Cross-posting to Beauty Equals Goodness and Beauty Is Bad: these tropes as currently defined are too broad to be tropes, like Hot Dad / Hot Mom used to be. Most characters are beautiful, not because they're good or bad but because they're either played by attractive actors (thanks to the way TV and movies are), drawn by someone who'd prefer to draw attractive people, or written about by someone who tend to write about attractive people because they live in an appearance-obsessed culture. Between these two tropes and fans' own subjective tastes, you're going to end up naming almost every character in existence!
My suggestion would be to zap examples that are just there because the person who added them thought they were attractive, and stick to examples In-Universe - an Alpha Bitch who wins a beauty contest, a heroine who gets compliments on her appearance, etc.
We need to fix some examples; I've seen this trope on character pages that boil down to "Evil character happens to be attractive," even when the hero is just as pretty.
Very Manly Muppet
Cut this:
- The Shrek movies are full of this. The hero is a crude, rude, ugly green ogre. Princess Fiona only becomes her "true" self when she starts showing signs of a similarly rude sense of humor and later becomes an ogress herself (though admittedly, a very cute ogress. She looks more like a cute full-figured girl who happens to be green than a monster). The villain of the latter two films is the handsome Prince Charming.
- Similarly, the other princesses in the third film only become likable when they give in to their fighting urges. Rapunzel, who doesn't, is eventually revealed to be Charming's girlfriend - and bald to boot.
First off, Fiona's development starts way before she becomes "less pretty". But either way, the example already states that ogress!Fiona is cute. As for the third film— which I admit I have not seen— giving into fighting urges (?) doesn't sound like it involves becoming uglier, though perhaps less ladylike (?). Also, what does Rapunzel dating Charming have to do with her looks? Lastly, if she's bald, does she still meet the in-universe standard for prettiness?
Long story short: yeah, Shrek is a walking backlash against Beauty Equals Goodness, but I don't feel like this example makes a lick of sense.
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Well, I'm quite tempted to point out Shrek is all over this trope. Tropes Are Not Bad, and it manages to be a case of Beauty Is Bad via viciously subverting Beauty Equals Goodness. Think about it: Sure, Fiona is a Cute Monster Girl even as an ogress, but she's still Hollywood Pudgy, green-skinned (a.k.a. not conventional standards of "pretty"), and does ogre stuff - which sometimes, is kinda gross (farting in the mud hot tub, for example). At the end of the first film, she's not evil, but kind of selfish and petty, and she gets her Happy Ending not by breaking the curse that makes her turn into an ogre, but embracing her ogre-ness.
Then there's the second film, which really sticks out in my mind because the Big Bad of that film was such a firm believer in Beauty Equals Goodness, it pretty much translated into Black-and-White Insanity. Plus, Shrek is turned into a Mr. Fanservice human with a full head of hair, and Donkey becomes a stallion - both of which is reversed by the end of the film.
It's not a bad thing that Shrek uses Beauty Is Bad as a trope - it's going less on the angle of "conventionally attractive people are baaad," and more "Ugly is good," which is basically getting around to the same thing. However, the example really needs cleaning up, it's confusing and covered in Natter.
Hard to tell oftentimes in visual mediums. The nature of the move and television businesses means that the vast majority of actors and actresses are conventionally attractive. Granted, there is a lot that can be done with makeup and presentation but in any movie or television show both the protagonists and antagonists are almost certainly going to be attractive, at least to some degree. What matters more in Movies and TV, therefore, is how much the beauty is played up and is part of the defining features of the character.
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Yes. However, the key is that the conventionally attractive character is the villain, while the (stereotypically/conventionally) ''unattractive one is the good guy. For instance, the villain is a blond, curvy (but not too curvy) Alpha Bitch with big boobs while the protagonist is either scrawny or Hollywood Pudgy, sports Youthful Freckles, has brown, black or red hair and wears glasses. Sure, the protagonist is probably even prettier and her personality more charming, but the work has to specifically treat her like she's not pretty, and that the pretty rival/villain's attractiveness is emphasized and practically tied in with their status as a villain.
We might as well rename this trope "Skinny Is Bad". I actually wouldn't mind having a trope like that, since it does exist, but come on. Skinny is not always a direct synonym to "beauty".
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I'm guessing this trope is about (wo)men who are considered conventionally attractive. But you're right - we should have a trope for "Skinny Is Bad," since there's a trope out there for villains who are startlingly thin (particularly compared to the rest of the cast, who are generally more "filled out"), as a way to emphasize how evil they are.
Arguably, we could call Skinny Is Bad a Sub-Trope of Beauty Is Bad, since being thin is part of a more conventional beauty standard.*
This always struck me as a sort of weird meta-trope anyway. While Beauty Equals Goodness is a prominent view held in media, Beauty Is Bad always seems to come about as a reactionary position among fandom. Basically saying "a good-looking character is always less interesting." Hence the typically negative response to Adaptational Attractiveness. The rest is already covered by tropes like Evil Is Sexy.
Agreed. It bothers me that the article's picture is an image of a magazine cover that says "Skinny women are evil", which is not the same as saying "Beautiful women are evil". The woman saying it considers herself and many other fat women physically appealing!
Even if we say this trope only refers to those who are generally perceived as beautiful, that image is a bad one to be using for this article with it's current name.
I'd like to thank the editor who posted the example in the Real Life section mentioning skinny girls. That's right folks, there really are women out there with 20'' waists who literally can't help it. Heck, if you saw how much food I put away, you'd never believe I was 98 lb! Thank you for hearing this rant.
About Vega in Street Fighter II, all of the boss characters are no less attractive than most of the playable characters. Blanka and Dhalsim are obviously the worst looking.