But yeah, I hear you on the "essential beauty" issue. Coming out of character design classes, the otherwise unspoken ground rule of designing female characters is "well, they HAVE to be pleasing to look at if you want to get ANY audience attention." This rule exists on every level of entertainment and doubly so for drawn/animated stories.*
Beauty, as far as average human perception goes, can only be done in so many ways before it gets repetitive. Ugly provides infinite possibilities. It'd be lovely to cross that threshold and, well, not be told 'she needs to be prettier'. ;|
On a totally odd note, Japanese female character who's actually obese! (it's an h-doujinshi so I dunno if this is really just one of those fat/inflation fetish parodies.) ::went ahead and downloaded the whole thing in .zip:: I doubt I'll actually look through it, but if it happens to pique your curiosity... ^^;
*(off the top of my head, Ellie the Elephant from the toddler show Pocoyo might be a minor exception - the Angelina Jolie character in Kung-Fu Panda kinda pushed boundaries as well; speaking of "being hot with a tail", you have Angelina playing Grendel's Mom and then playing a snake in Kung-Fu Panda, who's basically ALL tail :P)
at least the pretense to rape wasn't as contrived as "Wanted"...?
Beauty, as far as average human perception goes, can only be done in so many ways before it gets repetitive. Ugly provides infinite possibilities. It'd be lovely to cross that threshold and, well, not be told 'she needs to be prettier'. ;|
On a totally odd note, Japanese female character who's actually obese! (it's an h-doujinshi so I dunno if this is really just one of those fat/inflation fetish parodies.) ::went ahead and downloaded the whole thing in .zip:: I doubt I'll actually look through it, but if it happens to pique your curiosity... ^^;
*(off the top of my head, Ellie the Elephant from the toddler show Pocoyo might be a minor exception - the Angelina Jolie character in Kung-Fu Panda kinda pushed boundaries as well; speaking of "being hot with a tail", you have Angelina playing Grendel's Mom and then playing a snake in Kung-Fu Panda, who's basically ALL tail :P)