So Beautiful, It's A Curse - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): So Beautiful Its A Curse

To quote Dr. Merlin, anyone who says "She's so pretty that it's like a disability because everyone hates her or wants to have sex with her" will be summarily keelhauled.

—The Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test

Beauty is a pair of shoes that makes you wanna die!

—Frank Zappa, "Beauty Knows No Pain"

A very specific form of Cursed With Awesome that comes up with depressing regularity. An admittedly attractive character (almost always female) remarks on how their beauty is a drawback. Whether it be as a failed attempt at being humble, offering a "sour grapes" solution to appease other people, or because their beauty actually is a severe drawback, they decide to spend some time Wangsting about it. Usually, this makes the character come across as either thankless or otherwise disconnected from reality, making them a bit unsympathetic.

Seldom actually shown with a realistic amount of the Green Eyed Monster making life miserable.

A Discredited Trope if there ever was one, it now either gets used for parody or specifically to evoke eye rolling. Sadly, it still gets used a lot in amateur fiction and is practically synonymous with Mary Sue.

Examples:

Myth And Legend

Helen of Troy from Greek Mythology, a woman whose beauty inspires a war, in which she did not have fun; making this one Older Than Dirt.
- Then there's Psyche, whose beauty inspired people to worship her as the new Venus. The real goddess of love, needless to say, was not amused.
- Andromeda had a simlar story to Psyche, with a little help of her mother Cassiopea bragging about her beauty.
And then there's Deirdre from the Irish legend, who practically exemplifies this trope. Her life sucked.
In the Fairy Tale Puddocky, a witch transforms a young woman under her care into a toad because three princes start a quarrel over the young woman's beauty.

Live Action TV

In Stargate SG 1 at least one minor character uses this trope almost verbatim, with the justification that Goa'uld always want attractive hosts.

Anime

While Kyohei from The Wallflower never says anything to the likes of this, he certainly fits the trope. He can't hold a job thanks to constant sexual harassment, he's had a slew of stalkers that eventually drove his family to kick him out, he used to have to be escorted to school to avoid being attacked, it was implied that he had been raped several times by many strangers as a grade-schooler and there was even one time where he was kidnapped off the street by a Host Club for the purpose of selling him to the highest bidder as a sexual slave.
One of Arina Tanemura's one-shot manga stories dealt with this: a girl named Eve who was supposedly stunningly beautiful..and hated it. She was a victim of attempted kidnapping, no girls would talk to her because she was rumored to have stolen a girl's boyfriend, and she never knows if boys are only interested in her for her looks or not. And yet she ''still'' gets beauty treatments and buys cute, expensive clothes (and works part-time jobs to pay for it all!) because "people say a cute girl who isn't fashionable must be a slob."
The lead female character of the manga Telepathic Wanderers hates being beautiful because not only do most men she meets lust after her, but, being psychic (and unable to control her power), she's forced to watch every fantasy a man has about her in her presence. (And, in keeping with what seems to be a theme with this trope, she also almost gets raped at one point in volume 1.)
Gilgamesh from Fate Stay Night got such a high rank in charisma that it's "more of a curse then a blessing". Seeing as he never himself even mentions it, the description almost seems to be written by someone else then the author.
Parodied in Princess Tutu. A character named Femio believes that he's so beautiful, it's a sin, because it causes every women (and a few men) that sees him to fall maddeningly in love with him—so much so that they can barely stand to be around him! It's SUCH a sin, he constantly "repents" for it by allowing himself to be trampled by a bull called by his faithful servant. However, it turns out that he's so egotistical and so bizarre with his self-imposed punishments that everyone hates him and do everything they can to avoid him, and he's too obsessed with himself to see it.

Comic Books

One of the specials in Rising Stars is a woman whose power is that she appears to everyone who sees her as the most beautiful woman they can imagine. This gets her lots of unwelcome attention and means that no one sees the real her, instead just being focused on their own lusts and such.
In DC Comics, Power Girl sometimes complains because everyone only pays attention to her ... attributes.

Film

Parodied in A Knights Tale, when Jocelyn is chided by a religious leader laughing over the lengths that 'Sir Ulric' is going to in order to find out things about her, she responds, "I only laugh to keep from weeping — why, God, did you curse me with such a beautiful face?" She says this, one notes, with a dead monotone.
A slight variation is hilariously invoked in Mean Girls. The high school girls have been building a trust exercise: they read out apologies for all the bitchy things they have done, then fall backwards to be caught by the other girls. The simultaneously vain and deeply insecure Gretchen Wieners actually utters the following 'apology' completely without irony (Needless to say the other girls do not all rush to catch her when she falls backwards):
"I'm sorry that people are so jealous of me... but I can't help it that I'm so popular."
Parodied in Undercover Brother.
White She Devil: I know what it feels like to be discriminated against...they look at me, and all they see are my full breasts and my narrow waist that tapers to my pert backside. It's just not fair.
Done straight in The Ten Commandments. An Egyptian overseer lusts after a female Hebrew slave, leading the other Hebrews to comment about how beauty is a curse.

Literature

Anne Of Green Gables had a version of this, where her friend Leslie was trapped in a marriage to a man she hated, ostensibly because of the curse of her irresistible beauty. (He had coerced her into marriage by threatening to foreclose on a mortgage and throw her mother out of her home.)
Another male is Joseph from The Bible since he was "a goodly person and well favored", and his master's wife conceived a passion for him. Her repeated advances being repulsed, she finally attempted compulsion; still failing, she brought a false accusation against him before her husband, and Joseph was thrown into prison. One could make a case that one the reasons his father favored him was because, aside from being the son of his truly loved wife: Rachel, he inherited his mother's good looks making his beauty indirectly the reason he became a slave as well.
The book version of The Princess Bride sort of deals with this. Buttercup laments that everyone puts her on a pedestal, it's such a hassle to maintain such beauty, nobody thinks she's smart, etc. Apparently being the most beautiful woman in the world isn't all peaches and cream.
There's a book called Cloud Of Sparrows about missionaries going to Japan in which Emily, the 17-year-old heroine (no, wait, only nearly 17) is so beautiful (and such a raving Mary Sue for whom even the author seems to have a perverse contempt) that she's apparently a rape-magnet. So after she's been raped by her step-dad and nearly raped by some family friends' sons and leered at by every man she meets, she hates "her accursed beauty" (and that's a direct quote) and longs to escape from it. So she goes to Japan, where no one's seen a Western woman before and everyone finds her not just odd-looking but extravagantly hideous — yay! And she spends the whole plot trying desperately to stay in Japan rather than return to a land where she'll be considered beautiful again. Even when she nearly gets raped there too.
Florimell in The Faerie Queene — She doesn't complain, but she has a right to. After fleeing from 3 guys who try to rape her, a hyena-like monster, and a witch who clones her, she's kidnapped by Proteus and thrown in his dungeon until she agrees to sleep with him (which she adamantly refuses to the end). The author feels deeply sorry for all the troubles he puts her through... all because she's so beautiful.
Justified in the book Five Children and It, where the kids get a wish to be extremely beautiful, but nobody recognizes them, and they aren't even allowed into their own house. (Fortunately, the wish has a built-in time limit.)
A bizarre and creepy version shows up in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in which one character is so beautiful that it is physically painful to look at her. The problem is solved by cutting up her face with clamshells.
Referenced in the Narnia book Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Lucy has the opportunity to read a spell from a Wizard's book that would give her supernatural beauty. The book came complete with handy illustrations showing people worshipping her, then turning on each other, fighting wars over her, and so on. Lucy almost reads it anyway, but after an illustration of an angry Lion fills the page, she changes her mind.
Rosalie from Twilight. Her beauty led her to get bashed and gang-raped as a human.
Parodied in the Discworld novel Maskerade: the thin, beautiful, brainless Christine, when questioned about her scanty breakfast, tells fat but highly talented Agnes, "It's lucky for you, you can eat whatever you want." Agnes tries to be charitable but "deep down inside, [she] thought a rude word."
Male example: Lord Byron's Alternate Character Interpretation of Don Juan (and Lord Byron himself, too, for that matter).
Karen from John Steakley's Armour, whose beauty scares almost all men away except for those (her step-father, many superior officers in Fleet, etc) who rape her and get away with it because the juries are so awed by her that they forgive the men for buckling under the irresistable temptation.

Western Animation

Video Games

Male example: Mask of the Betrayer's Gannayev asserts that that the reason he's in jail is that he's "too handsome to look upon." He's not lying either — sort of. According to the warden, Gann has the habbit of bedding nearly anything in a skirt, much to the dismay of every Overprotective Dad on the continent. There's even a set of elaborate runes lining his cell just to make sure he doesn't do it in his sleep (which he can. Gann's probably the only Spirit Shaman who uses his dream hopping powers to get laid.)

Theater

A male example: in The Food Chain by Nikki Silver, the superficial supermodel Serge says this, then immediately follows it up by listing off his cursed attributes and titillating the two characters listening to his speech.

Fan Fic

Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, heroine of masterly fanfic parody (shh, yes it is, it must be) My Immortal is propositioned by everyone she meets, leading to the, uh, immortal lines:
“Yeah but everyone is in love with me! Like Snape and Loopin took a video of me naked. Hargrid says he’s in love with me. Vampire likes me and now even Snaketail is in love with me! I just wanna be with you ok Draco! Why couldn’t Satan have made me less beautiful?...Im good at too many things! WHY CAN’T I JUST BE NORMAL? IT’S A FUCKING CURSE!”

Tabletop RPG

Played hilariously straight in Dungeons And Dragons: The Nymph fae creature in the Monster Manual is so beautiful, looking at it can blind or kill. She can, however, turn it on and off.
- What do you expect? It's magic.

Web Original

Exemplars from Whateley Academy webfiction universe are mutants whose powers manifest in a form of Involuntary Shapeshifting — the more they use their powers, the more they change towards their mental image of a perfect body. Higher rank Exemplars quickly outstrip "baseline" (human norms) — so a Class 1 Exemplar would look fairly attractive, Class 2 would look unbelievably attractive, Class 3 would be creepily flawless, and it goes up from there. Combine the fact that some of the Exemplar mutants have mental images that aren't the "right" gender (and that some of them, at least in theory, hate their new situations), and they fit this trope to a T.

Web Comics

Wapsi Square has a short arc featuring the main character, who's improbably busty and thin, and another character working as a model, who is also improbably thin, lamenting how people can't take them seriously. Since it begins with the main character's friend dismissing the model as ditzy, it does serve as a decent Aesop about not judging someone by how they look. However, the main character blames some self-esteem issues on how she is too ideally shaped, inverting the norm in a way that can be frustrating.

Real Life

A little sadder in Real Life. How can you be sure if people like you because you're you or because you're pretty? It may be hard to make friends too, due to "pretty people = The Libby" preconceptions. That being said, if you whine about how pretty you are, ain't no-one going to pity you, girl.
Evangeline Lilly from Lost is always whining about how her beauty is such a burden, how she'd cry herself to sleep and wish she was ugly when she was younger because men wouldn't leave her alone, how she covers up the mirrors because she's so tired of looking at her oh so beautiful self, etc. Either she's got an ego the size of Jupiter, or one very bizarre manifestation of low self-esteem.
Eva Longoria and Cameron Diaz have both complained that they have been denied certain roles because they were just too darn beautiful for them. I suppose that's one way to keep from having to admit that they have marginal talent. And neither one of them is all that in the looks department, either.
I would say Marilyn Monroe was a real example of this according to her bio she was molested as a child several times and she was also typecasted as Dumb Blonde (even though she made a career out of it) and her final years of life were marked by illness, personal problems and a reputation for being unreliable and difficult to work with.

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