Excerpts from the Once and Future King by T.H. White regarding "The Ill-Made Knight" (Lancelot)
" For one thing, his ears stick out dreadfully. He's also compared to "an African ape" and is apparently "as ugly as a monster in the king's menagerie" (K.1.24). Poor Lancelot. Guenever even tells him at one point to leave and to take his ugly face with him."
"Lancelot, despite being the bravest of the knights, is ugly, and ape-like, so that he calls himself the Chevalier mal fet - "The Ill-Made Knight"."
"In the third volume, Lancelot self-describes as the Chevalier mal fet - the “Ill-Made Knight”, which is also the title of the volume. These flaws are not limited to Lancelot’s exterior either;
For one thing, he [Lancelot] liked to hurt people. [...] One reason why he fell in love with Guenever was because the first thing he had done was to hurt her. He might never have noticed her as a person, if he had not seen the pain in her eyes."
And this even goes back to the presentation of Lancelot in the earliest of Arturian writers, Chretien de Troyes, who wrote
The Knight of the Cart. In the beginning of this story (which does not describe Lancelot physically as that was not the style of writing back when stories were told only through poetry -- the novel did not yet exist), Lancelot rides in the back of a cart and is covered by pig shit and other unnameable filths, he earns his namesake "The Knight of the Cart" which is a sick burn and also sets up how the public views his character from that point on. For example, "they all cease their play and shout across the fields 'See, yonder comes the knight who was driven in the
cart! Let no one continue his sport while he is in our midst. A curse upon him who cares or deigns to play so long as he is here!' pg 11, the Knight of the Cart.