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  • Scarred heroes in urban fantasy/romance is extremely common. Usually, the scars aren't disfiguring, and may be a wild turn-on for the scaree's love interest. In J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood series, almost every male main character is covered in scars. Zsadist in particular has a nasty S-shaped scar cutting across his face.

  • Both Simon and his mother in the Ahriman Trilogy have scarring from their battles against Ahriman. Simon's consist of a series of almost kisslike marks up and down his arm.
  • "Fighting Jack" Aubrey, from the Aubrey-Maturin books, has a generous assortment of scars which he acquires in large part, during the events of the series. His subordinate Tom Pullings has severe facial scarring, Babbington has an amputated nose (which Doctor Maturin is repeatedly called upon to testify was lost due to frostbite, rather than syphilis), and a number of minor characters have assorted deformities. Maturin acquires serious damage to his hands from French torture (it is implied his fingernails were torn out) that make it harder for him to play his cello, but it got better later on, although only in a relative sense. This is largely omitted in the film adaptation, although Pullings has minor scarring, Midshipman Blakeney has an amputation of one arm, in his role as a composite of several minor characters, and in a reference to the torture, Maturin flexes his fingers before he plays cello.
  • Subversion and played straight at the same time. In BattleTech, the duplicate Thomas Marik is horribly burned across the right side of his body, possibly missing an eye (Artwork seems to vary on this point). However, as a leader he strives for honor and decency, and he is also one of the strongest opponents of the genocidal Word of Blake. Thomas' scars are cosmetic surgery to make him resemble the horribly disfigured real Thomas Marik, who is the leader of the Word.
    • Star Captain Trent also subverts this, as despite being horribly scarred by an Inferno Missile on Tukayyid he is one of the few remaining high ranking Smoke Jaguar warriors who clings to the old ways and tries to remain divorced from the petty politics with the clan, going on to deliver to the Inner Sphere forces the location of the clan homeworlds. Much of the skin on one half of his body (including a large part of his face) has been replaced and is obviously artificial as it is a bit more translucent than normal skin should be.
  • Bazil Broketail: Count Trego has a scar from a sabre wound on his face. He didn't earn it in a battle, though, but in a duel with another Czardhan knight some time ago before events in the series. He's on the good side, and though kind of a jerk at first he's ultimately a nice man.
  • In The Belgariad, the Murgos are a Proud Warrior Race whose rite of passage to adulthood involves slashing their faces as a blood sacrifice to the insane God of Evil Torak, which leaves distinctive scars to indicate their zealotry. A friendly Murgo in The Malloreon sequel series has barely-visible nicks on his jaw as a sign that he only ever paid lip service to the Religion of Evil.
  • Some of the scalp hunters of Blood Meridian bear grisly and noticeable scars, including missing ears and letters branded on the face. A number of these were received as punishment for crimes, emphasizing that while they're the protagonists, they're definitely not heroic.
  • Cira of A Brother's Price has a scar from the corner of her left eye down the line of her chin to the corner of her mouth, and her body is Covered with Scars. However, they healed so that her skin lies smooth, and Jerin finds the scars attractive, giving her plain face boldness and character.
  • In P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath, heroine Jame picks up a classic Good Scar in Book 3 (vertical below the left eye).
  • In Chung Kuo, Gangster boss Whiskers Lu has had half his face scarred by acid.
  • Codex Alera: Canim Ritualist Marok has arms covered in Self-Harm scars. However, due to the nature of Canim culture and magic in the setting, these hammer home that he is a follower of the Good Old Ways and a good guy. Canim Ritualists have to spill blood to work magic. Old-fashioned, self-sacrificing and community-oriented Ritualists will only use their own blood. Power-hungry Ritualists will gladly use blood from other sources.
  • A young Vlad the Impaler in Count and Countess sustains heavy wounds on his throat and loses part of his ear. It's not long after these events that he makes the jump to Anti-Villain.
  • Semi-averted in Lois McMaster Bujold's The Curse of Chalion: good guy Cazaril has both hands permanently damaged by his time as a galley slave, as well as scarring all over his back (hidden by his shirt) from a near-fatal flogging at the tail end of same. However, other characters perceive these as evil scars, since similar floggings are meted out to rapists and paedophiles. This causes him a bit of bother when he has to use a public bathhouse.
  • In the original version of Dangerous Liaisons, after the Marquise de Merteuil's machinations are exposed, she is reported to have contracted smallpox, leaving her with disfiguring facial scarring — a physical manifestation of her evilness and public shame.
  • Father Callahan of The Dark Tower has a cross-shaped scar on his forehead; it was supposed to be a swastika, but the Neo-Nazis carving it were stopped before they could finish.
  • Subverted with Carnival of Alan Campbell's Deepgate Codex series. Her entire body is covered in knife scars most of which are self-inflicted, and she also has a thick rope burn around her neck which is the sole physical remnant of her father's abuse. Characters who are close to her often remark that she is beautiful in spite of (and even because of) these scars, and that they show that she really is a kindhearted person despite her horrible reputation.
  • Doom in the Deltora Quest series has a grizzled face, complete with a scar across his eye. He's a good guy.
    • And later on, Lief ends up with scars over a substantial part of his face and neck — such things happen when you have a run-in with a Circus of Fear and almost get brainwashed — and he remains the good guy he's always been.
  • The Discworld novels avert it to a breaking point with Igors. While they sport horrible scars and work as henchmen for vampires and werewolves, they are extremely skilled doctors with high professional ethics. In fact, the scars come from their surprisingly ethical principle of testing every medical novelty upon themselves first. Female Igors — Igorinas — are universally and conventionally beautiful, on the other hand, though they may sport the occasional very fine stitching here and there. It's implied that the reason why they are so beautiful is because Igor surgical skill extends to the field of cosmetic surgery.
    • Death's granddaughter Susan also has some Good Scars, in the form of three thin, white marks on her cheek that only show up when she's flushed or angry. She inherited them from the slap that her father received from Death.
    • As of Night Watch Samuel Vimes has a particularly vicious scar running up his face and across his eye. The scar and accompanying eye patch were actually a plot point in that book.
      • He's pretty scarred up all over from years of chasing guys with names like "Knuckles" across rooftops, something that Rosie Palm brings up while deducing his profession.
    • In Jingo, 71-Hour Ahmed has a face covered in scars to the point where his beard doesn't grow properly, and Vimes says that there was no way a face like that could be innocent of anything. He is not actually evil, though; he's the Klatchian police chief and a counterpart to Vimes.
  • Subverted with Johanna Reyes from The Divergent Trilogy. While her scar is obvious, ugly by most standards, and even impedes her speech, both Tobias and Tris say it somehow makes her more beautiful and strong.
  • The Divine Comedy: Manfred, one of the first characters introduced in Purgatory, has a scar above his eyebrow that hints at his former life of violence and sin. Despite his scar, Manfred is still noble-looking and beautiful, indicating he is still good despite his failings.
  • The novelization of the Doctor Who story The Dinosaur Invasion plays with this: one of the villains, who's doing bad things out of a good motivation, has a distinctive facial scar of the Evil variety, which he got while saving an innocent person's life as a firefighter before he became a villain.
  • Sort of inverted in The Dresden Files — Harry gets his hand fried to a crisp by one smarter-than-usual baddy. However, because the shade of the fallen angel Lasciel was in his mind, a bit of skin on his palm stayed unburnt, in the shape of her angelic sigil. Definitely evil, but also sort of an antiscar.
    • As of Turn Coat, he has also acquired the standard anti-hero eye scar thanks to an angry guy with a knife. This is only one of the more visible ones in his (very large) collection, which also features claw marks, bullet wounds, the aforementioned crispy-fried hand, and marks from having been beaten half to death with a chain. Hell, he's probably gotten a couple of new ones in each book, since they more often than not end up with him in the hospital or at the very least lying on the couch in his apartment, hooked up to an IV. No wonder he's The Woobie.
    • Though Stacy finds them attractive in Small Favor.
    • His hand heals noticeably throughout the books, going from practically crippled to stiff to more or less functional by Changes. Waldo Butters attributes this to a sort of Healing Factor which is also responsible for the general long lives of wizards (Harry expects to live to be around 200, unless someone or something kills him off first).
  • Earthsea:
    • Averted in Tehanu: Therru (good guy) was horribly burned when her natural parents threw her into a fire.
    • In A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged, in a calamitous attempt to summon a long-dead ghost, summons some never-exactly specified evil creature whose first business is to attack Ged and maul one entire side of his face. These scars never leave his face, and so he is reminded every day of his arrogance and the balance that he disrupted.
  • Subverted in The First Law in which more or less every major character has at least one ugly scar, whether they're good or bad. Logen in particular is more or less one big walking scar and is described as horrendously ugly by many other characters though his status as a good guy is very questionable. In Best Served Cold, Shivers has his eye, along with half of his face, horrendously burned. He gets a prosthetic metal eye in its place, but the scar left over is hideous enough to sicken the most hardened warriors. The torture he goes through makes him one of the cruelest characters in the series during The Heroes, which is quite the competition.
  • Averted in Karen Miller's Godspeaker Trilogy as the scars that Hekat and Rhian have are self-inflicted.
  • Harry Potter:
    • Harry's famous 'lightning bolt' shaped achey scar. It's easily covered up by his fringe. A magical quill in the fifth book gives Harry another scar, this one on the back of his hand, the words "I must not tell lies" in his own handwriting, from writing those words, over and over again, in his own blood during detention.
    • In Deathly Hallows, he acquires two new scars in the same scene: a round one in his chest where Hermione had to cut out the locket-Horcrux that had stuck to his skin, and two snake-bite marks on his arm.
    • Averted with Alastor "Mad Eye" Moody, a professional fighter of Death Eaters and other Dark wizards, who is heavily scarred and disfigured, including missing a chunk of his nose.
    • Also averted with Bill Weasley after he is brutally mauled by werewolf Fenrir Greyback. His face is scarred to the point of resembling Mad-Eye Moody.
    • Similarly averted with George Weasley when he loses an ear thanks to a Death Eater in the beginning of Deathly Hallows.
    • And in a positively whimsical aversion, Dumbledore claims to have a scar above his left knee in the precise shape of a map of the London Underground.
  • Firesong from the Heralds of Valdemar series by Mercedes Lackey gets seriously burned across his face by a magical explosion. He gets somewhat depressed about it, since he was the most attractive guy in his whole clan before, and wears a mask, but definitely remains a good guy.
  • Jason from The Heroes of Olympus has a little one on his lip from trying to eat a stapler when he was two. Lit, Midas' son and bodyguard is covered in them.
  • The Hunger Games: Invoked in Mockingjay, when Katniss has her uglier scars surgically cleaned up, but is left with some more attractive scars, because she's got to have some scars to show how bravely she's been fighting. Averted in the end, however, when she gets only basic skin grafts and there's no attempt to blend them because Coin has no more need of her.
  • Subverted in Aisling: the witch Niahrin, an unequivocally good character, has massive, grotesque, sickly-pale scars distorting the left side of her face.
  • The Anti-Hero Dustfinger from Inkheart had his face "decorated" by the villain's sadistic henchman. He has three light, curved lines across his face. The narrator describes this as giving the impression of something glass that had been cracked and then stuck back together. While these do count as "Good Scars", they do cause most people to automatically distrust him (not that their instincts would be wrong).
  • In the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming, James Bond is often described as having a scar down his right cheek. However, in the movies based on the books, this scar had mysteriously vanished. Also, one of the Russians, whose timely intervention against 'Le Chiffre' in the first Bond novel Casino Royale saved him from that villain, left him alive but marked him with the Cyrillic letter Ш (the first letter of the word Шпион, meaning 'spy') carved on the back of his right hand, which ended up leaving a scar that the best efforts of plastic surgeons in the employ of MI-6 could not completely eradicate.
    • Bond villains, on the other hand — along with their henchmen — are the most scarred-up bunch of mofos ever filmed, and Largo's eyepatch is the only one that could pass for remotely heroic. Le Chiffre from Casino Royale (2006) might top them all: a dead, milky blue eye that weeps blood, covered by a jagged, livid scar. Right hands don't get much redder than that.
  • Xanatos, the Big Bad for half the Jedi Apprentice books, has a small, neat broken circle scar on his face. When Qui-Gon attacked Xanatos's father he cut the man's hand and put a notch into a ring he wore. Xanatos pressed that ring into his face, deliberately creating this scar.
  • Kate Shugak has a faded scar running most of the way round her neck where a child murderer attempted to slit her throat. She ended up killing him with his own knife.
  • Played with in the Knight and Rogue Series. Michael takes the blame for a rather petty incident in the first book to spare a near stranger the punishment and gets flogged as a result, leaving rather graphic scars all over his back. This is no big deal until he's rather unfairly tattooed as an unredeemable criminal at which point everyone sees his scars and assumes they must have been legal punishment for some unspeakably horrid crime.
  • Played with in Dean Koontz's Frankenstein series. Deucalion, the original Frankenstein's monster, has horrific scarring across half of his face, as well as the expected patchwork scars. He's a good guy, but he's also Frankenstein's monster, and he is still subject to murderous rages.
  • Dodge from The Looking-Glass Wars has a few of these running parallel to each other across one side of his face from getting bitch-slapped by The Cat as a child.
  • Averted in Mortal Engines — Hester's face was sliced in half as a small child, and the enormous, disfiguring scar that resulted (one eye gone, nose destroyed, lips wrenched to one side) tends to horrify people, but... she's mostly one of the good guys. However, there's an in-universe example — in Pennyroyal's heavily altered version of events, 'Hester Shaw' has an eye-patch and a 'discreet' scar on her cheek.
    • Played straight in the film version, where Hester's scar is a lot less grisly.
  • Kvothe from The Name of the Wind acquires a variety of scars on his back as a result of not one but two severe whippings over the course of a rather short period of time. It's remarked in the book that they are attractive, pale good-guy-looking scars. All of them but one.
  • In the Nightrunner series, good guys Seregil and Micum have scars aplenty, but in places that can be hidden under clothing. By contrast, the evil Duke Mardus has a big scar across his otherwise handsome face.
    • The scar Seregil gets in the first novel is usually covered by his shirt (and before with a glamour) and becomes a plot point in book two (Chekhov's Scar?). Even before the MacGuffin that is to blame for the wound gave him...naasty experiences and also scarred Alec's hand when he removed the thing. Alec had no after effects since the magic pattern of the disk was on the side touching Seregil's skin.
    • Seregil and Alec acquire many more scars in Shadows Return. This trope is also averted there when they get their slave marks painfully removed.
    • Beka also acquires several scars "all in the front". Well, since she's a soldier, Action Girl, Micum's daughter and more or less Seregil's "niece"...
    • Princess Klia looses two fingers after a poisoning attack.
    • Tobin from the Tamír Triad has a half moon shaped scar on his chin, acquired when he was a little child and Mommy wanted to kill him in a fit of madness. The scar stayed after his transformation.
  • In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Amaranta Buendía horribly burns her own hand in the stove to prove to her mother that she didn't mean to drive her first boyfriend Pietro Crespi to kill himself. She covers the scars with a black bandage until the day of her death.
  • Taizu in C. J. Cherryh's The Paladin has a classic Good Scar, vertically down from one eye, although it's more severe than many such and goes all the way down her neck.
  • Luke from Percy Jackson and the Olympians has one going vertically through his eye.
  • Possible subversion in Redwall; Folgrim in Legend of Luke has a badly scarred face and a missing eye, yet turns out to be a good guy (once he's broken of his rather horrible habit of devouring his enemies — said enemies were Always Chaotic Evil so the good guys have no problem with killing them, but they still don't think eating them is okay).
  • In The Rise and Fall of the Sky Valley Cult, former pageant queen Syvier has been horribly scarred, and is now an assassin. She is later revealed to have mutilated her own face to escape the toxic world her parents forced her into.
  • Sharpe has "Sweet" William Frederickson, who has a full range of evil scars — hideously disfigured, missing one eye, one ear, most of his teeth and several fingers... Although he is in fact a good guy, very nearly as badass as the titular hero (who has a classic "Good guy" neat scar on one cheek.)
  • Pity of the Spider-Man: Sinister Six Trilogy has scars running down her cheeks, but this was done intentionally by The Gentleman to make her look more helpless and vulnerable.
  • Mickelson from Sky Jumpers has a scar that runs down his right temple to his jaw.
  • In the extreme moral ambiguity of A Song of Ice and Fire, hero and villain scars are sometimes played straight and sometimes subverted:
    • The ferocious and morally ambiguous Sandor "the Hound" Clegane sports a hideously burned face, which has haunted all his life and turned him into the rage-filled drunkard he is. People generally see him as an inhuman monster, but he subverts his villain scars by revealing his underlying humanity over the course of the series, especially in comparison to his older brother, who gave him the scars in the first place.
    • Tyrion Lannister, a deformed dwarf, gets most of his nose cut off by a sword stroke. He was already unfairly hated for his deformities, however, so he thinks of the scar as a bit of a pointless overkill. Everyone assumes that his deformity and scars are proof of his evil nature, and serve to help push him from a basically decent and generous soul into what might be a villain.
    • Beric Dondarrion is patchwork of grisly scars — and all of them were fatal wounds (stabbed in the eye, speared through the gut, hanged with a noose), but he has been resurrected from the dead multiple times. Since most people don't know about the resurrections, the scars add onto Beric's Shrouded in Myth Folk Hero Just Like Robin Hood reputation for fighting for the people and being the man the cruel authorities just can't kill.
    • Jon Snow gets cool scars. First he gets his hand burned in a wight attack, forcing him to wear a black glove most of the time. Then he gets his face clawed by a possessed eagle, giving him some cool facial scars that women comment on.
    • Although it's yet to be seen, Littlefinger is said to have a scar on his chest gained during a rather one-sided duel with Brandon Stark for Catelyn's affections, marking the beginning of his transition from The Woobie to a bitter and somewhat unhinged Magnificent Bastard.
    • Osney Kettleblack has the typical cool anti-hero scars under his eye, but the origin of them is hardly heroic — he and his brothers were beating up a Hooker with a Heart of Gold and she scratched him. Basically, the scars represent how despite his pretensions to being a cool rogue, he's just a thug.
  • Mackenzie Calhoun in Star Trek: New Frontier has a scar down his left cheek made by a Danteri in the final battle on Xenex. Kat Mueller has a thinner scar down her right cheek from a fencing incident at Heidelberg. Despite the technology to remove them, neither does.
  • Star Wars Legends:
    • Face Loran, a Wraith from the X-Wing Series, has an interesting take on this trope. He was a child actor, and in Wraith Squadron is said to be quite attractive if not for the raised, puckered scar that goes from his left forehead, across the bridge of his nose, and onto his left cheek. In the numerous disguises he takes, he always has to either hide it or incorporate it into the disguise, like when he masquerades as General Kargin, a pirate with "horrible burn victim makeup." He could have it removed with a simple, if pricey, bacta treatment, but he thinks of it as a reminder of what he's done — he acted for Imperial propaganda, unwittingly helping the cause. After Ton Phanan's death and insistence that Face stop punishing the child he'd been, he does have it removed, but for some time wears a fake scar in the same place.
    • Razor's Edge: The Space Pirate leader Aral tukor Viest has a scar cutting across the middle of her face, marking her as a rough customer, and wears facial piercings that highlight the scar, making sure everyone notices it and understands its significance.
  • The Stormlight Archive: Having fought in a war with incompetent leaders, it should come as no surprise that Kaladin's got a few scars on him (as noted by a lighteyes considering buying him). He gains more in slavery, including a few brands on his forehead. When he joins Bridge Four, he gets even more.
  • Surprisingly averted in Twilight — Emily, Sam's girlfriend, is described as being beautiful on one side, but her left arm and the entire left side of her face are covered in scars from when an out-of-control werewolf-Sam attacks her.
  • Also averted in Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. Aral Vorkosigan's L-shaped dueling scar on his cheek adds to his rather thuggish appearance, while his son Miles not only bears an assortment of surgical scars from the piecemeal (emphasis on piecees) replacement of his brittle bones with synthetics but retains one from a needle grenade to the chest that nearly cut him in half. His future wife finds these scars quite a turn on.
  • Lijah Cuu from the Warhammer 40,000: Gaunt's Ghosts novels has a nasty scar nearly bisecting his face. It "nicely" foreshadows the extent of his treachery.
    • Ibram Gaunt also bears a multitude of scars from various injuries sustained in the line of duty. A particularly impressive scar runs across his stomach, which he received from his uncle Dercius in a chainsword duel to avenge his father's death.
  • Both played straight and averted in Warrior Cats. Clawface, as his name implies, has many scars running along his face. He's a villain. However, Stonefur, who has battle-scarred ears, and Brightheart who has one eye and ear missing and is horrifically scarred in that area, are both heroes. Tigerstar, another villain, has a scar across the bridge of his nose and a split in his ear. Longtail, a hero, has a V-shaped cut in his ear as well. Of course, one has to take into account that almost every character in existence is scarred somehow, but...
  • Watership Down. In the warren-dictatorship of Efrafa scars are used to identify which 'mark' (section of the warren) you belong to (as the protagonists are rabbits who obviously don't carry identity cards). After his climactic fight with the Big Bad Bigwig has so many scars it's joked the Efrafans wouldn't know which mark to put him into, as he's got them all.
  • Any number of characters in The Wheel of Time books are scarred, to differing degrees. The main character (Rand), in fact, recently lost a hand, and Mat has had one of his eyes ripped out Towers of Midnight. The author is also fond of showing a character's battle experience with scars — one even has a missing eye, which he has replaced with a patch painted to show a horrifically scowling eye (and if you make him mad enough, his real eye will match it). Another has a nasty scar around his neck, which he covers as best he can with scarves and so on.
  • Where The Drowned Girls Go: The villainous decoy headmaster of the Boarding School of Horrors has a heavy scar crossing his face from hairline to collar. It's his only distinguishing feature ever since the denizens of a Magical Land literally cut the individuality out of him, leaving him profoundly hostile to the supernatural.
  • The Witch of Knightcharm:
    • The villainous necromancer twins, Julia and Alejandra Medina, are both badly scarred. In addition, Alejandra—who (at least initially) appears to be the less hostile and murderous of the two—has slightly smaller scars than her sister Julia.
    • The psychopathic Luban Chan is described as having a 'pockmarked' face, indicating the presence of deep scars. Luban also spends her final attempt at the orientation course trying to murder the protagonist.

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