Basic Trope: A magic-user obsessed with their own good looks and youth.
- Straight: Helga the Enchanting checks herself out in mirrors she passes, is easily flattered by references to her beauty (and conversely, insults to her appearance are a Berserk Button) and uses magic to erase the tiny lines in her skin.
- Exaggerated: Marco the Magnificent carries a mirror with him at all times, sacrifices a virgin every month to the dark gods to keep himself looking fabulous, and once destroyed an entire city because a barber gave his Beard of Evil a bad trim.
- Downplayed:
- Helga the Enchanting is vain, aloof, and self-centered, but she's also a surprisingly nice person once you get to know her.
- Wanda the Wonderful is pleasant, sensible, and generally not too concerned with her looks, but can't resist the temptation to magic away the occasional zit.
- Helga seeks magic for the sake of gaining eternal life, the fact that she can stay young and pretty is a nice side bonus.
- Justified:
- Helga started studying sorcery in the first place because she was afraid of growing old and losing her looks, the immense power was just a bonus.
- Helga makes money helping non-magic-users magically improve their looks, but she wouldn't seem credible if she didn't maintain her own. But once she'd fixed a couple warts and wrinkles, she realized she had no reason not to fix all her flaws and it became a compulsion. Being literally flawless went to her head and she grew vain.
- Magic in mortals is sourced by sexual relations with The Fair Folk and they have very high standards of appearance before they even consider such lowly beings worth their time.
- Helga is an Immortality Seeker, obsessed with retaining youth because aging is a sign of impending death. Therefore, she's obsessed with maintaining a youthful appearance, ensuring that maintenance is successful, and goes into a mild panic at the least sign of ageing.
- Helga is just a narcissist — in an Alternate Universe without any magic, she's shown to use lots of makeup and even plastic surgery to improve her looks.
- Inverted:
- Helga the Horror uses magic of epic proportions to control the fates of nations and as a side-effect turns herself into an Eldritch Abomination. When someone confronts her about turning herself ugly, she finds it hilarious, says a god doesn't care about such things, then splatters him for wasting her time.
- Helga looks disheveled from neglecting bodily care in favor of an all-consuming obsession with studying magic.
- Helga is unattractive or even downright hideous and proud of it.
- Subverted:
- The supposedly Vain Sorceress turns out to be perfectly normal-looking and dress comfortably at home when not expecting visitors. The big display of beauty and pride is all a show for the benefit of her royal clients.
- The main characters are told that Helga is vain about her beauty, but when they finally encounter her, she turns out to be a repulsive hag who doesn't care about how ugly people find her.
- Helga is an extremely beautiful, vain sorceress and.....an extremely sweet person. Her methods of staying young forever involve magical incantations and herbs from the forest.
- Double Subverted:
- The sorceress tears off her loathsome "normal woman" disguise as soon as The Hero leaves—she knew that he wouldn't take advice from someone obsessed with their own looks.
- Hags have different ideas of attractiveness; by her own people's standards, Helga is a great beauty and takes pride in her reputation as one of the most beautiful hags in the world. She simply doesn't care that humans don't find her attractive, any more than a typical human woman would care about hags considering her ugly by their standards.
- Parodied:
- Helga the Enchanting acts like a typical vain sorceress, but her looks are at best mediocre, and she's a Fashion-Victim Villain. It's just that her temper and power have made it ill-advised for anyone to tell her the truth about her appearance.
- Helga the Horrendous revels in her ugliness, to the point that she uses magic to make sure her nose wart has the right amount of hair growing out of it. Likewise, her clothing is deliberately chosen to scream "old hag."
- Helga stays young and beautiful forever using not the souls of children but the SOLES from their shoes.
- Helga hides away when doing her magic to retain her youthful beauty, so rumors spread. The truth is it's a really long incantation that takes nearly a half hour to complete, and she can't pause, which means despite her best efforts, she's drooling about halfway through. She's so terrified of someone being grossed out that she prefers people spread what she calls "horrid rumors" about her than see her looking less than glamorous for even a moment.
- Zig Zagged: The sorceress is beautiful and vain, but only in public, but her humble act at home is actually a disguise, but when the hero uses The Power of Love, she gives up her self-centeredness, but she's still not half bad-looking.
- Averted:
- Magic-users in the story make no reference to their own appearance, and are not shown maintaining it.
- Magic-users try to appear plain so they won't attract attention which could make them an easy target.
- Enforced:
- In this universe, magic-users must have a striking appearance in order to maintain their magical powers. You can be either really good-looking, or really ugly, but you can't be average.
- Its done in a harsh, gritty Low Fantasy. Magic allows to have a healthy, normal complexion which is often mistaken for "striking beauty".
- Lampshaded: "What's the point of having magic, if it can't make you pretty?"
- Invoked: Marco the Magnificent decides to take on an apprentice, and chooses the really pretty one, stoking her vanity with flattery.
- Exploited: Helga makes herself rich by selling "Bottled Beauty" and all the sorts of enchantments and potions she has used on herself through past few centuries; that way she can share the wonders of beauty with her lesser folks, AND amass a modest fortune to buy an steady supply of reagents for her own magic-powered beauty treatments.
- Defied: "I will never let an obsession with my appearance take over my life!"
- Discussed: "'Eliminate Skin Wrinkles' is the most popular spell among sorceresses who shop here at the Magic Box."
- Conversed: "I see they got a really hot actress to play Helga the sorceress on Generic Fantasy Show. I bet they'll make her be incredibly vain and self-obsessed."
- Deconstructed:
- Helga winds up having to spend so much of her time and magical power just maintaining her looks in the face of advancing age that she never gets anything else done, and becomes irrelevant to anyone else.
- Helga just so happens to be very beautiful by birth and is normally vain like any other human. And simply had a Terrible Fashion sense. But thanks to rumors and badly first impressions, she is constantly looked down by the most traditional of the Magical Circle and ridiculed behind her back by the noble/courtiers...
- Helga's obsession with her own beauty stems from a belief that her looks are the only thing anyone else cares about. Her past experiences have only reinforced this; when she first showed signs of aging, she found herself suddenly losing the attention she used to command, and worse, being belittled and dismissed as 'old and ugly'.
- Reconstructed:
- In the setting, mind control spells are much more taxing than illusions and rejuvenation. Why exhaust yourself casting them when you can get other people to do stuff for you?
- ... that's it, until the chips are down and she shows why she was feared/being in such a High Place in the First place.
- In the setting, emotions and feelings can be used to generate magic. Helga just so happens to use lust as her fuel for which she needs to maintain a perfect sex appeal all the time.
Back to Vain Sorceress! I, Helga the Enchanting, the most beautiful among the witches, commands you!
