User blog:Bluebutterflychan/Headcanon Corner: Do You Even Lift?

Having recently read the recent Selfors novel, Truth or Hair, and also having gone in for a holiday re-watch of the EAH seasonal special, Epic Winter, I noticed a few "little" details about our daintiest, royalest princesses. More specifically, how physically strong they are.

Every character in the series is embued with some sort of inherent strength, whether they be in the webisode, doll line, or book canon. Indeed, after the 2015 re-branding, that is literally Ever After High's marketing slogan: "Where Princesses are Powerful." However, the strength I want to discuss about today isn't the sort of strength that comes from one's virtue or bravery.

We're talking all about pure musclepower, here. And boy, do I have some things to say...

The O'Hair Twins Have Thighs of Steel
Seriously powerful.

The passage that triggered this line of thought comes from the Truth or Hair novel by Suzanne Selfors, during a scene where Holly is walking up the stairs of the Tower Hair Salon, where her sister works cutting hair. It goes a little something like this...

She didn't mind the steep climb. [...] Too bad stair climbing isn't an official school sport, she mused to herself as the saircase wound upward. [...] Even though many of [Poppy's] clients found the hike tiring, they were willing to break a sweat in order to get their hair done by the most popular stylist in Book End. Holly laughed to herself. Stairs are much better than having to climb a rope ladder woven by hair, she thought.

Furthermore, the book expresses that Poppy does not only work in a tower... the sisters' shared dorm room is also in a tower. As the book explains,

Not many people would choose to have to climb up all those stairs every evening after class, but Poppy did it without even thinking about it and never complained.

Assuming that these two towers are (more or less) similar in altitude to the original Rapunzel's Tower, Truth or Hair even conveniently gives us the height that must be ascended to reach the uppermost level: 72 feet, as stated by a "fun fact" about Rapunzel's braid. Depending on how tall the architect decides to make a building's stories, 72 feet should come out to 6-7 stories tall-- or, more precisely, 216 standard four-inch tall steps.

By the way, this doesn't count ANY of the steps taken on landings in between.

Assuming each girl ascends each flight of stairs once a day-- Poppy going to work, Holly visiting her sister, and both of them climbing the stairs to return to their dorm-- they each climb 432 steps per day, or 12-14 flights. Some quick Googling indicates that even some professional bodybuilders have difficulty accomplishing this feat-- one of the websites I visited seemed horrified at the idea of doing more than ten flights at a time, and only on four out of every five days.

Holly and Poppy do six to seven flights at a time every day, twice a day. That's not counting any events where they have to go back to their dorm for something or another, and it also doesn't count any books (or extra hair!) they might be weighed down by on the way. Furthermore, neither of them-- not even fangirl-blogger Holly-- seems bothered by it even slightly.

You could say it's magic. But you could also compare it to the world IRL, where literal bodybuilders find this exercise painful and exhausting. Either way, the O'Hair twins? Probably some of the strongest legs Ever After.

Apple White is Secretly Swole
Now that I've talked about EAH's tower-dwelling princesses, I'd like to discuss another royal with some hidden strength. We know Apple White as student body president, chemythstry whiz, and altogether quite a proper princess.

She can also scale a vertical incline with nothing save for what seems to be a handheld ice-ax, and three goats strapped to her waist. (Really, she can.)

These goats are completely free-hanging, with all of the torque and sway that comes from having heavy objects held to you by only a rope-- if you stretch your arms out while holding a weight and sway a little, you can see this for yourself. Using rough estimates based on Apple's height, we can also measure the wall in question to be 20 ft tall at least. Though Apple seems to be having a reasonable amount of difficulty, the ease with which she withdraws the ice-ax to further scale the wall of snow indicates that her difficulty doesn't come from exertion, but rather, from the fact it's the winterpocalypse and she's late for class.

This is the kind of feat one expects to perform while climbing Mount Everest. Its difficulty is further compounded when, later on in the movie, Crystal Winter tries and fails to do the very same thing. Being the Princess of Winter and all, Crystal is likely more experienced at scaling ultra-high snow fort walls (though, in her defense, she probably just used her magic to do so prior to this web special).

Full-grown domestic goats, depending on breed, typically weigh somewhere between 75 and 200 lbs according to my research. Though the three Billy Goats Gruff seem to be juveniles still (presumably the goat equivalent of adolescence), we can still roughly estimate their weights at a minimum of 30lbs each.

Please leave a comment if you know someone who can scale a 20-ft-tall vertical incline with 90+ lbs hanging from their waist using nothing but an ice-ax, because they sound totally amazing.

Surprisingly, this isn't the first time Apple's super strength has made an appearance. In Spring Unsprung, evil!Apple seems to have no difficulty at all carrying Daring Charming piggyback-style. My guess is that, being fairly tall and muscularly-built, Daring Charming weighs significantly more than the petite Apple White, making her easily stronger than the average person (who is expected to be capable of carrying somewhere around their own weight).

I'm thinking that the Topsy-Turvy spell didn't do anything to change the characters physically, since other cursed characters didn't seem to show any signs of physical ability changes-- it was only because of the personality flip that Apple so openly flaunted a strength that she probably had within her all along.

TL;DR I heard that Apple White has a six pack. That Apple White is totally shredded.

The End is Just the Beginning
There are way, way more examples of seriously strong girls in EAH-verse... for example, swan-form Duchess Swan being able to significantly slow Lizzie Hearts' fall into a deathly-deep chasm in Next Top Villain, or Darling Charming and literally any time she fights a thing, or perhaps Jillian Beanstalk's climbing, or even Briar Beauty's many daredevil feats.

I implore you, friends and readers, to tell me which ones are your favorites! If I've missed your own favorite strongprincess, please leave a note down in the comments-- and if you can, please point out which amazing feats of (physical) strength they've pulled off!

If you think I'm misguided in the two headcanons presented above, let me know! If you think that their strength has been obtained through some sort of fairytale magic, a side-effect of a curse, or anything along those lines instead of being gained the old-fashioned way, I would royally love to hear what you think :)