Despite how much everyone in Fairy Tail talks about being family, they’re also the rowdiest bunch of mages in all of Magnolia. Families can get pretty wild, after all. But while the group is known for their raucous behavior and constant friendly sparring, there’s one member of the guild that can make everyone behave: Erza Scarlet, or as she’s often called, Titania, the Queen of Fairies.
Considered one of the most powerful members of the guild, Erza is responsible for some of the best and most over the top fight scenes in the series. Behind Natsu and Lucy, she’s one of the biggest characters on the show, but how much do Fairy Tail fans really know about her? Warning, spoilers are in effect for people who haven't finished the series yet.
10 PROTECTIVE OF THE GUILD
Much like every member of Fairy Tail, Erza is extremely protective of the guild and its name. In an omake chapter entitled “She’s Erza” (adapted in episode 203), she ran across Moulin Rouge, a young woman using the name of the guild to threaten a small town, robbing them of their money. Though Erza would find out Moulin was doing it just to survive, as she was an immigrant from another country and couldn’t find work, the young woman received no mercy. Erza promptly beat her to a pulp for impersonating a member of her family. Pretty harsh, but after the beating she invited Moulin Rogue to come work for them if she wanted later, anyway.
9 HER MOTHER CREATED DRAGON SLAYER MAGIC
Erza starts out as a baby that appeared on the doorstep of a church in Rosemary Village, and the story doesn’t delve any deeper until the final arcs. During the Alvarez Empire arc, we learn Erza’s mother is actually Irene Belserion, a woman who was the Queen of Dragons four hundred years ago. Irene helped create Dragon Slayer magic to fight against invading dragons from another country, but it gradually changed her into a dragon as well, which lost her the love of her husband. After four hundred years of wanting to transform back but failing, she finally chose to have Erza and give her away rather than have her deal with the enmity she had for the humanity her daughter had that Irene had lost.
8 WAS ONCE A SUPERHERO NAMED FAIRY WOMAN
Despite Erza’s serious personality in combat or in business, she’s not a dour person by any means. Another omake chapter focusing on her showed Erza being tricked into buying an odd-looking superhero outfit from a clothing store. Told that the costume was worn by a woman who defeated evil, she immediately took to the outfit and explored the city as Fairy Woman. The rest of the chapter sees her doing good deeds and helping people, but eventually the costume changes her appearance to look more like a Western-styled character. The end of the chapter sees her return to the clothing store to punish the man for giving her a cursed outfit... but she still maintains the different look afterwards.
7 ENJOYS RACY ROMANCE NOVELS
Typically, a lot of leading anime heroines tend to be very pure. It matches the audience they’re usually aiming at, young boys and girls who might not have had their first crush and certainly aren’t experienced with love even if they have.
So the lead characters usually have little experience with love as well, even though they’re older. But Erza’s a completely different case. During the “Welcome to Fairy Hills” story, Lucy gets to tour the girls’ dormitory for Fairy Tail. While there, she learns from Levy that Erza has a penchant for the more racy kind of romance novel.
6 WILL DO ANYTHING FOR FASHION
One of the things that helps to make Erza feel like a more three-dimensional character is that she isn’t just one thing. She isn’t just a talented fighter who takes her job super seriously. She isn’t just the primary leader of the current generation of Fairy Tail. She’s also kind of a goof who loves sweets. She wants to be taken seriously both on the battlefield and as a woman. Over the course of the series, we see Erza often curious about the latest fashion trends, and while she’s often off-base (and has a strange love of bunny outfits), it still makes her endearing as a character that she’s trying.
5 SHE OWNS MORE ARMOR THAN SHE CAN SUMMON
During the omake “Welcome to Fairy Hills”, Lucy visits the dormitory of all the women of Fairy Tail. It’s a joke chapter with a sweet ending, but it has a secondary purpose of allowing the fans to get a look at all the rooms of the women in the guild, from Biska to Juvia, Erza to Levy. But what we learn about Erza is that she actually has way more armor than we actually see her use. There’s a limit to the amount of armor and weapons she can store in magic space, and so she keeps the remainder in Fairy Hills, renting out five rooms just to have enough space for them all.
4 LOVER OF GOOD FOOD
If Erza can be summed up, it would be as a person who loves life and wants to live as much of it as she can as excellent as she can. She wants the best friends and that’s why she joins Fairy Tail. She works hard and fights the strongest monsters to show off her abilities. And she loves food. During the off-hours for the guild members she’s always going somewhere or coming back with a delicious food item, usually a dessert. Even the giant suitcases she brings with her don’t contain armor, they contain different food and ingredients to cook with.
3 SHE'S A TERRIBLE DRUNK
During the comedy storyline “Fairy Christmas”, we learn that one thing Erza can’t do very well is hold her liquor. During a Christmas party for the guild, everyone involves gets more than a little tipsy on “holiday cheer”, but before Natsu and Gray can exit they’re both pulled into the arms of their romantic interests, Lucy and Juvia.
Jealous at all the romantic couples, Erza snaps and pulls the group into playing the Guild Master Game, where the “guild master” gets to make anyone involved do whatever they want. Erza’s pretty harsh with this game, subjecting the other members (and fans!) to some pretty hilarious and embarrassing sights, making the OVA or manga omake chapter a must-see for any Fairy Tail fan.
2 ORIGINALLY HAD A DIFFERENT LOOK
Erza has a fairly established look now, even though she’s best known for constantly altering her appearance through the use of multiple different kinds of armors. However, originally Hiro Mashima envisioned a completely different appearance for her. She was going to have a spear instead of a sword, and have a much more natural, “wild”, almost amazonian appearance. He was aiming for someone who could scare Natsu with just a look, and while he succeeded, it was with the armor-clad woman we know today rather than some kind of ersatz anime Wonder Woman.
1 HER FOCUS ARC ORIGINALLY WENT VERY DIFFERENTLY
Hiro Mashima had plans to go for a major twist in the series early on. During the Tower of Heaven arc, we see Erza start to have dreams of her past life as a slave working on the Tower. But these flashbacks were initially planned to be the present for the series rather than the past. In other words, Erza would have still been a young girl slaving away in the tower, and all her memories of Natsu, Gray, and the others would have only been a dream of what life outside the Tower could be. This would have been a massive shift that essentially positioned her as the main character, but fortunately, Mashima changed his mind and decided against invalidating all the fans’ experiences with the guild.