Prefers the True Form

Now, would you mind putting on this Smurfette costume?

Sometimes taking on A Form You Are Comfortable With doesn't work. An individual would be able to see your true form anyway for some reason, or they're in an Interspecies Romance and for them, the true form is a turn-on.

There are many reasons why someone may prefer the true form; an episode delivering An Aesop on accepting others for their differences, someone may be a Nightmare Fetishist etc.

This trope is more common in fantasy or sci-fi works than other genres, but can be also a staple in Paranormal Romance.

Compare Freaky Is Cool

Contrast with Glamour, Freakiness Shame, A Form You Are Comfortable With, and when their true form is too overpowering, You Cannot Grasp the True Form. See Unnecessary Makeover for the YMMV version.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: After the girls recover from a "Freaky Friday" Flip induced by Kusuri's drugs, Rentarou explains that while seeing the girls' personalities switched around made his heart go crazy, he still prefers the girls as their usual selves.
• Durarara!!: Downplayed. Celty wears a motorcycle helmet to disguise her lack of a head. However, Shinra prefers when she isn't hiding it, loving her without her head. However, Celty worries it may be that he has a thing for dullahans in general, and doesn't know what she would do if Shinra ever met another headless woman.
• The h-manga, Monster Romance has a one shot chapter unconnected to the main story where a human man has sex with a Slime Girl. She was an alien that wanted to live on earth, but ended up homeless when she had no idea how to navigate among earthlings, so he took her in, on the condition that she would take the form of any woman he wants. Eventually he realizes that he's fallen in love with her and asks that they have sex in her natural form, and though she warns him that she could make him sticky with her original body form, he says he doesn't care, adding that he won't use her as a surrogate anymore when he gets rejected by a human woman, and they confess their feelings for each other.

Comic Books

• Sondra Fuller a.k.a. Lady Clay of Batman has the ability to take on almost any imaginable shape, at the cost of being stuck with an oozing clay body as her Shapeshifter Default Form. As such, when she becomes a member of the Mud Pack, she's often used to keep her fellow Clayface Preston Payne under control by transforming into the superheroine Looker and seducing him into committing crimes alongside her. However, when Basil Karlo double-crosses the team in order to duplicate their powers and become Ultimate Clayface, the ruse breaks down, leaving Sondra effectively unmasked in front of Preston for the first time... only for the similarly-disfigured Preston to admit that he actually likes her default form, reducing Lady Clay to Tears of Joy. Whirlwind romance and marriage soon follows.
• When we first meet the faerie Nuala in The Sandman (1989), she's a tall and beautiful blonde. When she's presented to Dream, he waves his hand to dispel her glamour, leaving her in her true form, a short and plain brunette. This isn't through any romantic or aesthetic preference - Dream just says he doesn't like people walking around with minor magics in his realm.
• Partway through Powers, Detective Walker becomes part of an interstellar group called the Millennium Corps, (pretty much the Green Lantern Corps) who communicate with him through visions and dreams while taking the form of a pair of superheroes he knows, Zora and the first Retro Girl. Walker is pretty unhappy with this, since by this time they're doing this he'd been a lover to both of these women, and both had since died. Despite Walker making this clear, his handlers from the Corps occasionally appear in these forms anyway, mostly when they're getting on his case about not using his powers properly.
• V for Vendetta: When V visits the doctor who helped in his torture years prior but now lives as The Atoner, she calls him beautiful when he removes his mask.

Films — Animation

• Heavily implied in the case of Ursula from The Little Mermaid. Despite her infamous ugliness, she's shown several times to be proud of her looks (i.e. calling herself "starving" despite her bulk). She is also a Vain Sorceress by her use of glamour magic. Instead of relying on her "Vanessa" disguise to win the trust of her customers, she uses it only to complete her Evil Plan and turns back into her normal form immediately after Ariel runs out of time.
• In Shrek 2, Shrek has turned himself into a human due to thinking that the once-human Fiona would prefer him that way. The spell would become permanent if they kiss before midnight, but just as he's about to, she refuses and lets the spell wear off, wanting to be "with the ogre [she] married".
• Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs implies that Snow White prefers her real, chubby appearance to the slim figure and conventional beauty she gains while wearing the magic red shoes. The first time she takes the shoes off and changes back, she sighs in relief. Only later does she start to prefer her Red Shoes form because it brings her more positive attention from other people, but in the end she happily changes back to her true form permanently. Meanwhile, in an inversion, when her kiss breaks her love interest Merlin's spell and changes him from a green dwarf back into a handsome prince, she admits that she doesn't care for conventional handsomeness and preferred his green dwarf form. But she still loves him anyway because his True Beauty Is on the Inside.
• Mad Madame Mim from The Sword in the Stone. This trope is played straight in her case because the uglier she becomes in her regular form, the better it is. This is demonstrated in her Villain Song, during which she turns her face into a pig's and tears her maiden form apart, which is only "skin-deep". Both Merlin and Archimedes are aware of her behavior and the former tells her that, after healing from her post-battle fever, she will hopefully become uglier than ever before (the reason being she takes these remarks as a compliment).

Films — Live-Action

• In Galaxy Quest, the Thermians take on a human form when meeting the main cast so as not to disturb them. In the end, after Fred falls for Laliari, she finally shows him her true form, which apparently involves pink tentacles. Guy is very squicked out, but Fred seems very into it.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • In First Class, Raven takes on the form of an attractive human woman, but when she and Magneto get together, he says he prefers her real mutant appearance. She drops the disguise and returns to her blue-skinned, red-haired form.
    Magneto: ...Perfection.
  • Ironically, Magneto cruelly dismisses Mystique in The Last Stand after she's injected with the mutant cure, leaving her naked, depowered, and (in human terms) completely gorgeous.
    Magneto: Such a shame. She was so beautiful.
• In the Disney Channel movie Z-O-M-B-I-E-S, when Zed, a teenage zombie boy, goes out with Addison, a teenage human girl, he puts on makeup to look like a living human. Despite his efforts, Addison looks uncomfortable, suggesting that she would rather he look like his normal self than try to pass for something he's not.
• Platonic example in The Fifth Element, when Zorg meets a group of Mangalores disguised as humans.
  Zorg: Is that you? What an ugly face! It doesn't suit you. Take it off. [the Mangalores shed their human forms, revealed as brutish creatures] That's better. Never be ashamed of who you are. You're warriors. Be proud!

Literature

• Red Dwarf: When Lister is offered a chance for a commuted prison sentence in exchange for volunteering for a scouting mission to a terraformed world, he is given a luxury suite with the unrestricted use of a Symbimorph named Reketrebyn for whatever he wants. Reketrebyn tries to please him by taking on Kochanski's form but Lister states that he can't function with Reketrebyn in this form, as he has lost Kochanski to an alternate version of himself at that point. When it takes Rimmer's form, he also brushes it off. It's only when Reketrebyn takes on its Shapeshifter Default Form (an androgynous humanoid with a matrix color scheme) that Lister feels more at ease.

Live-Action TV

• Grimm: Hexenbiests (the females) and Zauberbiests (the males) are known for being very beautiful in their human form, which contrasts with their Wesen form resembling a rotting corpse. However, while it's clear they are very attracted to regular human beauty standards, they actually do prefer their Wesen form; Adalind only agrees to sleep with Renard after he woges. Nick lampshades it later on; when Adalind woges to look more threatening, his unimpressed, sarcastic response is to ask Renard how he can find that attractive.
• Red Dwarf: In "Camille", the crew encounter a genetically engineered life form who each of them perceive as their perfect mate. At Kryten's insistence, Camille turns off this ability, revealing her true form as a big, green, one-eyed blob. While the others are repulsed, Kryten actually finds Camille's true form "kinda cute".
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: At the end of "Chimera'', Kira gently tells Odo she's sorry if she ever made him feel like he couldn't be his true self around her. In response, he shapeshifts into a beautiful shower of golden light which envelops her as she smiles ecstatically, deeply moved at his trust.
• Star Trek: Voyager: In "Lifesigns", the Holographic Doctor allows a woman of belonging to an entire race deformed by disease known as the Vidiians, now terminally ill from the Phage ravaging her body, to assume a beautiful holographic projection of what she would look like if she was completely healthy modelled on the DNA of her undamaged cells. Throughout the episode returning her to her people for treatment, the Doctor's and the Vidiian woman's mutual feelings grow, but her bitterness also grows that he's only in love with the idea of who she could have been rather than the deformed invalid she really is. To prove his love for her is true, the Doctor turns off her holographic projection and shares a tender dance with her before her departure in her decaying, diseased ravaged real body.

Western Animation

• X-Men: Evolution: Nightcrawler relies on a Holographic Disguise to resemble a normal human, but during one episode in Season 1, a girl sees his true form before he teleports away. She grows attracted to him because of that.
• Both inverted and subverted in Young Justice (2010). Miss Martian has taken a form of a literal Green-Skinned Space Babe due to hating her real form, but when her true White Martian form is revealed, a character gives a speech on acceptance. In Phantoms, her mother says that Miss Martian's chosen form (a white Martian-colored human appearance) now feels like her true appearance.

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