PLEASE be a little ugly...
May. 14th, 2022 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jajalalaBy now I'm sure lots of you have read the Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny essay (if you have not, give it a read! Quite compelling) but I'm gonna apply the vibes of that essay to some of my favorite media types (anime manga etc)
Throughout this I will talk about attractiveness like it's some clear-cut scale. It's not, and I think there is a lot more normal human difference of taste than people think, and that things that are considered central beauty standards are often not actually attractive to individual people (and conversely some conventionally unattractive features have appeal)... but I'm not going to pretend that these beauty standards don't exist, and that consumers and creators don't purposefully adhere to or ignore these standards when creating characters. So bear with me as I call things "pretty" and "ugly" to communicate efficiently.
Recently some online friends of mine have gotten into Genshin Impact, and I see that there's lots of activity and excitement for the game. There's a bunch of characters, and it even seems to be doing well femslash-stats wise and yet...
All the characters just look too pretty! It feels so bland to look at, I'm like "okay yeah wow another girl who you can put on merch and just be like... pretty. Another pretty boy or a rare muscly guy with horns. All with perfect perky faces and smouldering eyes." Like yes they all have "unique" elements with different colors, heights, costumes, hairstyles, and other elements... but at their core they all are put to a standard of conventional beauty that just bores me at this point in my life.
All this also makes me think of sports anime, and the comparison between Haikyuu and Free!
Now keep in mind that I've only watched a few seasons of Haikyuu, and have not actually watched Free! (though have absorbed clips and such from tumblr osmosis back when it was airing more actively). So take my opinions with a touch of bias.
Still, I look at the character designs and see subtle but stark differences. Haikyuu has some more "standard" beauty characters, Hinata certainly is cute in the center with his big eyes and smile, Sugawara on the far left has big eyes and soft-looking hair, while Tsukishima in the glasses and Tobio with the volleyball have tall, collected demeanors that could suit them as a love interest in a shoujo. And all the characters have some degree of muscle, being athletes.
But when you take them in, much more unique and "plain" features pop out. Their hair varies in how it's drawn, and it's not just a matter of color and length. There are at least three boys with short, dark brown hair in that image, but none look the same. You see a lot of eyeshape variety, with some big and wide, some squinty, some downturned and some upturned, varying pupil sizes... My favorite character is Yamaguchi in the center-back with a rather plain-looking face, tiny pupils, and freckles. I find him so likable partially because he's got a unique face that fits with his character-- someone who feels kind of plain and awkward, but won't let that stop him from improving.
Meanwhile the Free! characters are pretty. They may show variation in eyeshape, hair color, and hairstyle, but the creators never made a design choice that could edge them towards anything resembling ugliness (with MAYBE the exception of the shark teeth Rin has). As a result, there is surface level "variety" in their presentations, but at their core they are all just reflections of a same beauty standard with no space to breath in anything truly unique or compelling.
This is an odd pull and not anime, but Pretty Little Liars? I had to stop watching because I couldn't tell all the pretty people apart! There was some big plot point where it was revealed an antagonist was sleeping with some boy... but the dialogue didn't explicitly say who he was, we were just shown a clip of her flirting with some guy in her house. To this day, I'm not sure who it was. Was it the teacher who was sleeping with one of the main characters? Another character's boyfriend? The deliveryman? The police officer? I literally couldn't process what kind of twist had just happened because all the men were just stock-standard "attractive" white brown-haired guys. At least with the girls I could use hairstyles to help differentiate them, but men in Hollywood are apparently scared of unique hairstyles. (Am I faceblind? Perhaps a little bit. But it would help if some people were allowed to have unique "ugly" features!!!)
And I'd like to make an honorable mention for Hunter X Hunter for the absolutely whack character designs they have. Melody is one of those rare cases where a woman gets to be bald with a buck teeth and just... be a normal character? She's not "the ugly character", she's just a character with a personality, hopes, and dreams, while inhabiting a character design that makes her instantly recognizable.
My current fandom is My Hero Academia, which also has a wide breadth of character designs that I appreciate. The women are often less varied than men (sadly) but you also have design choices like Tsuyu's frog-like face, which prioritizes expressing her frogginess over making sure she makes a good "waifu". There are also of course characters like Wash who are literally a washing machine, or Habuko with her head literally being that of a mongoose. I will admit some central characters are at least a baseline level of attractive (Shouto filling that angsty heart-throb role for the teenage girls, though he also has a huge facial burn scar) but they all still maintain unique character designs and the whole world feels like it's inhabited by a wide variety of human beings with differing levels of attractiveness.
So why does the lack of ugly frustrate me? I mean there's the whole argument in the essay I linked at the beginning of this post: It feels so divorced from reality that it loses any relatable charms. The physical appearance no longer feels like it really tells you anything about the characters; they lose out on the additional characterization that comes with more unique character designs. It feels like all the characters are one color-palette swap away from being impossible to tell apart. Even when designers successfully differentiate all those pretty characters... it still feels like the characters are missing out on being more interesting when designers don't allow them to be anything less than pretty.
I don't fully know where I'm going with this, but perhaps: I don't currently wanna play Genshin Impact unless they introduce some ugly characters. I need people I can sink my teeth into and feel like they're real, not delicate designs afraid of pushing the boundaries of attractiveness to be truly unique.
Throughout this I will talk about attractiveness like it's some clear-cut scale. It's not, and I think there is a lot more normal human difference of taste than people think, and that things that are considered central beauty standards are often not actually attractive to individual people (and conversely some conventionally unattractive features have appeal)... but I'm not going to pretend that these beauty standards don't exist, and that consumers and creators don't purposefully adhere to or ignore these standards when creating characters. So bear with me as I call things "pretty" and "ugly" to communicate efficiently.
Recently some online friends of mine have gotten into Genshin Impact, and I see that there's lots of activity and excitement for the game. There's a bunch of characters, and it even seems to be doing well femslash-stats wise and yet...
All the characters just look too pretty! It feels so bland to look at, I'm like "okay yeah wow another girl who you can put on merch and just be like... pretty. Another pretty boy or a rare muscly guy with horns. All with perfect perky faces and smouldering eyes." Like yes they all have "unique" elements with different colors, heights, costumes, hairstyles, and other elements... but at their core they all are put to a standard of conventional beauty that just bores me at this point in my life.
All this also makes me think of sports anime, and the comparison between Haikyuu and Free!
Now keep in mind that I've only watched a few seasons of Haikyuu, and have not actually watched Free! (though have absorbed clips and such from tumblr osmosis back when it was airing more actively). So take my opinions with a touch of bias.
Still, I look at the character designs and see subtle but stark differences. Haikyuu has some more "standard" beauty characters, Hinata certainly is cute in the center with his big eyes and smile, Sugawara on the far left has big eyes and soft-looking hair, while Tsukishima in the glasses and Tobio with the volleyball have tall, collected demeanors that could suit them as a love interest in a shoujo. And all the characters have some degree of muscle, being athletes.
But when you take them in, much more unique and "plain" features pop out. Their hair varies in how it's drawn, and it's not just a matter of color and length. There are at least three boys with short, dark brown hair in that image, but none look the same. You see a lot of eyeshape variety, with some big and wide, some squinty, some downturned and some upturned, varying pupil sizes... My favorite character is Yamaguchi in the center-back with a rather plain-looking face, tiny pupils, and freckles. I find him so likable partially because he's got a unique face that fits with his character-- someone who feels kind of plain and awkward, but won't let that stop him from improving.
Meanwhile the Free! characters are pretty. They may show variation in eyeshape, hair color, and hairstyle, but the creators never made a design choice that could edge them towards anything resembling ugliness (with MAYBE the exception of the shark teeth Rin has). As a result, there is surface level "variety" in their presentations, but at their core they are all just reflections of a same beauty standard with no space to breath in anything truly unique or compelling.
This is an odd pull and not anime, but Pretty Little Liars? I had to stop watching because I couldn't tell all the pretty people apart! There was some big plot point where it was revealed an antagonist was sleeping with some boy... but the dialogue didn't explicitly say who he was, we were just shown a clip of her flirting with some guy in her house. To this day, I'm not sure who it was. Was it the teacher who was sleeping with one of the main characters? Another character's boyfriend? The deliveryman? The police officer? I literally couldn't process what kind of twist had just happened because all the men were just stock-standard "attractive" white brown-haired guys. At least with the girls I could use hairstyles to help differentiate them, but men in Hollywood are apparently scared of unique hairstyles. (Am I faceblind? Perhaps a little bit. But it would help if some people were allowed to have unique "ugly" features!!!)
And I'd like to make an honorable mention for Hunter X Hunter for the absolutely whack character designs they have. Melody is one of those rare cases where a woman gets to be bald with a buck teeth and just... be a normal character? She's not "the ugly character", she's just a character with a personality, hopes, and dreams, while inhabiting a character design that makes her instantly recognizable.
My current fandom is My Hero Academia, which also has a wide breadth of character designs that I appreciate. The women are often less varied than men (sadly) but you also have design choices like Tsuyu's frog-like face, which prioritizes expressing her frogginess over making sure she makes a good "waifu". There are also of course characters like Wash who are literally a washing machine, or Habuko with her head literally being that of a mongoose. I will admit some central characters are at least a baseline level of attractive (Shouto filling that angsty heart-throb role for the teenage girls, though he also has a huge facial burn scar) but they all still maintain unique character designs and the whole world feels like it's inhabited by a wide variety of human beings with differing levels of attractiveness.
So why does the lack of ugly frustrate me? I mean there's the whole argument in the essay I linked at the beginning of this post: It feels so divorced from reality that it loses any relatable charms. The physical appearance no longer feels like it really tells you anything about the characters; they lose out on the additional characterization that comes with more unique character designs. It feels like all the characters are one color-palette swap away from being impossible to tell apart. Even when designers successfully differentiate all those pretty characters... it still feels like the characters are missing out on being more interesting when designers don't allow them to be anything less than pretty.
I don't fully know where I'm going with this, but perhaps: I don't currently wanna play Genshin Impact unless they introduce some ugly characters. I need people I can sink my teeth into and feel like they're real, not delicate designs afraid of pushing the boundaries of attractiveness to be truly unique.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-14 06:45 pm (UTC)First off, Genshin's enduring popularity just baffles me because it is not actually like... fun to play, like at all. I have played it a little and I get bored and frustrated after half an hour because it's so focused on style over substance-- it looks and feels in its controls a bit like the creators wanted to make a game like Breath of the Wild, but the controls are so janky and the interface by necessity being the touch screen of a phone or ipad just takes any possible charm out of it. Every time I've picked it up I've put it back down and gone to play Breath of the Wild for a few hours instead. The characters have to be pretty because it is drawing in people to look at them rather than to play the game itself. I think it's also a gacha game (?) which adds an extra insidious addictive layer to this but I never got far enough in playing it to encounter that aspect. ANYWAYYYYYYYYYY
I definitely think that within the anime games market there IS an aspect of like, what will sell the most of those little figurines people sometimes buy, you know? And I don't think there's anything wrong with them, I too like to collect a pretty little toy sometimes, but it does add some weird consumerist dimension to the way that market functions, even above and beyond the way media has become so much more consumerist in the past decade or so. Which is ironic, because a friend was showing me some figurines they want that were made in the mid-2000s for a Final Fantasy game, and MY GOD those things are horny. Nobody may be horny in superhero movies but the FF market in 2005 definitely was.
My Hero Academia's greatest strength is its interesting and varied character designs, in my opinion. I stopped keeping up with it because the plot felt like it was switching focus in ways I didn't find compelling but I still think of the characters fondly and it's down to them being varied and memorable. I think you're absolutely right that it makes the world feel more real and I think that's why it has such staying power as a fandom despite the writing being a little shaky. What little I know of the mangaka, Horikoshi, has always struck me as him being the kind of person who just likes making new characters, and the plot comes secondary to that. To me it seems that My Hero Academia has such varied characters and character designs because that's the primary focus of the person who designed them in the first place (I do think there's still room to dig into the sexist double standard at work here in making so many of the female heroes generically pretty even if they do have powers that let that get glossed over... the one girl who can manifest things out of her body, and thus has to have a lot of skin exposed for better access to that power, comes to mind).
I think overall anime is sort of its own animal when it comes to beauty and beauty standards, because even when anime is making "pretty" characters they're not really... real, I guess? Like I'm not sure being "pretty" means quite the same thing when it comes to animated media than it does about real human people. It's definitely disappointing when there's a lack of interesting and varied character designs in anime but it almost feels like a separate problem than the problems outlined in "Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny". In anime, everyone looking the same is a result of either laziness on the part of the animators (the "same face and/or body with different hair colors" problem) or pandering to the market of people who buy those little figurines/an outgrowth of that, or a combination of both. It's its own self-reinforcing cycle of recreating what sells and pandering, with things like Genshin being pretty to hide the fact that they're a soulless cash-grab. Which I guess isn't totally different from the problem of the veneration of the ideal human form to the detriment of genuine sex appeal and charisma in movies, but... I don't know, they feel like different problems informed by the same thing to me. Late-stage capitalism's effect on media.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-15 02:33 pm (UTC)I won't get too deep into the sexism of BNHA thing bc otherwise I'll be typing all day (Is it better than a lot of shounen? Absolutely. Is there still shit to critique? Ooooh absolutely)... On the costumes angle: I don't know if you ever got to this part, but Mirio is literally introduced as a guy who has to be naked for a lot of his moves to work, but as soon as he gets an important arc they're like "ooh but his hero suit is made of his hair so he doesn't have to get naked during these epic and emotional fight scenes." Meanwhile you have invisible Hagakure having to be naked, Momo needing to expose skin, Toga turning naked after transformations... like bro why are none of the women given a modicum of contrivance to let them keep their clothes on like Mirio? They could make suits out of their hair just like him!!...
But 100% yes on Horikoshi's love of character design. Even looking at the basic character sketches (of which there are many for even small side characters) you get to see some unique aspects, often accompanied by little notes about individuals little nuances and ways in which their quirk affects their day-to-day. One thing that intrigues me is that for many of the female heroes, when he does a "casual clothes" sketch of them they are often dressed very much like real normal women, with various types of fashion sense and generally comfortable looking clothes. I hate a lot of the sexy hero designs with the tight spandex, but the fact that their casual sketches are so normal feels like it's a deliberate choice and perhaps mild commentary on how female heroes have to be sexy to boost their rankings, AKA a hero-reflection of the IRL issue of female athletes often having to appeal to the media in a way male athletes don't... but of course he never actually goes as far as to give any women a meaningful arc or focus on the subject to actually drive the point home.
Ack sorry said I wouldn't rant and then went off... BNHA is my active fandom right now so lots of thoughts.
I think you're right about IRL people and animations being somewhat different beasts when it comes to the beautiful not horny problem. That whole merchandising/figurine angle is one that can't be ignored, though live-action movies also get merch at times it's a very different intent (and although you can choose actors with specific looks, it's not the same as a character designer making a character from scratch). To be honest I think there's also space in anime/cartoon space to normalize impossible bodytypes--I'm not the type to get into a moral panic about cartoon characters having a tiny waist (it's a cartoon, it's meant to have exaggerated proportions) but when it's always exagerrated in the same direction (esp for female characters) then it starts kind of being like "Men can be square, or triangular, or a stick, or round, and women..... can be an hourglass."
Now that I'm thinking about it more, the essay focuses more on the failed eroticism of hyper-sexual bodies, but I guess for me what I'm currently frustrated by with these media is more like just boredom. Anime/cartoons are a medium where one can push the boundaries and express things that live-action media can't depict. And when creators waste their opportunities for creativity to make those merch-ideal figures, I guess I've been subconsciously sensing that they do care more about selling those figurines than about making unique/compelling/interesting characters... and why would I invest my time/energy/money into story/characters that are so clearly a cashgrab that they're scared to make anyone ugly? Perhaps some central ugly characters aren't just nice to see for interest, but also a barometer that lets me know that the storytellers are willing and able to tell a richer and more nuanced story.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-16 06:26 pm (UTC)Perhaps some central ugly characters aren't just nice to see for interest, but also a barometer that lets me know that the storytellers are willing and able to tell a richer and more nuanced story. God, real.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-15 03:37 am (UTC)When everyone is 'beautiful' what does it even mean? It's like all other human traits... everyone is smart... everyone is funny... etc.
no subject
Date: 2022-05-15 02:45 pm (UTC)When everyone is pretty there's such a flattening of the meaning... it cracks me up whenever a show tries to introduce a character as like, "the prettiest girl in school" and then it's like.... wow she looks just as attractive as every other girl in the show bc the bar is already so high