these are things that jennifer was not privvy too, therefore they could not be in the game we play because as far as jennifer knows, they never happened.

supposing i'm right (i'd kind of like to be...) theres the scene in the trailer where meg is tightening the string around the bundle of eleanor's clothes, and a blood stain seeps through. jennifer couldn't have seen this, because it was a nasty deed and meg almost certainly did it in private (in room 26, perhaps?) and even if she had felt like an audience, she didn't like jennifer.

the fact that there is blood, and that this couldn't have been warped/dramatized by jennifer's unreliable imagination because she didn't see it, makes me think the bird was very real. maybe?

also, thank you both for responding.

[jackdyce]

According to the Game Script on GameFaqs, (and my memory seems to confirm this), on the balcony during the Once Upon a Time chapter, Jennifer says:

The red bird in the cage... The doll Eleanor treasured.

While I suppose you could identify 'doll' as just being a term of endearment, it seems more logical to me that the bird was a toy. So why would the girls take bets as to how Eleanor would react?

1) This never actually happened, it was one of the things Jennifer made up in her dream world.

While I do think that there are scenes of the game that never actually happened, my feeling is that a similar conversation probably did exist. So, idea number

2) The girls were betting on how Eleanor would react to her bird being the gift of the month. Would she be sad that she'd have to temporarily give the bird up, or would be she be mad? Since she was so emotionless, however, she showed no visible reaction, hence Diana and Meg's surprise at the end of the chapter.

What you do bring up, however, is the purpose of the trailer. The majority of those scenes do not exist in the game, although they seem to back up certain parts of the game. So, is the trailer seen when you turn on the game part of Jennifer's nightmare? Or is it intended only to put the player in the appropriate mood, and not as a part of Jennifer's dream? Is the trailer supposed to be a part of the game, or seperate from the game? I really don't know the answer to that; I guess I'll have to think about it some more.

[hewiealbino]

I have a theory about the blood and the bird. Personally, I believe that everything Jennifer comments about in the January chapter to the truth. The red bird is indeed a doll that Eleanor carries around. But why is there blood coming from a toy bird? I think it has something to do with the storybook for that chapter. Someone mentioned that the books in the story are written by Gregory, and he'll read those stories to Joshua.

My theory is, the "Joshua" Gregory read the Bird of Happiness story to is Jennifer. When she got to orphanage and saw the red bird doll, it reminded her of the bird in the story. Even though the actual sacrificing of the doll (during the orphanage days), there is no blood, Jennifer's mind somehow warped the image into something that resembles the story. The bird died a bloody death.

We have to remember that everything that goes on in this game (except January) is warped by a confused mind trying to remember too many things at once, so everything is mixed into images that might not be what you think at first.

[jackdyce]

I think that your theory about the stories having been read to Jennifer by a confused Gregory to be a very good one. That actually would explain a lot of things about the game - Jennifer was confusing what really happened with Gregory's stories. Good thinking.

[spookythings]

i second the 'good thinking.'

i forgot all about the part on the balcony. *shoves theory into a sack and beats it*

[domriver]

Very interesting. I always though the bird was real as well since there was blood on it. One question - What is the point of a painted Red bird in the bathroom with a huge hole in the middle with blood dripping suppose to mean?

[Azure Princess]

Maybe it's some kind of foreboding feeling/foreshadowing towards the 'death' of Eleanor's bird? OwO Just a thought.

[PrincessJennifer]

The bird was, in real life, just a toy. As for Eleanor's lack of reaction, I'd assume that while she was longing for a bird to bring her happiness, she did not believe such a thing existed, so she was not really let down.

[Azure Princess]

Hmm... That's quite a complex character. She knew that no such thing existed, but she's still helplessly drawn to it anyway.

I like her. ^^

[PrincessJennifer]

azureprincess said:

She knew that no such thing existed, but she's still helplessly drawn to it anyway.

Kinda like me with Gregory...>_> XD He'd be cool to meet in real life, though.

Yeah, Eleanor's great.^^

[Azure Princess]

LOL As is everyone else with a particular character of their choosing... ^^

[PreciousLittleGirl]

I wonder what Eleanor's life was like before she came to the orphange...