The Protective Piece

While Ves considered himself to be an artful mech designer, Gloriana was no slouch in this department either.

The Hexer clients she catered to in the past always liked to make their mechs more grand and imposing. The Hexer mech culture also featured a light degree of gender segregation in many cases.

Male mech pilots predominantly piloted masculine-looking mechs while female mech pilots preferred more feminine-looking mechs.

This was not a hard rule, though. The more liberal parts of the Hegemony did not adhere too much to this custom. In parts where hexism was more predominant, it became a lot more evident.

So Gloriana possessed a fair amount of experience in designing mechs that purposefully leaned towards a masculine and feminine aesthetic.

She just never added a codpiece to her mechs before. In the Hexadric Hegemony, designing such a ridiculously chauvinistic ornament would have instantly ruined her reputation!