Discussion Main / ProgressivelyPrettier

How bout doing this with an already attractive character?

Prettiness isn't always generic or lacking in character, though... the trope seems to be saying ugly is always better.

I've just deleted the Homestuck example, having written a piece-by-piece breakdown of exactly how much of it was dependent on either one-sided writing or plain wrongness; unfortunately, said breakdown was longer and more formatted than would be non-awkward for the edit reason box, so I'm going to leave it here. Here's a quote of the deleted example, for the sake of convenience:

• In Homestuck, the trolls were originally intended to be monstrous, with odd-coloured skin and eyes, fangs, an inherently violent streak to their personalities, and also quite ugly. They seemed to find humans ugly-looking enough to be sexually incompatible with troll-on-human crushes based mostly on personality, and John at one point compared the trolls' appearance to Howie Mandel's lumpy-skinned, freaky-looking character in Little Monsters. Much later in the story, after the comic had grown its insane fanbase, a character instead remarks that the trolls are 'all so pretty', humans and trolls now find each other physically sexy, and at one point Karkat is revealed to have no idea what the concept of shaving is, implying trolls naturally lack body hair. Their inherent violence is Retconned as being caused by malevolent psychics, and their Bizarre Alien Reproduction is revealed to be not as bizarre as we were initially led to assume. We were also treated to teenaged and adult clones of the main troll cast from two different universes, who are universally depicted as sexy, Karkat's adult counterpart being a handsome, muscular man with a 'hotness' theme.

Now, the list of complaints:

• "originally intended to be monstrous" implies some sort of Word of God on the subject, which there isn't as far as I know (although I admittedly haven't read through Andrew Hussie's full Formspring archive). Also, the bit about the inherently violent streak is wrong, but I cover that more a few lines down.
• Trolls finding humans ugly has always been in question, since the only source we have on that subject is Karkat telling John to tell Jade to "GET HER GROSS AND TOTALLY UNATTRACTIVE HUMAN BUTT OFF HER UGLY HUMAN HIGH HORSE AND ANSWER MY MESSAGES", which is a sentence pretty much impossible to take seriously as his actual opinion on her looks.
• John is known to compare pretty much anything to his favorite movies given the opportunity. At one point he reenacts the ending of Con Air with a pair of salamanders.
• Nobody ever says the trolls are "all so pretty".
• The character who says the trolls are "so beautiful" (which I assume is the incident that the "all so pretty" misquote is referring to) is a parody of the fandom, and that line is just the conclusion of a whole bunch of gushing about how great trolls are.
• The inherent violence isn't retconned to be the fault of a bunch of psychics, it's just never there in the first place. Their society is highly violent, yes, but the story never tries to claim that it's inherent, just that it's the clear social paradigm.
• While some of the teenage/adult clones are portrayed as sexy, Karkat's ancestor was never one of them. One version of him is portrayed with zero emphasis on his attractieness one way or the other, although he's a confirmed celibate. The other had a steady relationship, but still doesn't really have any emphasis on his attractiveness, just his charisma.

Fail Polish has been renamed to Progressively Prettier as per this TRS thread

Should this be merged with Fanservice Pack? It seems to be pretty much the same thing.

This is almost certainly not an example. Like many webcartoonists, Lar DeSouza started somewhat rough and improved greatly with practice. This is just some Art Evolution.

• Looking For Group: Compare Benny's appearence from her first appearance to later ones.
  • Well, the boobs and Hartman Hips were there from the start.

This name needs to be changed. I know it's meant to be the verb polish, where you make something look better, but it reads like the nationality Polish, which makes this thing seem racist.