Except for traits some friends prefer for looks I have the policy of 'if I gotta look at its ass, it is going to be pretty'. I blame my WoW days for that since im WoW you stare at the back of a bit pretty much the whole time. I say WoW but I mean any video game you can customize. WoW just happened to be one of the first I played where I could customize. In essence, the descriptions I write are typically what I like with little to no regard to what others find appealing. The only exception is for friends if we are making a couple together. Then I work towards making us both happy.
However, being pretty seems the norm on the games I play. It seems like those that aren't 'hot' are the ones people ignore. Looks are often so important to people it causes stalking and females to avoid playing females. The exception for hotness being if the character is powerful. So, I think the looks issue. just depends on the culture bred by the game's genre and the type of play it encourages.
@arkandel said in Decriminalise Pretty:
As for comic books how many heroes and heroines aren't drawn to be absolutely gorgeous?
Depends on who your superheroes are.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
@ganymede Ed is absolutely supposed to be good looking. For a 14 year old I guess, IDK. He is drawn sparkling and dramatically ripping off a coat once or twice.
But in general, I think rp turns into microcosms of human behavior. Pretty in life is a privilege most everyone would like to have. Then it becomes a focus on people who aren't doing it right.
Just like life. Pretty people are desired, scrutinized, and then 'put in their place'.
@juniper said in Decriminalise Pretty:
We as a hobby... kind of hate women who want to be pretty. I can't count the number of times that a new character has walked into the scene and one of my friends has OOCly referred to that character as a whore because she is described as being willowy and slender with cerulean eyes and perfect lips or whatever. I can't deny that I've felt this same sort of knee-jerk reaction.
hey so my eyes skimmed over this and i didn't really see but what the fuck is wrong with your friends, maybe you have bad friends??
@juniper I have absolutely had that reaction -- to someone who emphasized in every pose how gorgeous their character was. I have zero problems with people playing pretty characters -- male or female -- (I do it too), I have zero problems with a player mentioning every now and then how pretty their character is in a pose, but I do have that instinctive reaction that you mentioned when someone repeatedly hits me (and everyone else in the scene) over the head with how absolutely stunning their character is. That feels to me like their looking for attention and to be told how pretty they are and want to pull the spotlight onto themselves.
Are my feelings on that always right? Nope! Do I feel like this happens more often with female characters? Yup! Is that maybe because I just notice it more frequently with female characters? Yup! Do people still have the right to relish in how beautiful the character their playing is? Yup! Am I still going to have that instinctive reaction if (in my opinion) they overdo it with the mentions of their character's beauty? Probably.
@seraphim73 There are types of characters whose primary trait is, often times, used to hit others on the head with it.
So sometimes that trait is "I am fucking gorgeous!". But it has also often been "I am fucking deadly", "I am fucking mysterious", "I am fucking tall", or even in some cases "my player can use a thesaurus". 
@kanye-qwest said in Decriminalise Pretty:
Ed is absolutely supposed to be good looking.
I was trying to find a good GIF of Alphonse, and that's all I found.
I'll decriminalise pretty the minute pretty people stop making a big deal out of it. It's a MU, we're all pretty, develop an actual personality.
@arkandel said in Decriminalise Pretty:
my player
can use a thesaurusknows what a thesaurus is.
The number of times I've seen someone use some listed synonym in precisely the wrong way outweighs the number of times they have used it correctly.
Thesaurus Abuse is real.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
I think the most out of the blue comments about the beauty of my PC's PB I've ever received was for Maren@Arx. Even though absolutely no one who made those comments was going to hit on her. I agree that the model is stunning, and think that probably people felt more able to comment on that in a positive way because it was not going to be construed as saying that they wanted to bang her.
And I want to add on to Roz comment too, that if your "friends" are labelling people as "whores" for having a pretty PB and especially if they know you like pretty PBs too, I'm really sorry. That's really not a friendly thing, and I'm sure you deserve more supportive play partners than that. 
@carma said in Decriminalise Pretty:
@tinuviel said in Decriminalise Pretty:
we're all pretty
On one game, I created an unattractive character. Based on my sheet alone, I was accused of being a troll. I just didn't want people hitting on my character.
In my experience, and my experience includes playing an 80-year-old dowager who got hit on by people who didn't read her desc and had a REAL interesting interpretation of what I was posing I guess, there is no such thing as a character who won't get hit on.
fishes around in pockets and puts 2 cents on the table
So, my take on it, for what ever it's worth, it that there are a lot of various factors involved in this. I don't see that much of this, but I usually connect on Superhero games and Places We Don't Mention (in polite company); both styles where Pretty is the norm. For both women and men.
Saying that I have noticed this on certain games. Some Slice of Life games, some Supernatural games. And when the 'pretty-shaming' happens there, that's where the multiple factors come in
Distrust of Player/Motives. Having played several female PC's over the years, I understand the GIRL effect; Guy In Real Life. Making a pretty female character can be (although not always) a sign that the player is a male, leading to all sorts of mental disconnects with other players, especially for male players looking for TS. The other half of this coin is the automatic assumption is that a pretty female character is just there for TS-bait. This assumption grows with the amount of 'purple prose' in the character's description (i.e. Her cupid's bow lips are plump and moist with a natural red color like freshly picked strawberries...).
RL Issues. Let's face it; this is not a hobby with an overlarge percentage of mentally stable participants. I'm included in that with my depression, commitment issues, and ADHD. But, we do have a somewhat-deserved reputation for attracting the socially maladjusted. It's not a large percentage, but it's noticeable. And it's amplified because these kinds of players tend to be on all the time and have a greater amount of participation. We're going to have the incel crowd with an amplified voice/presence, is what I'm saying. So, pretty female characters are going to set these folks off by reminding them of the 'bitch cheerleader that wouldn't go out with me in high school just because I liked comics/anime/RPGs/other. Definitely not because I never used deodorant and was always staring at her boobs...' This can even pass over with a general social anxiety; 'Everyone says she's a great RPer, but the character is just too good looking and social. She's never going to want to RP with a character like mine.' So, that gets twisted into hostility; preemptively rejecting the character before she 'gets a chance of rejecting me'.
So, what's the solution? Unfortunately, this is something that the 'pretty hater' players need to work on themselves. As a community, all we can do (and usually do here) is stick up for the players that get caught up in the issues of the player's putting out hate because of their own issues. I'm not saying that playing a misogynous or misandrous (male hater) character is wrong or even invalid, but that's a thin line that's only slightly easier to walk than playing a racist/predjudiced character.
@ganymede said in Decriminalise Pretty:
@arkandel said in Decriminalise Pretty:
As for comic books how many heroes and heroines aren't drawn to be absolutely gorgeous?
Depends on who your superheroes are.
Why is it always Glimmer as the standard bearer of non-traditional attractiveness?
I demand validation of my ScorFuma shipping!!!!!
@roz said in Decriminalise Pretty:
@juniper said in Decriminalise Pretty:
We as a hobby... kind of hate women who want to be pretty. I can't count the number of times that a new character has walked into the scene and one of my friends has OOCly referred to that character as a whore because she is described as being willowy and slender with cerulean eyes and perfect lips or whatever. I can't deny that I've felt this same sort of knee-jerk reaction.
hey so my eyes skimmed over this and i didn't really see but what the fuck is wrong with your friends, maybe you have bad friends??
I actually have no friends now, this is a big reason why.
I don't mind pretty.
I do mind if it is shoved in my face with every entrance pose and/or the character in question attempts to flirt non-stop.
Why?
I hate that oocly pretty is used to equal worth. I work with middle school students and that shit is brutal on them. Keep the correlation that being beautiful is somehow more desirable than other traits out of my fun times.
I hate when flirting is all a character does. Like, just stop. Please. Intact with me some other way. Show me some kind of range. I'm bored and will run for the hills first chance I get.
If you can play a character with nuance who happens to be pretty? Then idgaf if they are pretty.
@silverfox said in Decriminalise Pretty:
I hate when flirting is all a character does. Like, just stop. Please. Intact with me some other way. Show me some kind of range.
I can creep on you and get jealous of every interaction you have with any other person too, if that's helpful.
He/Him
People also forget that beauty is subjective. Ages ago I used a singer whose record company once saddled him with the fake accolade of being voted the most beautiful man in the world, but I still gave him app: 3. I always undercut the stat a bit, because what I find beautiful isn't necessarily going to be what others find beautiful. And I don't find plastic surgery-ed Instagram models with back-breaking bosoms attractive, nor Frazetta-Comes-Alive men with artful stubble. But I get that whomever put the desc together and photoshopped the shit out of their played-by models to further enhance the attributes of these sorts of characters most likely does.
Just don't get mad at me when my aesthetics don't match yours is all I ask.
@ganymede Ed is absolutely supposed to be good looking. For a 14 year old I guess, IDK. He is drawn sparkling and dramatically ripping off a coat once or twice.
But in general, I think rp turns into microcosms of human behavior. Pretty in life is a privilege most everyone would like to have. Then it becomes a focus on people who aren't doing it right.
Just like life. Pretty people are desired, scrutinized, and then 'put in their place'.
