Silva fam fanatic

instead, all her brainspace spent on that song would be replaced with the vivid memories of roman gladiator, taylaurius velox. she's able to hide this at first, but her music begins to take on a gradually romaner and romaner tint. at first, people are like "damn, she's getting REALLY conservative, huh" and other people are like "wow, she's so deep, she knows what a rubicon is" but eventually travis kelce leaves her out of nowhere (he wasn't sure if dating someone possessed by a roman gladiator made him gay or not and anyway he was getting sick of being like "we're going to play the lions" and taylor being like "LIONS? WHERE?") and taylor publishes an entire brutus themed album about this betrayal and it's beginning to weird people out

and so eventually travis kelce is getting like, bomb threats sent to his family for leaving taylor and eventually he's like "okay, okay, i left her because she kept having all these vivid nightmares of gladatorial combat and she kept saying that football was giving her the ick because we never actually killed anybody for the glory of rome" and then he just gets more bomb threats because he left a struggling woman during a mental health crisis

and eventually taylor is writing music about her forbidden roman senator lover and her fanbase is either whittled WAY down or WAY up because people want to watch this trainwreck happen (or maybe she influences culture so hard that we're just all really into rome now) but she's being super cagey about the name of this roman senator. until. and now here's the twist:

weird al has been getting all of the same vivid memories of taylaurius velox. and he still has all his memories of her old songs. so he's writing all these detailed song parodies of taylor swift songs that don't exist anymore including specific details about their shared gladiatorial reality that taylor has never shared with anybody else. including that her lover's name was publius, and she's been calling him Poob for short

at this point a lot of original swifties are leaving. they could do the brutus stuff, but they really can't survive poob. taylor makes a clapping back at the haters song including the lyric "these bitches don't know publius" and it ends up all over all sorts of merch. there's a renewed archaeological interest in roman gladatorial combat

most importantly, the internet discourse is the best it's ever been. does this make taylor swift transmasc? is travis kelce problematic for leaving his fiancee while she gradually morphs into a roman gladiator? is this good queer representation? if taylaurius velox was a gay man, does that mean the gaylors were technically correct? is weird al morally wrong for capitalizing off of her music if she cant remember it anymore? was weird al sent by god to torment taylor swift?

One Punch Man vs. One Karate-chop Pig

I'm gonna preface this with the fact that I am not an expert or a professional, I just dabble in cosplay and find costuming and historical-fantasy outfits interesting.

So I decided I'd go through her standard outfits and try and breakdown what I think she's trying to do with her clothes, the image she is trying to portray with them and how she is aiming to present herself.

To clarify. I'm not counting any of her outfits from promotional material, or merchandise or the games. I'm also not counting any one-off outfits, like the Star Festival dresses. I will also not be including the Spade Raid outfit other than as a comparison point bc that, like the Royal Knights robe, is a uniform and not individual choice. I'm purely looking at the everyday outfits she has chosen to wear.

So these three. (Pre-canon, elf arc, spade arc)

First off, as I'm sure you've noticed, she doesn't show a lot of skin. In fact--between the high collar, long sleeves and gloves--she's the character to show the least amount of skin out of the entire show. Which is quite a feat considering she's competing with people like Nacht Faust. For someone who is supposed to be "the most beautiful woman" she sure goes out of her way to avoid showing off her body.

Speaking of that title, I find it interesting that the manga extra that tells us that specifically says she's the most beautiful without her helmet (source: manga extras) and yet. Nearly every time we see her. She has her helmet on (I personally disagree with the anime's decision to remove her armour and helment for the Heart stuff for this very reason. The only times we see her without her helmet in the manga she is A) at the hotsprings, B) possessed, C) in bed recovering or D) lost it in a fight. She doesn't just- not wear it). A helmet that is clearly designed to throw her face into shadow. Look at the difference between her original outfit and her Spade arc/movie outfit. Her helmet is angled down more, throwing more shadows over her face and her eyes (and also limiting her upwards vision but that's not the point). She's trying to make herself more intimidating and unapproachable. She also seems to be trying to feminise a traditionally very masculine silhouette type, because we've all heard of the big, brooding guy in armour.

For me, this makes her a really interesting deconstruction of the The Most Beautiful Woman trope. Because generally in media when you have a character described as beautiful, especially the Most Beautiful, they use that to their advantage. They flaunt it, they show it off. Boa Hancock from One Peice, for example. Lucy Heartfilia from Fairy Tail. Charlotte goes in the exact opposite direction.

She seems to go out of her way to avoid drawing attention to her looks. Her hair is up and out of the way with two exceptions, the Star Festival and when she's recovering from being possessed, unless it has been physically forced loose during a fight. She wears so many layers you can't even see her figure, especially with the way her tops tend to bunch around her waist. And then she has armour on top of that.

Armour, especially metal armour, generally makes people look bigger than they actually are. Charlotte doesn't have any pauldrons, so it's not giving her broad shoulders, but she does have the puffy little white sleeves which, on the few times she loses her cloak and squad robe, do make her look a little bigger.

Even when we get her not in armour, left to her own devices she wears a corset; something that makes it equally hard to tell what her actual figure is because corsets are items of clothing designed to shape your body.

The biggest change to her silhouette between her elf arc and spade arc outfits is her cloak. Simply bringing it forwards over her shoulder rather than just hanging down her back immediately casts her body into even more shadow and makes it far harder to spot where she actually is.

The other thing about her outfit that stands out to me, is that it is incredibly practical. She is the only person in the cast to actually wear metal armour. Sure, we have a few examples of people summoning armour with their magic, but there's a difference between magical armour and physical pieces of metal wrapped around your body.

And I know I said I wasn't going to talk about her Star Festival dresses, but I need to bring them up as a point of comparison. Charlotte wears two different dresses during the Star Festival. One of them is very plain and simple, the other is a considerably fancier (though still fairly plain in the grand scheme of things). Sol picked one, Charlotte picked the other. Charlotte's choice? The plain, simple dress that appears to ber very easy to hike up should she need to do something. It's got a high neckline and minimal embelishment. She even has a little cloak.

And while it is cute that she lets her squad (or at least Sol and Puli) pick out clothes for her, it's very clear that they don't understand what she likes. Because the dress Puli chooses for her for that stupid mixer episode could not be further from Charlotte's own choice of dress.

yes she’s the most beautiful woman in the series

no that doesnt stop her from being a dangerous knight

no that also doesnt mean she rejects being feminine