Fungal Affliction Research Team
Should there be a subtrope to this about people who were once attractive but lost their looks to drugs/plastic surgery instead of natural aging?
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Yes, there should be. Ask in the Trope Finder about whether we already have it. And if no, it should go to YKTTW.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
I checked YKTTW and Trope Finder. However, tropes like Drugs Are Bad, Magic Plastic Surgery and Younger Than They Look do not cover this topic precisely enough. I am therefore writing a suggestion on the to do page.
I don't think there should be real life examples. We've deleted them from many other tropes dealing with physical attractiveness, because the whole thing is highly subjective. Saying that someone was attractive in the past is subjective, and so is saying that they're unattractive now, not to mention that it can be offensive.
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Seconding — since young people are generally considered more attractive than old people, almost every human being on the planet can be shoehorned into this category.
The only real life example I think is good is this (because it actually points out this fact):
- Your grandparents. Think about it... If you ever see old military pictures from World War II, most of the soldiers look rather handsome and all those old photos of their girls were done without Photoshop.
Maybe it should be taken to this thread
(nominally it's "natter alert", but cutting of Real Life sections is also frequently discussed there).
By extension, should the Pro Wrestling section be yanked too? The examples aren't people who are made up or played by different people in flashbacks (unlike Film).
I grew up in the 1970's, and was baffled that the newspapers and magazines idolised two actresses (both now deceased, btw) who to me seemed long past their sell-by date and who even by the kindest assessment could only be described as a walking example of the saying "mutton dressed as lamb". I wondered what was going on here, as Diana Dors was just... well, fat, wrinkly and blowsy. I'd never met a cheap prostitute, but DD looked just how you would expect a cheap tart to look. Pretty much the same applied to Pat Phoenix, another rather bloswy gin-marinaded old broad who the papers inexplicably drooled over. All you could say for "Elsie Tanner" that she looked several classes above Diana Dors, but still could not be put in the box ticked "beautiful."
It took a while to work out the mechanism involved here: the people lauding Dors and Phoenix as beautiful were older journalists who'd grown up with them and probably hadn't noticed, or if they admitted their 1950's pin-up girls had got old, they'd be admitting their own age too.
Is it universal that there's a sort of Squick about looking at women who were the beauties, the pin-ups, of a time twenty years or more before you were even born? (Could this be a trope: Pictures Of Lily, after the old Who song?)
He said "Son, now don't be silly!"//
She's been dead since 1925!" //
How I cried that night; //
If only 'd been born in Lily's time;//
I would have been alright....//
You might be looking at a beautiful woman from 1952, say, but your brain and instincts are saying "she'll be ninety and well wrinkly now" and it takes a struggle to suppress the squick and look dispassionately at the photo. And the younger Diana Dors of the 1940's was attractive, in a blowsy tarty sort of way; she had the figure, at least, even if the face said something dissolute. Same for Pat Phoenix: you could see where they were coming from with the younger version.
I had a dose of this the other way: I'd quite liked an impishly attractive French actress called Annie Girardot. I was in my teens, she was in her thirties). It was a hell of a jolt to realise, recently, she's now in her seventies and batshit with Alzheimers'... as a little bit of my mind still sees her, in the peak of life, running naked into the sea in the thriller movie Traitement de Choc....
Edited by AgProv Male, early sixties, Cranky old fart, at least two decades behind. So you have been warned. Functionally illiterate in several languages.
Pulled some probable non examples. The trope is when someone hasn't aged well but once was very beautiful.
- Family Guy
Brian: Eighteen year old Lois. Son of a Bitch!
- Not that there is anything wrong with her now.
- Metal Gear Solid Snake is still hot enough as an old man to pull off a Porn Stache and an insanely visible ass without causing mass Squick, but, when made-up to look like his younger self, he's so gorgeous he can grope members of the Amazon Brigade with impunity and not have to worry about violent reaction. Or, um, get hit on by a male PMC who mistook him for a street-walker.
Pulled this one since it seemed tenuous:
- Kreia of Knights of The Old Republic 2.
- Though any suggestion of such simply comes from one of Atton's throwaway lines at the beginning, all of the player's options to respond to which are along the lines of "are you really that desperate?"
Pulled these ones on the basis that the person needs to be a real looker when young.
- And Esmerelda 'Granny' Weatherwax. While she wasn't conventionally pretty, she was very striking and memorable. Which sort of counts. Though in her case, she hasn't lost it.
But what we have here is not a nice girl, as generally understood. For one thing, she's not beautiful. There's a certain set to the jaw and arch to the nose that might, with a following wind and in the right light, be called handsome by a good-natured liar... This gives her a piercing expression which is extremely disconcerting. It's not a face you can talk to. Open your mouth and you're suddenly the focus of a penetrating stare which declares: what you're about to say had better be interesting.
-Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies- 'For one thing, she's not beautiful' - how much more obvious does Pratchett need to be? When Nanny and Granny were young women, believe it or not, Nanny was the pretty one.
- Mrs. Whitlow, as we find out in The Last Continent, was almost overwhelmingly sexy as a young woman.
- Overwhelmingly, that is, to wizards. Which to be honest isn't saying much.
- And Esmerelda 'Granny' Weatherwax. While she wasn't conventionally pretty, she was very striking and memorable. Which sort of counts. Though in her case, she hasn't lost it.
Wizzard
Pulled the bit about "Turvey" being Mrs Lavish's "Pole Name" in Making Money. Unlikely as it may seem, there's a reference to her family being Turveys, and her nephew is introduced to the Patrician as "Hubert Turvey".
Edited by DaibhidC
Hillary Clinton doesn't seem to qualify unless "older" equals "unattractive". Her looks haven't faded unless you think women ought to be eternally 20.
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For the sake of comparison:
Hillary in 2008: [1]
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Hillary circa 1965: [2]
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Not exactly wrinkly and decrepit, but time has changed her greatly. I'm sure there's some people that would find her attractive, but...
Edited by Anaheyla This is still a signature.
Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Real life examples should be removed
, started by Aquila89 on Feb 15th 2012 at 4:45:52 PM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman