Madeline Hatter, A Rebel Wrapped In An Enigma.

If you fed your first and middle name into Google Translate, turned it into Latin, fiddled with the result then translated it back to English and switched the words around, you might get an idea of how Charles Lutwidge Dodgson came up with his pen name of Lewis Caroll. In less clever wordplay, Ever After High's Madeline Hatter is the daughter of Caroll's creation the Hatter (from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.) He's not named 'Mad' or explicitly called a "mad hatter" in the novel, although he quite clearly is 'mad'. The saying "as mad as a hatter" actually predated Caroll's story. In the 1800s, hatters tended to breathe mercury fumes as they turned fur into felt, and it led to a symptoms that included trembling, uncoordination, slurring, losing teeth, memory loss, irritability and an unfortunate smorgasbord of mental conditions. (Many Chinese emperors took mercury as an elixir of immortality. Ironically it precipitated their deaths.) The Hatter once sung for the Royals of Wonderland, but his rhythm may have been flawed since The Queen Of Hearts charged him with "murdering the time!" Ever since then, time has abandoned the Hatter and for him it's always six o'clock - "always tea-time". The Hatter's companions include the narcoleptic Dormouse and the March Hare. ("Mad as a March hare" is another saying that existed before Wonderland.) The Hatter and Hare return in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There as Hatta and Haigha (say the words out loud), two of the White King's pawns. In Wonderland, the Hatter asks Alice the riddle "Why is a raven like a writing-desk? 148 years later, his daughter's best friend's name is Raven. Coincidence? Well... in the lead-up to the full launch of the Ever After High, this Wonderlandish key:


...led to this silhouette and question:

Like her father, Madeline Hatter is certainly not a Royal, but at this point she's not a Raven-style Rebel. Madeline is happy "to follow the destiny of dear old Dad": she has a broken watch that inaccurately tells her it's teatime, loves tea, and hangs with a dormouse named Earl Grey. According to Madeline's bio, "everyone thinks I'm mad. So nobody believes me when I tell them I can see into the future." Maddie has a Cassandra Complex. In Aeschylus's play Agamemnon, Cassandra correctly foresaw the fall of Troy, the murder of Agamemnon and her own death, but was doomed by Apollo to be unable to change her destiny or convince anyone else of her predictions. In a Maddie-style forecast, here's an early preview teaser of her doll and Raven's:

Mad thought: Maddie is the only one who can hear and converse with the narrators. Is she the only one who's sane?