Impossibly Pretty People. Guh.

[alixtii]

cofax7 has a post on impossibly pretty casts and how we as audiences react to and fanwank the impossible attractiveness of the characters.

I think I think of Sunnydale as being inhabited by impossibly attractive people, but it never bothered me. For one thing, Sunnydale always struck me as a (white) upper-middle class community--even if many of the people were lower class people who could afford to act upper-class because of low property values. I went to a private high school and a private university and a lot of people were impossibly attractive there, too. I suppose if I thought about it it should have been a lot more of a problem on Veronica Mars, where the 02ers wouldn't have been able to afford to keep themselves looking like the 09ers.

Plus the Hellmouth lets you fanwank anything.

I only really think about this when I create OCs, because my first impulse is to always create OCs who are pretty (not so-impossibly-Mary-Sue-pretty, but pretty) girls, because I am shallow, and then I feel guilty and like a bad liberal. Then I think about the rest of the population of Sunnydale, realize an unattractive female would be really out of place, and stop feeling guilty. (I'm not someone who feels fic should be more realistic than canon. Unexpected realism--for example, witches in the Jossverse talking like real-world Wiccans--throws me out of the world of the fic.)

And I rarely mention in the fic whether the character is pretty, so it's really just my imagination I have to worry about. Although my Character Index has pictures of some of the OCs, which are usually taken from IMDb or otherwise of (impossibly attractive) actors.