[OOC: history, etc]
[*points below* slightly tl;dr, sorry!]
My reasoning behind writing this is to clear up Elle’s basic history. When I started playing him I was pretty much winging it aaand - I’ve come to the realisation that some notes might make things a little easier. His backstory was written pretty much - well, backwards, which means that several times I’ve been forced into going back and reading through several pages of conversation with someone before answering something. I hope nothing Elle’s said/done has contradicted anything else, but if it has, please tell me! :D
The main variation on canon here is that… well, to start with, his name. Elle has stated several times that he doesn’t have a surname - or that if he does, he doesn’t know it - and he was being truthful. As you might expect, his full name is ‘Elle Lawliet’, for no other reason that that it was what his parents (or guardian) named him. Formally, in the orphanage, he has been recognised as ‘E’, but it’s definitely not something he’d answer to or expect. In the ghost plot, he experienced a hallucination where his own name was ‘Elle Lawliet’ but he doesn’t know how to take that - he knows it’s a part of at least two other Ls’ names but, since they don’t share the same first name, that isn’t necessarily an indication of anything. Not knowing his full name is to his benefit at the moment, at any rate.
Along with the name, Elle isn’t L in the simplest sense of never assuming the detective’s role. He was one of the first students at Wammy’s, along with his world’s A and B, and he’s been at the orphanage since he was eight. Besides this, the orphanage basically works like it did in canon (or what we know of it), the only real difference being that the person the orphans idolised was Light. Elle would still be more used to referring to him as ‘L’ than anything, but he does know of him as Light. Since coming to the orphanage, he knows ‘Yagami’, as well. Light’s personality is still quite similar to the Light of canon and he is still younger than Elle, despite his position as L.
There isn’t much about Elle’s early history at Wammy’s than stands out. He arrived there when he was eight (making the set-up of it a little different to canon) and before that, his time was mostly spent at various foster homes and orphanages. He doesn’t have any memory/knowledge of before he was four, but his first few years were spent in Japan, which he’s assumed from his language skills.
Up until a couple of years ago, Elle was living in Wammy’s. He’d reached the age where he legally could already, of course, but he didn’t really have any motivation or purpose for doing so. It was a little before this time that the Kira investigation started and, being ‘potential successors’, Elle and the other orphans were enlisted as help. He hadn’t met L, yet; none of the orphans had, but Elle was invited to go along and meet with him a couple of times. During those brief periods, he managed to establish two things: L really, really didn’t like him and L was Kira.
It was after this that A committed suicide and Elle blamed this on Kira at first. The investigation was moving slowly - although not impossibly slow, L was the one heading it - but they knew about the Note and the ways of coercing people before their deaths. This created something of an inside rift between Elle and B - who thought Elle was unwilling to assume responsibility over their friend’s death - though Elle wouldn’t acknowledge anything was wrong with he and B’s friendship, or even change his ideas about Kira. It was then that he decided to move to Japan, where his contact with the orphanage grew less frequent, until one day he ended up in the mansion.
I started off trying to have Elle resemble the canon L as closely as the situation would allow, but… yeah, that didn’t really turn out. His speech patterns, for example, are more relaxed, but it’s quite a bit more than that. The main difference would probably be his reluctance in assuming L’s position - he’s found out that his main role model, his entire life, has been Kira and even though the reluctance showed up even before that, it certainly didn’t help the situation. After what happened to A and then, seeing that most of the Bs in the mansion are a little… well, Elle isn’t really sure what to think about L anymore.
Besides that, Elle is quite a bit more used to people than his canon counterpart. He’s more likely to be friendly or talk to someone and also incredibly difficult to offend. He doesn’t trust easily but he does trust; he’s also a little more likely to take a diplomatic approach to something. Something slanting towards the negative side of his personality - as well as a sort of self-indulgence demonstrated in his eating habits and the cases he takes, Elle will try to shy away from responsibility of any kind. It’s something he’s very unused to.
When Elle meets versions of Light in the mansion, he’s more likely to be pleasant than anything. He doesn’t really like being associated with his alternates and he doesn’t see why he should do the same thing. Besides that, he has somewhat alternating views on Kira - Elle doesn’t really regard it as evil behaviour, more ‘stupid’ than anything and he doesn’t feel that it’s right to dislike someone for being stupid. He also has something of a disadvantage on recognising Lights as Kira.
Because of B, he’s not really uncomfortable with people who look a lot like him, but he is uncomfortable with the fact that most of his alternates seem to be ‘L’. Despite this, none of them have grated against his personality particularly badly, save for a couple of conversations.
When Elle first met a Misa in the mansion, he said he was “familiar with her name, but not much else”. That was true - he knew her as a pop star, but he didn’t know her as having any connection to the Kira investigation. That’s not to say she didn’t, in his world - A and B both met L numerous times (the assumption here being that L was Kira and Kira was afraid of Elle) and both mentioned having seen a blonde girl there. He’s made the connection now, obviously, but liked both the Misas he’s met.
Elle’s initial reaction in greeting Bs in the mansion has pretty much gone from, “OH HAY B :D” to “…”. I think it’s rather understandable when taking into account that the B of his world was basically his best friend and relatively normal - I say ‘relatively’ because Elle’s B did dress like Elle [hence why he wasn’t surprised at that aspect of the Bs in the mansion] and was overall rather creepy, but not fanatical about him like some of the Bs. He was also independent, rather disdainful of Kira and not a serial killer. Despite this, he does treat the Bs he meets pretty well - it’s just a pretty big difference, although he feels some semblance of guilt towards most of them and (more because he’s not inclined towards self-hate) some irritation at his alternates. He treats As pretty similar to Bs, albeit with a little more uncertainty.
Watari is the only one in the mansion that Elle is really predisposed to dislike. This is mainly due to the fact that he knew Watari more personally than he knew L and, the way Elle saw it, Watari was responsible for a lot of the things that went wrong. He isn’t really prepared to change his stance on the matter, but he is questioning it after realising half the orphans appear to adore him.
In his world, Elle doesn’t know Near, Mello or Matt particularly well. They’re children and, though he knew quite a few of the younger children at the orphanage, all of those particular three were pretty antisocial there. He doesn’t really have any preconceived ideas about any of them, except that the Nears tend to be more dispassionate - and also, sometimes, a good source of information, which he appreciates - Mellos, straightforward (plus, he’s been threatened by more of them than anyone else) and Matts, laidback.
He vaguely remembers Matsuda as someone who worked with L. He doesn’t know Takada, Halle, Rester or Gevanni.
Wedy gets a mention because, even if I haven’t come across any in the mansion, Elle has mentioned that he knows her. I tend to think of Wedy as one of his friends back in his world.
Elle didn’t know about the existence of shinigami before coming to the mansion. Since then, he’s met a couple of Ryuks and a Rem. I think he pretty much decided that Ryuk was harmless the first time he met one (also, relatively the same) and have figured out that they like entertainment and apples, but not a lot else.
I have a feeling there's a lot more I should be writing down but ... it can wait.
Also - if you have any comments, criticism, etc, feel free to put them here. ;) Any suggestions would really be incredibly helpful.