Most of the popular books starring female characters that I can recall have plain or funny looking protagonists. Jane Eyre, Anne Shirley, Sara Crewe, many of Jane Austen's female leads, the narrator in Rebecca... Even Scarlett O'Hara is described as "not beautiful" even though she's charming, and the heroic Melanie is very plain. In the books I've read, the beautiful female lead is the exception (I can't even think of any.)
They're plain in the books, but then when they're portrayed visually, they're almost always far more attractive. We're totally ok with reading about plain women but much less ok with drawing them or casting them in film.
Bella, the main character in Twilight, the ur-13-year-old Romance novel, [1] is plain. Ordinary even. So much so that at a movie screening I hosted, the girls who came complained that the actress cast in the role was "too pretty".
There's valentine given to a girl in one of my favorite childhood books, The Good Master [2] that tells the tale:
"You may be plain, and you may be silly, but you are the only girl for me."
If the beauty she beholds matches not her heart, she is using it in vain.
Clockworkpaperdoll knows beautiful drawings get higher chances of being read. Should she have a little more faith in her readers to look past the surface beauty of these characters by making one plain with a great character?
All forms of beauty inspire strong emotions in the beholder. It must be truly difficult for a woman who wants to inspire her man but knows she will never do so as easily as her pretty rivals can
This is of course why writing the nonhuman is a heady drug, one can well forget that there are in fact standards even for beings strange and unusual.
Plain or not...
Appeal.
Charm.
A design is good when it has just reason to stick with the viewer or the reader.
Even the ugly characters must be ugly in a way somewhat different to that of the real.
Not always the iconic and ideal, but the realm of fiction is the land less and more than our own.
Less because it isn't what is within the sight of our dark glass.
More because it points to what truly is beyond our dark glass.
An alpha that's handsome beats an ugly alpha, but the ugly king is still king, bearer of his mantle.
Aura as some would say these days.
It never does to assume one is the case, but some plain women of history nevertheless held many men in thrall, for a woman's powers, like the alpha man's are not limited to solely the appearance.
Or rather, there's self maintenance and behaviours that will cast an appearance in a different light. As a beauty is excused her excess, so is the plain or ugly excused by manner, by pleasantry.
Though, man or woman...
So easily there's bitter fruits to holding others captive, no less than being one of the forgotten.
We easily forget that whatever our station and gifts of birth...
There's struggle to be had.
But certainly...
If we are to make men and women unreal, the tendency right is to make them fair.
The hunchback however fits protagonist, antagonist and side character with ease.
If only you remember.
Even the ugly must have appeal, not ugly for ugly's sake and never should the high crime of calling foul fair and fair foul be done.
Vox, I think your conversation with Clockworkpaperdoll reveals an interesting convention. Manga has spent decades proving that ordinary-looking male protagonists can carry a story because readers grow attached to who they are, not just how they look. I think that’s an angle we haven’t tried more with female protagonists. 🤔
A plain heroine isn’t visually uninteresting. She simply has room to become beautiful through the story instead of arriving that way on page one. Readers don’t just enjoy looking at pretty faces; they also enjoy watching compelling characters come alive. 🤔
Perhaps the question isn’t whether plain women deserve to be protagonists. It’s whether visual storytellers all over have mistaken a convention for a necessity. 🤔
The anime Psycho-Pass does a great job with its female lead, Akane Tsunemori. She is by all accounts a plain woman and not a Mary-Sue character. Yet her character growth is compelling to watch as she solves cases and figures out the truth behind the overarching system in the dystopian era they live in.
It definitely helps that her partner in solving cases is a Sigma man as the way they bounce ideas off of and interact with each other keeps you engaged.
Under media-driven, modern feminist pair-bonding theory, all women are Queens who deserve no less than a high-status man. High-status men are men who, relative to the general male population, are at the highest tier of the male hierarchy, the best of the best. The supply of such men, by definition, will be very limited due to the basic truism that if all men were "high status," then none would be. Half of every population group is below average. So, under modern feminist theory, there is only one solution to the problem of putting a high status man in the bedroom of every "queen": polygamy.
There is no other way for assuring that something that exists in over-supply (queens) each can have something in very limited supply (high-status men),
We've gotten a lot ... what's the word? ... stupider? ... delusional? ... about male/female dynamics in the last hundred-plus years.
The best plain women authors I've read write almost like anthropologists. Perhaps it is because they are in quasi-outsiders, not themselves deeply involved in certain social dynamics, that they can become almost like ethnographers.
The female social astuteness is very beneficial to them in this regard, but the female tendencies toward solipsism and emotional investment work against the socially astute, ethnographic style.
Thank you very much for the good-humored concession, as well as featuring my work, and pretty much everything you do!
Most of the popular books starring female characters that I can recall have plain or funny looking protagonists. Jane Eyre, Anne Shirley, Sara Crewe, many of Jane Austen's female leads, the narrator in Rebecca... Even Scarlett O'Hara is described as "not beautiful" even though she's charming, and the heroic Melanie is very plain. In the books I've read, the beautiful female lead is the exception (I can't even think of any.)
They're plain in the books, but then when they're portrayed visually, they're almost always far more attractive. We're totally ok with reading about plain women but much less ok with drawing them or casting them in film.
Does it not work then to write a female character as plain but then draw her as pretty? Or does that create a dissonance?
Bella, the main character in Twilight, the ur-13-year-old Romance novel, [1] is plain. Ordinary even. So much so that at a movie screening I hosted, the girls who came complained that the actress cast in the role was "too pretty".
There's valentine given to a girl in one of my favorite childhood books, The Good Master [2] that tells the tale:
"You may be plain, and you may be silly, but you are the only girl for me."
.
.
.
1. Not the sequels. The sequels are appalling
2. It has horses in.
If the beauty she beholds matches not her heart, she is using it in vain.
Clockworkpaperdoll knows beautiful drawings get higher chances of being read. Should she have a little more faith in her readers to look past the surface beauty of these characters by making one plain with a great character?
All forms of beauty inspire strong emotions in the beholder. It must be truly difficult for a woman who wants to inspire her man but knows she will never do so as easily as her pretty rivals can
This is of course why writing the nonhuman is a heady drug, one can well forget that there are in fact standards even for beings strange and unusual.
Plain or not...
Appeal.
Charm.
A design is good when it has just reason to stick with the viewer or the reader.
Even the ugly characters must be ugly in a way somewhat different to that of the real.
Not always the iconic and ideal, but the realm of fiction is the land less and more than our own.
Less because it isn't what is within the sight of our dark glass.
More because it points to what truly is beyond our dark glass.
An alpha that's handsome beats an ugly alpha, but the ugly king is still king, bearer of his mantle.
Aura as some would say these days.
It never does to assume one is the case, but some plain women of history nevertheless held many men in thrall, for a woman's powers, like the alpha man's are not limited to solely the appearance.
Or rather, there's self maintenance and behaviours that will cast an appearance in a different light. As a beauty is excused her excess, so is the plain or ugly excused by manner, by pleasantry.
Though, man or woman...
So easily there's bitter fruits to holding others captive, no less than being one of the forgotten.
We easily forget that whatever our station and gifts of birth...
There's struggle to be had.
But certainly...
If we are to make men and women unreal, the tendency right is to make them fair.
The hunchback however fits protagonist, antagonist and side character with ease.
If only you remember.
Even the ugly must have appeal, not ugly for ugly's sake and never should the high crime of calling foul fair and fair foul be done.
Such an act is evil.
Vox, I think your conversation with Clockworkpaperdoll reveals an interesting convention. Manga has spent decades proving that ordinary-looking male protagonists can carry a story because readers grow attached to who they are, not just how they look. I think that’s an angle we haven’t tried more with female protagonists. 🤔
A plain heroine isn’t visually uninteresting. She simply has room to become beautiful through the story instead of arriving that way on page one. Readers don’t just enjoy looking at pretty faces; they also enjoy watching compelling characters come alive. 🤔
Perhaps the question isn’t whether plain women deserve to be protagonists. It’s whether visual storytellers all over have mistaken a convention for a necessity. 🤔
"A plain heroine isn’t visually uninteresting. She simply has room to become beautiful through the story instead of arriving that way on page one."
Howl's Moving Castle is a great example of this kind of story.
The anime Psycho-Pass does a great job with its female lead, Akane Tsunemori. She is by all accounts a plain woman and not a Mary-Sue character. Yet her character growth is compelling to watch as she solves cases and figures out the truth behind the overarching system in the dystopian era they live in.
It definitely helps that her partner in solving cases is a Sigma man as the way they bounce ideas off of and interact with each other keeps you engaged.
I keep putting off Psycho-Pass in my watchlist. I really ought to watch it.
Under media-driven, modern feminist pair-bonding theory, all women are Queens who deserve no less than a high-status man. High-status men are men who, relative to the general male population, are at the highest tier of the male hierarchy, the best of the best. The supply of such men, by definition, will be very limited due to the basic truism that if all men were "high status," then none would be. Half of every population group is below average. So, under modern feminist theory, there is only one solution to the problem of putting a high status man in the bedroom of every "queen": polygamy.
There is no other way for assuring that something that exists in over-supply (queens) each can have something in very limited supply (high-status men),
We've gotten a lot ... what's the word? ... stupider? ... delusional? ... about male/female dynamics in the last hundred-plus years.
The best plain women authors I've read write almost like anthropologists. Perhaps it is because they are in quasi-outsiders, not themselves deeply involved in certain social dynamics, that they can become almost like ethnographers.
The female social astuteness is very beneficial to them in this regard, but the female tendencies toward solipsism and emotional investment work against the socially astute, ethnographic style.
Great essay. Flannery O'Connor was a rather plain, homely woman, too. Godspeed
" modern psychologists and scientists with the advantage of nearly 150 years of additional data".
And the disadvantage of nearly 150 years of Feminism & Progressive ideology.