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PLEASE be a little ugly...
May. 14th, 2022 10:32 amBy 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...
( Genshin Impact Critiques )
All this also makes me think of sports anime, and the comparison between Haikyuu and Free!
( Haikyuu vs. Free! )
( Other media I like/dislike for this sort of thing... )
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...
( Genshin Impact Critiques )
All this also makes me think of sports anime, and the comparison between Haikyuu and Free!
( Haikyuu vs. Free! )
( Other media I like/dislike for this sort of thing... )
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.
