Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-2095950-20170802191110

I think the Swimsuit Servants should be split into their own articles.

I know they were put in the same articles under the mindset of "It's just the same character, but in a swimsuit", but FGO recently introduced the Costume Dress where you can have your Servant wear a different costume. Considering that the first costume is Shielder's Swimsuit of Perpetual Summer, I initially assumed that future swimsuit Servants would just be the Servant with a different costume.

I was wrong, they are making more Swimsuit Servants. And, in my opinion, that gives them a stronger argument for them being different characters. I mean, they have different profiles, stats, and Noble Phantasms. That's as "different Servant" as you get in FGO.

If you're still thinking "story just treats them as the same character in a different costume", actually, there's dialogue for Swimsuit Mordred and Kiyohime reacting to their normal selves, which seems like evidence of them being considered separate characters. None of the other Swimsuit Servants, though, have reactions to meeting their normal selves, and the only non-Swimsuit Servant reacting to a Swimsuit Servant among the relevant characters is Artoria reacting to Mordred using the Prydwen as a surfboard.

If that's not enough, Swimsuit Artoria has dialogue explicitly mentioning her being "summoned in [the Archer] class" when summoned, so the Swimsuit Servants are canonically a completely separate summon rather than some CCC-Berserker-Elizabeth class change type of thing. The official FGO Comic a la Carte also has a scene of some Swimsuit Servants meeting their normal selves, which seems like further evidence of them being considered separate characters.

Speaking of which, do we also want to split Nero Bride, and the holiday Servants? Nasu said the Nero Bride of FGO is from a universe where she never met Hakuno, meaning she's technically a separate character, sorta like Illya's brother and Miyu's brother in Prisma Illya. The FGO Comic a la Carte also has a scene where Lancer Elizabeth and Brave Elizabeth have an entire conversation. Both of those Comic a la Carte scenes seem to imply that the rule for FGO is "every different Servant is a different character, even when they are a variant of the same person", which for some we have ignored for holiday and Swimsuit Servants. 