i really do understand y'all, this isn't cool and everything, but then i think we can't really criticise her for her behaviour as we don't know what she really is like, maybe she has some serious mental health issues and i don't think we'd be making them better.
you don't chose to develop an ed or a mental illness, or maybe she really is on the spectrum and i'm pretty sure that this wouldn't help her as well, also it's definitely not something she can, in any way, control.
i mean, from what we see from her and what we read in erimentha, we can surely guess ruby wasn't the other students favourite for a reason. still, she might have been bullied for being different, something i experienced myself. kids can be cruel if you have the wrong interests, wear the wrong clothes or behave differently; that can also be not feeling comfortable with socialising or just being socially awkward (autism, anyone).
maybe she was coping with this by trying to be perfect and rather mature compared to the other kids, and this might have lead to her "better than the classmates" attitude as her lil anti-bullying wall she built around her, thinking that they're just jealous or whatever.
now that she grew up and she doesn't have these problems anymore/was able to lay her defence attitude down, she might be realising how she just completely skipped her teenage years. and, in my opinion, losing your childhood to bullies is one of the worst things that can happen to you. i can understand her wanting her childhood back, and moving back to mommy and daddy, having no responsibilities and no reason to act like an adult is just the perfect chance to have a "second childhood".
yeah, i agree that her romanticising of the victorian era is very weird, but maybe she has this modern childhood = bullying kinda connection, and from what she learned from her fairy tale books being a child in vic era must have been great. so she builds a perfect version of this, without the problems of course. i just think that maybe something inside her really broke and she's desperately trying to fix it, without really knowing how.
her ed behaviour might be scam of course, but most of the people don't plan to get one but rather just slip into it and only realise it when it's too late already. ruby might have thought that she'll just stop at the right point and that she'd be able to get out of it when she wanted too - that's what we all think, isn't it? now that she realised it might be a bit more problematic, she maybe wants someone around her to notice an help her by making it really obvious (sadly her family is just as oblivious as she is)
imo she needs professional help, but i know how hard it is to get help once you're in it. maybe she's scamming us and laughing at her bank account as i write this, but i think her obliviousness, ed and everything else might just be her way to hold herself together. there's plenty to criticise her for, still, but at this point i just feel sorry for her because i was exactly like her and i was struggling so hard. ruby reminds me of myself and i know how bad it would have been for me back then to get that kind of comments on something i hated myself for but i couldn't control anymore.
i know that nobody's really going to read this, but i feel better now i've said it and i feel like it's an important thing to point out. i'm very emotional right now because this brought up some memories and i feel so sorry for ruby. thus what i wrote probably doesn't make any sense at all, but please consider carefully what you criticise people for and what they can actually do about it.