Basic Trope: An attractive person insists they are not attractive, almost Always Female.
- Straight: Alice, a very attractive woman, insists she is just plain.
- Exaggerated: Alice is a Head-Turning Beauty, but insists she is incredibly ugly.
- Downplayed:
- Alice has slightly above-average looks, but thinks herself to have slightly below-average looks.
- Usually Alice believes she's pretty, but during depressive episodes she starts doubting herself.
- Justified: Alice has body image issues.
- Inverted: Alice is ugly, but thinks she is beautiful.
- Gender-Inverted: Bob, a very attractive man, insists his appearance is nothing special.
- Subverted:
- Alice turns out to have a hidden disfigurement she was concealing.
- Alice was pretending to think she is ugly to get sympathy; she is well aware she is beautiful.
- Double Subverted:
- Even with the disfigurement undisguised, Alice isn't very ugly.
- Alice ends up Becoming the Mask.
- Parodied: Alice melodramatically cries about her ugliness while boys look on, confused.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice alternates agreeing with everybody else that she's attractive and averring that she's plain or dumpy.
- Averted: Alice is correct about her attractiveness level.
- Enforced: Alice needs to be genuinely beautiful so men will like her, but needs to be insecure so she is identifiable.
- Lampshaded: "Alice, you're beautiful. Now shut up."
- Invoked: A bully attacks Alice over minor imperfections to undermine her self-image.
- Exploited: Every other woman in Alice's area enters beauty contests when her presence would have otherwise discouraged them.
- Defied: Bob shows Alice how pretty she is and stops her semifrequent bouts of self-pity over her appearance.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: When Alice is told she is beautiful, she seems more confused than pleased.
- Deconstructed: Less attractive women reason that if Alice doesn't think she is attractive, they must be truly ugly.
- Reconstructed: Then they realize that everyone just has these insecurities, and that looking like Alice won't fix them.
- Played for Drama: Alice ends up harming herself trying to be even more attractive.
- Played for Horror: Alice looks perfectly fine, but she believes her appearance is so ugly as to make her a Brown Note, taking a toll on her sanity.
- Played for Laughs: Alice does and says all kinds of silly things to try to convince people she is less pretty than she is.
Back to I Am Not Pretty. Sorry about how ugly that link is.
