app for balance_rpg! WARNING: The Good Place spoilers up to mid-season 3

[coolranchbaby]

	Eleanor Shellstrop: I know it sounds crazy. But if it weren't crazy, they wouldn't call it a leap of faith. They would call it a sit of doubting.
	APP HMD Bard Lynny

Player Name: Lynny
Age: 28
Contact: slothbless
Timezone: EST
Other character currently in game: N/A

Character name: Eleanor Shellstrop
Age: 36
Canon: The Good Place
Canon point: Season 3, episode 7
History: Wiki link and since the character wiki only goes hasn’t updated for season 3 yet here’s this
Three key adjectives: Self-Sufficient, Direct, Lonely

Influential Events:

"You know the thing is, the problem really, with being a do-gooder? No one cares!”

For the first thirty-three years of her life Eleanor had lived her life by looking out for one person: herself. With her parents being self-centered and neglectful, she emancipated herself as a teenager and lived her life as they had taught her: for yourself. If you don’t let anyone owe you anything, you don’t owe them anything. Her friendships were few and shallow, her romantic relationships crashed and burned and Eleanor did what she wanted, ignoring the little voice in her head that told her she shouldn’t.

On her thirty-fourth birthday Eleanor was almost hit by a truck carrying boner pills while chasing a bottle of margarita mix. If not for a stranger she never saw who pushed her out of the way she absolutely would have died. It’s in the wake of this near miss that Eleanor decides to do some soul searching and self-improvement. She quits her exploitative job of selling fake medicine to senior citizens, she agrees to attend a baby shower (something she would rather have chewed her own leg off than do before the near accident), gets a new job with an environmental group and generally makes an effort to be a good person for the first time in her life. For six months, everything goes great!

Right up until her newfound conscience ruins her relationship with one of her roommates and she is forced to move out. From there it’s all downhill over the next six months: she gets wrongfully sued, quits her job and goes back to a new version of her old one and generally reverts back to the selfish, self-absorbed person she was before.

What We Owe to Each Other

On her thirty fifth birthday, exactly one year after her near miss, Eleanor meets a mysterious kindly bartender who she spends hours talking to and who points her in the direction of ethics and a simple phrase, “What we owe to each other”. So the next morning she did some googling and found a three hour lecture by an ethics professor in Australia named Chidi Anagonye, which she sat through the entirety of to her own surprise. When it’s over she realizes this man could be the one to teach her her to be a better person through learning ethics. So she does the completely logical and not at all impulsive thing of packing a bag and getting on a plane from Phoenix, Arizona to Sydney, Australia to randomly drop into his office and meet him in person.

After Eleanor introduced herself, she explains to Chidi her near-death experience and situation from the past year and asks him if he’ll be her moral guide to becoming a better person and staying that way. Chidi agrees to help her, citing his own near-death experience, and introduces her to Simone, the neuroscientist he’d been working with for several months on his thesis. Eleanor quickly picks up on the sparks between them and decides, since neither of them has taken the plunge yet, to help Chidi ask Simone out on a date, which she accepts.

The Brainy Bunch

While Chidi and Eleanor initially have a few private ethics lessons, Eleanor quickly becomes a subject in Chidi’s new thesis idea: near-death experiences and their impact on decision making. She quickly meets the other subjects in the study: a famous socialite and philanthropist named Tahani Al-Jamil, a young man from Jacksonville, Florida named Jason Mendoza and another man named Trevor. Eleanor clicks almost immediately with every member of the group except Trevor, who she finds grating and obnoxiously friendly. She feels uncomfortable in the study group-like situation and asks Chidi if they can just continue their private sessions as that’s where she’s more comfortable but he doesn’t have the time. Trevor continues to worm his way into the group and push them farther apart. Eleanor considers going home to Arizona, the group setting eats at her inferiority issues and she doesn’t enjoy working with other people but when Chidi asks for three months she does agree. Trevor unexpectedly drops out of the study via e-mail, saying he’s “too stupid and ugly to continue”.

She runs into more trouble at the end of the three months, when she’s out of money and needs a part-time job but a surprise $18,000 lottery ticket fixes her money problems very quickly. Six more months pass and Eleanor has bonded with the group more than she’d bonded with anyone else in her life. It’s when Tahani gets engaged that things start to fall apart and, after a rejected plea to keep the study group together, Eleanor lashes out or “pulls a Shellstrop” as it were. She punches a cake meant for the group, throws insults at her friends and tries to leave in anger when Simone stops her. Eleanor admits that she’s afraid to go back to being alone and goes back inside. She allows herself to be vulnerable and admit that she’s going to miss her friends. Her apology is accepted and Tahani suggests they all meet once a year, starting in Jacksonville the next year.

That is until the four of them go down to the wine cellar in the mansion they’re in and see the weird old guy who either directly or indirectly convinced them to come to Australia and their waitress they had once standing in front of a magical doorway to another dimension. And this is where things get crazy.

Jeremy Bearimy

So the cat is out of the bag: the Brainy Bunch were all once dead as the result of their near-death experiences and had all gone to “The Bad Place” (essentially Hell) to be tortured for eternity in an experimental new torture designed by the demon who had helped them all find their way to Australia and to each other, Michael. They’d been put in a fake “Good Place” (Heaven) neighborhood, told that they had made it into the real Good Place based on the amount of points they’d earned, and were meant to torture each other for all eternity in a “No Exit”-style, “Hell is Other People” situation. Eleanor’s torture was knowing she didn’t belong and being forced to be around people who she knew were better than her in every possible way. Knowing this, she sought help from Chidi, who was her fake soulmate in this neighborhood, and asked him to help her learn to be a good person, to which he agreed.

She had also been the one to figure out they were being tortured and subsequently they all had their memories erased. The process would be repeated over 200 times (totaling in about 300 years) until finally Michael came to them, explained he was being ousted from being in charge by the other demons and that he needed their help to avoid being destroyed if his boss found out. This is how Michael came to join Chidi’s ethics class and, in time, become friends with the four humans, in particular Eleanor. When the torture plan is thought successful and the neighborhood is going to be destroyed with the human being sent to the proper Bad Place, it’s also Eleanor who sees through Michael’s facade and realizes they need to take a leap of faith on Michael and believe he’s trying to save them despite seemingly acting against them. It paid off when they all escaped the fake Good Place to go to the real Bad Place in order to be able to get to the Judge’s chambers, an all-powerful being who can be appealed to so they all, Michael included, can go to the Good Place.

When Michael and Janet seemingly sacrifice themselves in the Bad Place so the humans can escape Eleanor is understandably devastated but powers through. Of the group, she is the only one who passes the test the Judge gives the four of them to get into the Good Place but lies to her friends and says she failed as well. The old Eleanor would have simply jumped ship at the point and gotten her moral dessert but not this Eleanor. It’s at this point that Michael and Janet arrive just in time to prevent their humans from being shoved off back to The Bad Place and Michael the the Judge come up with a solution: the humans will be sent back to Earth at the exact moments of their deaths and given a literal and metaphorical push in the right direction. They have until the end of their lives to acquire enough points to make it into the Good Place and prove humans are capable of changing their bad behavior for the better. Michael and Janet would watch over them, not interfering (until Michael does exactly that several times in order to get them all back together again).

And this all brings us back to Australia, where Eleanor says “fork it” and leaves to get wasted because now that they know about the points system every good thing they can do from here on out will not earn them points and they’ll go directly to the Bad Place.

Soul Squad

With her understanding of the universe falling down around her, Eleanor does a very understandable thing: she goes to the nearest bar to get wasted. After a few drinks she finds a lost wallet and heavily considers doing what she used to do when this happened, just taking the money and leaving it where she found it...but she can’t bring herself to do it. Instead she hails a cab to the address on the man’s license only to find out that he’d moved. So she begrudgingly gets another cab, several of the things the wallet owner had left behind at his old place, and goes to his new address. She finally returns the wallet, cash intact, and is surprised to learn that the money and credit cards don’t matter to him; it’s the drawing done by his daughter that he carries with him. He thanks Eleanor and says he hopes his daughter grows up to be like her, which makes her start to cry.

After her morally centering sidequest, Eleanor returns to the university to find Chidi in the mists of a chili-based existential crisis in the middle of teaching his class. She teases him a bit about the peep chili then explains that she has a plan that can help them all. When they’re all six gathered back together she explains: none of them are getting into the Good Place but that doesn’t mean they can’t do good. Trying is better than not trying and even if they can’t get in they can do their best to help others do it. Still, despite her ethical solution, Eleanor still whips out her phone to film Tahani having to explain to her fiance that she’d just gotten platonically married to Jason for her money. Two steps forward, one step back.

While Michael, Tahani and Jason fly back to Florida to try and help Jason’s father get on the right track after a lifetime of petty crime, Eleanor has to help Chidi break-up with Simone without telling her why so as not to, you know, damn her immortal soul. Eleanor with her trail of burned bridges Eleanor is probably the worst person to do this but she makes an effort. The break-up goes poorly but now they’re all free to meet in Hungary to help Tahani reconcile with her estranged sister. Eleanor is ultimately glad Jason and Tahani are able to do this for their families since her parents are dead...except according to Michael this isn’t technically true. Her mother had faked her death and Eleanor has to split off from the group to fly to America, find her mother and murder her. No big deal.

”No, mom, *ya* basic.”

When Eleanor meets her mother Diana again it’s rough to say the least. She’s angry and hurt (partly because her mother is using her fake name while living her new life with her nerd boyfriend Dave and his young daughter Patricia. She’s even running for PTA Secretary. Eleanor is convinced the whole thing is a scam meant to get Dave’s money. She’s so suspicious of the whole thing Michael has to stop her from cutting up Patricia’s stuffed animals to find the money her mother had probably squirreled away in them. When they go to the PTA election Eleanor tells Dave about her mother’s real identity, both because she feels he deserves to know and because she wants to get back at Diana. It turns out Dave has known from the beginning of their relationship and they’re waiting until Patricia is older to tell her. This makes Eleanor even more upset and when Michael inquires as to why she thinks her mother can’t change when Eleanor herself had she confesses that she’s jealous. Diana has turned into the kind of mom she always wanted and she’s jealous that Patricia gets that but she didn’t. She wants to know why she wasn’t worth changing for.

After Diana wins the election Eleanor does find the money she’d hidden away in case she needed to make a quick exit. She talks with her mother, helping her realize she enjoys the stability and mundanity of living in the suburbs and that she should spend the money on Patricia. This is, after all, her doover. Eleanor and Michael leave Diana with her new little family to pick up the others from the airport and it’s presumably then that they get nabbed by a giant black tentacle and dragged to Faerun.



Link to Samples: Sample 1; Sample 2

Chosen path: Bard
5 Abilities:
-Vicious Mockery
-Bardic Inspiration
-Message
-Minor Illusion
-Prodigy

Why this path?: While Eleanor doesn’t have a strong connection to music in canon, words are her weapon of choice. Her tongue can be sharp as any dagger when she’s feeling emotionally volatile and on multiple occasions she's inspired her friends to keep going or come up with a plan on the fly and convince them to go along with it. She even comes with her own cantrip: "Ya basic!".

blurb code by photosynthesis