Willoughby Whippets and Tibetan Spaniels

Sometimes the lore doesn’t add up for me and I have to make stuff up for it to make sense. For example, I’m thinking most likely the developers wanted us to infer that the empty room in the Von Haunt Estate attic was for the baby they never had, but a land-owning Victorian couple would most definitely have had servants, and hence, rooms for the servants. They wouldn’t have needed to set foot in a kitchen either. So neither the number of bedrooms nor the layout of the house makes sense for an estate of this size.

My solution? After the house was partially burned in 1898, it was rebuilt by a distant cousin of Bernard’s who didn’t want to live with servants. The servants’ quarters were in the basement, which made them easy to fill in. And easier for them to escape, since the fire most likely started in the second-story drawing room.

Also, their names. Bernard Escargot Shallot and Mimsy Alcorn Shallot? Stumped me. I decided Windenburg had to have some sort of Latin American naming convention with a matrilineal spin, so that the mother’s last name comes first, and if a woman gets married, her husband’s father’s name replaces her father’s name. So Bernard’s mother’s last name was Escargot—that’s where my headcanon that Bernard’s mom is French comes from—and Mimsy’s mother’s last name was Alcorn. Alternative: Escargot could be Bernard’s real last name and Shallot the name of the barony or whatever.

Yes, of course I’m going to make Bernard’s mom’s bustle look like she has a shell and give her a hat with feathers like two little eye stalks. Idk if they were going for ostentatious with this last name but, having grown up around Francophones, it’s hard not to look at that and think “wtf, why is this guy’s last name ‘snail.'”