Where Are All the Plain Women?

[_ocelott_]

At Polaris, we had an interesting panel on this topic. (Ok, with one panelist and a small handful of participants, it was more like a discussion led by Kenneth Tam. Let me share the description for this particular panel before I get into my musing and ranting

Comments

[juushika]

I don't see this trend, actually. I haven't read much of the current "mainstream urban fantasy with fearless heroine" books, but the fearless heroines which I find most memorable were many things—and not primarily beautiful. Of heroines in Elizabeth Bear's Dust, one is average—not unattractive, but not worth a second glance—and the other is slim to the point of being angular and lanky. Cherie Priest's heroine Eden is perhaps too strong and too brave, but she's not too pretty: she tramps through woods at night, through the middle of floods, wearing boots and tying her dirty hair out of the way.

Meanwhile, the most beautiful character in Brennan's Midnight Never Come is the villain.

I think that there are quite a few authors that keep their head about on about the issue of beauty, and the ones who write about idealized ass-kicking beauties or idealized beautiful heroines in distress probably aren't writing something that I care about anyways. ^_^

Always, I would rather read about a character who is realistic, autonomous, faulted, and compelling. What they look like matters a lot less to me than whether they capture my attention. And when a character's appearance does come in to play, I prefer unconventional "beauty"—because I don't believe that average can't be beautiful, and I think that a mixed race, or "chubby," or lanky, or scar-covered, or similar is beautiful of the more memorable and more interesting sort.

[_ocelott_]

I've actually only run across a few characters that have made me roll my eyes at their amazing hotness. Generally those books have plenty of other issues, and so there's no shortage of things for me to be whacking my head against the wall over. (Elizabeth Haydon's Rhapsody comes to mind...)

I've actually come to the conclusion that readers don't always pay particularly close attention to the character descriptions the authors give, preferring instead to put their own ideals on the character. Consider Severus Snape (of Harry Potter fame), who has a huge fangirl following, all of who think he's the hottest thing in fictional history. In the books, however, he's written as quite an ugly fellow, sallow face, hooked nose, greasy hair, and all.