In Taylor Swift’s Folklore love-triangle trilogy, “betty” presents the male character’s viewpoint alongside “august” and “cardigan.”
Swift described the three songs as connected through fictional characters and overlapping perspectives. “cardigan” is associated with Betty, “august” with the unnamed girl involved in the summer relationship, and “betty” with James, the teenage boy at the center of the story.
The songs do not tell the story in a simple chronological sequence. Instead, they revisit the same emotional situation from different angles, allowing listeners to compare memory, regret, desire, and assumption.
A frequent mistake is to treat “august” as a direct autobiographical account. Swift framed Folklore as a work of imagination, and the trilogy’s characters were created for the album’s fictional narrative world.