Natalie Aureole [NAH-tuh-lee or-ee-OHL] is a "twenty-something-year-old" woman who moved to Plainwood in the Sinister Recluse series.

History and origin

Natalie Aureole moved to Plainwood during the events of Sinister Recluse: The Statue on Riverside. She appeared as a mysterious lefthander from the States with unknown goals or origins. She had hoped for a smooth transition, but was met with a rude awakening, as Plainwood was a place extremely dedicated to its fear and aversion to the supernatural, and especially against those who are lefthanded. Within her attempts to assimilate with the crowd and blend in, Natalie found herself making more and more cultural mistakes that made her stand out, including using the taboo left hand in daily interactions. As such, many of the townspeople of Plainwood, especially its mayor, Matt Kennett, feared her and suspected her as a Sinister Demon.

General description

Traits and abilities

Personality

Natalie is known to be shy and reserved. She has an innocent demeanor and tends to shut down when people around her are talking to or about her.

Natalie's theme color is purple. It represents her strengths of relaxedness, mystery, calmness, and dreaminess. Usually, she remains very calm and collected, often zoning out at times. She is kind and careful around others.

Purple also represents frustration, introversion, suppression, inferiority. She grew up more submissive around others and timid to talk to them. She also tends to get irritated when things don't go her way.

Natalie's biggest flaw is her fear of being the center of attention. She hates when people talk to her too much or put her on too much of a pedestal, whether that be positive or negative.

Her biggest strength is her genuineness and innocence. She always apologizes and thanks people for the slightest things.

Emotions

When around others, unless someone lit a spark in her, Natalie tends to be unemotive, and usually saves it for when she's alone so she can expel her feelings.

Natalie's idea of perfect happiness is being able to live a life where she is treated and respected as an equal.

Natalie's biggest fear is being the center of attention, because it's led to nothing but fear, anger, or sadness in her past life from people either hyping her up as an evil monster or giving her the unnecessary praise she doesn't think she deserves.

Natalie still sees love as a matter of crushes and love-at-first sight. She believes that the one will come to her naturally and that little-to-no active processes have to be made, besides bare minimum things like asking someone to dance.

Natalie is bored by few things, since she spent most of her life used to not doing anything anyway. She is mostly bored by people who talk too much.

Natalie is angered by people who talk too much about her or to her, either when she's there or not. It's a reflection of her past and secrets that she doesn't want to talk about. At the same time, she gets sad from people who ignore her..

Motivators

Natalie is extremely ambitious and will always set hardy goals for herself, no matter how possible they may seem. She is often disappointed if she meets those goals and it's not what she expected, but the promise of having a tangible goal in mind motivates her.

Natalie has lived the same way every day until Plainwood, at which point the biggest change in her life ever occurred. It was humbling and unnerving, and each risk with bad outcomes she makes makes her cling more to the status quo and a lack of change.

Relationships

Not much is known about Natalie's life before she moved to Plainwood, but she did have at least one acquaintance from before, known as Riley Saint Yves. Natalie seems to greatly admire and respect Riley out of everyone she had lived with before her move to Plainwood. She also mentions a Dan and a Moira in some of her journal entries. Not much is known yet about these people.

When Natalie moved to Plainwood, the relationships she made were difficult for her. The first encounter she had with anybody was with Eileen Pritchett, and even that was on accident when she panicked and managed to mysteriously blow up Eileen's house, erroneously thinking the house was vacant. She hasn't been able to shake that moment out of her mind, and because of that, she had inadvertently tarnished her relationship with Eileen.

Many people tend to either fear or underestimate Natalie. Either way, nobody treats her as an equal, which is a main theme throughout The Statue on Riverside. Only her friends Patrick, Riley, Moira, and Dan are the only ones who treat her an equal. Everyone else in her friend group, Vivian and Morgan especially, treat her with unnecessarily excessive praise and kindness.

Despite the cultural faux pas she had made in her first few days in Plainwood, Natalie did make some genuine friends, notably with Morgan Bailey. When everybody else was suspicious and fearful of her, Morgan was the only one who treated her with dignity and respect. Since then, Natalie had considered Morgan her "safety net" for Plainwood.

Development

Inspiration

The first idea of Natalie Aureole and her concept came to be in 2017, when Adam was about to fall asleep and had a semi-dream of somebody saying, "What's your escape from reality?" and a girl (the precursor to Natalie) saying "This," while simultaneously creating a portal into another reality made of bright lights. Later after that image, Adam thought that idea was inspiring and wanted to turn it into something more. He had considered writing a story about it. Adam had only ever attempted to write a full-length novel many years before, which he had hastily abandoned, so he wanted to start fresh, especially after having read the first Welcome to Night Vale novel as an inspiration to not only jump into writing but to have fun in doing so too.

This spark of inspiration was the basis for Sinister Recluse, which was originally called Normal..., and started out as a more slice-of-life adventure novel about a mysterious girl with supernatural powers who moved to a place called Pine Creek (proto Plainwood) and whose residents distrusted her. At this point in development, still around 2017, Natalie and other main Sinister Recluse characters such as Eileen and Vivian were high-school age, rather than adults. Between the first idea of Natalie's concept and the first draft of Sinister Recluse (still called, Normal...) in July of 2017, Adam had been toying around with different names and designs for this mysterious girl. The name Natalie had floated around in his mind but he wasn't dead-set on it until he began writing his first draft. His original design concept for Natalie, never drawn, was similar to Jinx from Teen Titans, specifically the hair. It wasn't until Adam went to a friend's party and noticed an outfit he thought would be fitting, that the first design for Natalie was created in November 2017.

Since her development, Natalie had always been a shy, reserved, and awkward girl.

Design

Within development, Natalie had undergone some design changes, including her outfit and skin color. In 2019, Adam changed her skin color to add more diversity into his character repertoire and to the main character of his series. He also changed her outfit in 2025 from a semiformal dress to sweats to symbolize more of her tendency towards comfort, but her original design was brought back and revamped in 2026 to symbolize her role in the series better: forced to look nice but being uncomfortable in doing so.

Etymology

Natalie has no apparent etymology, but Adam chose it because it kept going around in his head when trying to think of a name for the character. The last name, Aureole is French for halo, which represents Natalie's innocent demeanor, as well as the physical blinding brightness she can emit from her hands.

Natalie being known as the "Sinister Recluse" comes from the word sinister, which is Latin for both evil and left, with recluse referring to how she keeps to herself and stays out of people's ways.

Profiles

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Primary sources

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Trivia

• Natalie is Adam's favorite character he has created, in both design and personality.
  • Close contenders include Marion Marley and Radley Diamant.