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So Beautiful, It's a Curse

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So Beautiful, It's a Curse (trope)
"Boys. Go fig."

Jessica Rabbit: You don't know how hard it is, being a woman looking the way I do.
Eddie Valiant: Yeah, well... you don't know how hard it is, being a man... looking at a woman looking the way you do...

A very specific form of Appearance Angst and/or Blessed with Suck that comes up regularly where a character's beauty is a source of problems. This is usually because of its effect on other characters, often times inspiring jealousy, intimidation, suspicion, or unwanted attention. Otherwise, the character is only noticed because of their looks and not their personal merits. In cases where a character complains about their beauty, expect their complaints to be dismissed by or cause more resentment from other characters.

They may also be the target of Victim-Blaming if they are sexually harassed or assaulted. The beautiful character may be Mis-blamed or Wrongly Accused by the friends and family of a Stalker with a Crush or someone who they unwillingly attract, or even just the general public, as a way to deflect blame from the person who harassed them. Needless to say, this is depressingly common in Real Life.

In historical settings, her family will try to exploit her beauty for their social advantage. This may be a Rags to Royalty Arranged Marriage — or a less formal form.

Rape as Drama is the most vivid form of illustrating this "curse". This trope is also a Cyclical Trope in that a given audience may or may not take it seriously depending on current events and the time period. If the character in question is pushed far enough, they might end up Tarnishing Their Own Beauty. May take the form of Only Has Same-Sex Admirers, particularly in Pretty Boy and Bifauxnen characters.

Many writers will often use this trope as a "flaw", but what needs to be understood is that it is not a flaw in and of itself, but a situation that can lead to a character developing flaws as a result. When someone's beauty is all that many people see, the character may well grow distrustful and cynical of others, fear being stalked or taken advantage of, or harbor harmful and emotionally damaging beliefs about themselves and others, such as a belief that their only worth is in their looks, that looks are all people value in them, and/or that they will never be respected for their own personal merits or achievements not related to beauty.

Contrast Looks Worth Killing For, and the Fatal Attractor, whose victimization is not explicitly tied to their looks. See D-Cup Distress for when a well-endowed woman resents the attention her breasts get, I Didn't Mean to Turn You On for a character arouses another by accident and My Eyes Are Up Here from when a character verbally requests another to cease their ogling. These types of character may also be victims of those who are In Love with Looks.

It's generally not a good idea to pair this trope up with Screw the Rules, I'm Beautiful! unless you want your character to develop a nice frothy Hatedom.


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Examples:

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    Advertising 

    Asian Animation 
  • Bread Barbershop: In "Butter's Quest for Ugliness", Butter's good looks end up causing a bunch of women to faint from his beauty, causing him to get placed on house arrest. The rest of the episode is him trying to figure out how to look ugly so he can get out of the house and not cause people to faint.

    Comic Books 
  • Animaniacs: Minerva Mink in the Comic-Book Adaptation enjoys the attention she gets for her looks, except when she tries to get something normal done, like shopping for groceries or filing her taxes. Inevitably, the way she looks makes it harder to do, because every male around her is panting and howling. The only males who don't have this reaction are those she's attracted to, which causes her to react in a similar gawking manner.
  • The Beano: Used as an inversion of Bash Street Kid Plug's ugliness, in which the Kids have to try and "make a sow's ear out of a silk purse" by making a guest character who's so handsome he makes people faint, more like Plug.
  • Castle Waiting: This is the back story to the Solicitine Nuns, which honor a saint whose great beauty made her father insist on an Arranged Marriage. She prayed to be made ugly and sprouted a beard. (This is based on several genuine saints' legends.)
  • Faith: Faith's nemesis, Hollywood actor Chris Chriswell, is a strange, evil example. He grew up admiring supervillains and finding the heroes reactive and boring. When he got into acting, he dreamed of playing bad guys, but because of his good, rugged looks, he kept getting cast in heroic roles, to his profound frustration.
  • Green Lantern: Bleez of the Red Lanterns was kidnapped and gang-raped because of her beauty.
  • Josie and the Pussycats:
    • Melody is so beautiful that almost any man who sees her gets Distracted by the Sexy and suffers Amusing Injuries. In one story, the Pussycats can't get any work at a club because the female customers are so infuriated at losing all their boyfriends to Melody.
    • Zig-zagged in a story where a little boy is seen stalking Melody. When Alexander uncovers him, the kid tearfully confesses that he was stalking Melody because he was in love with her. Melody is so flattered she kisses the boy right on the lips, which sends him rocketing into the sky.
  • Legion of Super-Heroes: Charma has the uncontrollable power to make all men love and want her and all women insanely jealous of her. She got put into the general population of a prison and was killed, all for the purpose of making her Mad Scientist boyfriend go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against life, the universe, and everything, starting with trying to kill the Earth.
  • Lil i Put: The Polish comic book series has a storyline that focuses on the "most beautiful princess in the world", so attractive that everyone who saw her became mad with envy on the spot and began to hate the princess. Everyone, including male characters, her own reflection in the mirror and forces of nature. The princess was rather miserable because of this, especially that she was abandoned by everyone for being so inhumanly, incomprehensibly pretty. Her face is never shown so the reader doesn't turn against her, too.
  • The Mighty Thor: Amora the Enchantress often gets kidnapped by beings who want her because of her beauty. The Asgardians and Loki, who also desire her, will often call a truce to go rescue her.
  • Power Girl: Power Girl sometimes complains because everyone only pays attention to her... attributes. Though perhaps she'd have less of a problem if she covered over the peek-a-boo(b) window in the front of her costume. They're touted to be part of her disguise. Nobody's going to be looking at her face, after all, are they? How about putting on some pants? She's even got a belt, apparently, so her skintight leotard doesn't fall off.
  • Relative Heroes: This is the power of Allure. She was enchanted by the god Eryx with mystic pheromones and other powers of persuasion in return for her hand in marriage.
  • Rising Stars: One of the specials 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.
  • Spider-Woman: Jessica Drew has a similar problem in that her powers cause her to release pheromones that make men naturally attracted to her. It gets worse since the same pheromones also cause women to hate her.
  • The Wicked + The Divine: Tara was gorgeous even before she ascended to godhood. As a result, she's been sexually harassed since she was eleven and it only gets worse as she becomes famous. She despises the attention directed at her looks but her attempts to spotlight her artistic ability just lead to people hating her, and giving the people what they want gets her labelled as an Attention Whore.
  • X-Men:

    Comic Strips 
  • 9 Chickweed Lane: Edda, a ballerina-turned-model, projected such a wholesome Girl Next Door image that she became more popular than the clothes she was (barely) wearing and made the Corrupt Corporate Executives of the clothing line want to fire her over it despite the fact they originally didn't even want her face — it was her rear they admired. Heaven knows no one in the fashion industry wants a beautiful person model for them or have their ads go viral after discovering an ingenue.
  • Riley Freeman of The Boondocks struggles with making himself look like a thug because he's "cursed with cuteness". Something similar happened to Huey when he began ranting and an old lady ignored the whole rant because she thought he was so adorable.
  • In the Cast Full of Gay comic strip Chelsea Boys, ridiculously gorgeous, muscled young hunk Sky is a victim of this. He finds it hard to be taken seriously for his art because everyone is fawning over his hotness, but he maintains an overall cheery demeanor even when his roommate points out that some people just give him extra favors cause they want to get in his pants.
  • In Nodwick (which is based on 2nd edition D&D), the party once runs into an evil nymph who tries to kill them by disrobing. Nodwick and Piffany look away; Arthax and Yeagar comment that they've "never enjoyed succeeding a saving throw that much before".
  • Marigold the unicorn in Phoebe and Her Unicorn. When she sees her reflection, she is trapped staring, sometimes for days. This is plot-relevant more than once.

    Fairy Tales 
  • Similarly in "All-Kinds-of-Fur" and "The She-Bear":
    • In All-Kinds-Of-Fur, when the mother of the heroine dies, she tells her father to remarry only a woman that has golden hair too. And it turns out only their daughter has it, so the father forces her to marry him.
  • In the Italian fairy tale "The Devil's Breeches", the impoverished hero tries to support himself working as a valet, but either the wife or sister of each master falls in love with him for his beauty, and he has to quit to avoid complications.
  • In Donkeyskin, the queen makes the king promise not to marry until he found "a woman more beautiful and better formed than myself." In due course, the king does find such a woman: his own daughter. She has to flee to escape.
  • In The Evil Eye of Sani, the beautiful Chintamani is captured by boatmen and prays to Lakshmi to make her hideous and spare her rape. It works.
  • In the Hungarian fairy tale "The Grateful Beasts", Ferko's brothers cripple and blind him because they think his beauty will win him favor.
    His two brothers were as jealous of him as they could be, for they thought that with his good looks he would be sure to be more fortunate than they would ever be.
  • In Kate Crackernuts, the queen has her stepdaughter, Anne, cursed for being prettier than her own daughter, Kate. Kate loves her stepsister and calls her mom out on this.
  • In Master Semolina, the hero's astounding good looks inspire a queen to have him kidnapped — and lets her direct her men, by having them take the man who is so astoundingly handsome.
  • Pintosmalto of Pintosmalto is a marzipan statue decorated with gems that is brought to life by the Goddess of Love. He is astoundingly beautiful, which inspires a queen to abduct him to have for herself on his wedding day. His wife Betta has to save him.
  • In 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.
  • The Rose Tree: The stepmother kills her stepdaughter due to being jealous of her beauty and lovely golden hair.
  • Perhaps the all-time most famous example in fiction and folklore is the tale of "Snow White" a young girl sentenced to death by her envious Step-Mother, in original tellings her Mother, for the "crime" of being the Fairest of them All.

    Fan Works 
  • After She Woke The main character attends Hogwarts under a spell that makes her so completely undetectable that no one even knows she's attending school, because she's just far too beautiful. Every boy would be in love with her, and every girl would be insanely jealous of her beauty if they saw her. The idea of hiding her beauty through makeup, transfiguration, or just a mask never occurs to her or her parents.
  • Arrow: Rebirth: Before the Gambit went down, Sara Lance used to take a lot of pride in her looks. After it went down and she started getting raped for said looks, that changed, and she now despises men who ogle her as nothing more as a sex object. One of the reasons why she fell in love with Barry Allen is because he's one of the few who only saw her as a person.
  • Mabel in the older AU fic The Big Pines grew to be almost ridiculously buxom. At first, she enjoyed the attention but found that the only kind of guys she attracted were perverts who thought she was easy and only cared about her body, not the young woman attached to it.
  • Child of the Storm: Carol is a budding Amazonian Beauty and Younger than She Looks, passing for a high-school or college student in middle school. This creates huge problems for her, as she is always at the receiving end of sexual attention from men who are way too old (and she is far too young for a relationship anyway), while other girls appear to be jealous of her. At the start of the fic, her only male friends are her honorary brother Lex and Jean-Paul, who is gay. This means that she is naturally distrustful with poor social skills.
  • In Deserving, Dennis Creevey (!) becomes a Pretty Boy Gary Stu who laments this at one point. The review has some My Immortal-related fun with this.
  • Hinted in The Dressmaker Queen as being the cause of Jenny Thompson's troubles when Prince Gray sees her and announces that he'll marry her. It also doesn't help that he has a habit of taking the most beautiful women he can find for his own selfish purposes...
    The prince didn’t have a kind reputation when it came to womankind, often taking those who suited his fancy… Some he kept as mistresses in his various homes around the country, well paid until they got too old and wrinkled or he sighted another one. Others disappeared, whether they ran away, were shipped off to convents, sent to live with distant family members or committed suicide. All were ruined.
  • The FanFiction Critic tears this trope a new one in her review of Forbiden Fruit: The Tempation of Edward Cullen:
    Linney: "We have us a classic Mary Sue here. All the boys want to bone her...and all the girls hate her because she's just too perfect. I mean, who the hell walks up to you and says, 'you'd be prettier if you weren't so ethereal!' Who says that! Who!"
  • In Fangirls and Fanboys, Many of Tsuna's classmates begin to take notice of him after puberty turns him into a Pretty Boy. While at first he enjoyed it because the other kids started being nice to him and he was no longer being bullied, he soon starts regretting his good looks when his admirers became more obsessed with him.
  • In Fluffy Hero Izuku, Izuku is not a fan of the way his quirk, Fluffy Beast, gives him the features of a several cute animals, which naturally makes him popular with a lot of women. The way these women tend to baby Izuku makes him feel doubtful in his dream to become a hero.
  • Ginny Weasley and the Half-Blood Prince: Fleur is dismissive of her own beauty, seeing it as something that she never had to work for (as a consequence of her Veela heritage) and therefore something she didn't earn. All it does is make people ignore all her other skills and accomplishments. She got a job at Gringotts not to be close to Bill (though that was a nice bonus) but because goblins consider her to be just as ugly as all other humans, and so any advancements are purely on her merit.
  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire:
    Rowena: I have an aunt. You wouldn't know her, but she's one of the most sought after fashion models in the Muggle world. She is beyond stunning. She's the nicest, kindest person I've ever met in my life and she has exactly two friends in the world; my mother and a childhood friend who didn't let being the ugly one – and I use that term facetiously – turn her jealous. The thing is, she's so beautiful it's the only thing about her that interests anyone. She's given up making friends. Any woman she tries to make friends with just worries she'll steal their boyfriend or husband. The one thing she wants in the world is to find a guy who actually trusts her and marry him. But any guy she's ever dated, within six months, is convinced she's cheating on him. She can't so much as talk to another guy without them getting all possessive and controlling. I know it sounds weird, but being as pretty as Fleur isn't as easy as you might think. And before you scoff at me, I'll point out that every one of you four, even Ginny, whose boyfriend hasn't so much as looked at Fleur twice, is jealous of the attention she gets from boys, or, given present company, some girls.
  • In Heavenly Resonance, Lauren briefly mentions this as a very real danger she faced in Afghanistan. Though mercifully, nothing came of it.
    "I was trapped for five hours in a four by four crawl space, with two children, while a rebel gang ransacked the village my team was responsible for assessing and helping. Knowing any noise, we made, any movement would give away our position and that would mean..." (shudders) "The children would probably be taken to join the rebels, they were boys, old enough to be trained, strong enough to hold a gun. And a pretty blonde foreigner like me well..."
  • How Bad Can a Little Gossip Be?: Luca's cute looks unfortunately attract the twisted and creepy attentions of Mr Ricci's son, who began stalking him in order to make him his.
  • John experiences this in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World. Having been transformed into a muscular winged demigod, he is sexually attractive to everyone...but he's also no longer human and has no interest whatsoever in human women (and men, for that matter). Indeed, he finds them vaguely repellent when considered as sexual partners. This makes life...awkward...at times.
  • Mending the Knots: Pyrrha gets a lot of unwanted attention from boys because of her looks, especially from her loathsome and obsessive partner Oreo.
  • Mr. Evil's Original Character Susan Knives, aka Sword Hunter. She was born with an extreme form of eczema that makes her own sweat cause her to break out in rashes. So she is forced to wear a swimsuit worth of material as clothing. Aside from that, she is extremely attractive which causes males to instantly lust for her and the women think of her like a slut, all while anyone unaware of her condition automatically thinks she is a tramp. Due to this she has nearly been raped several times and forced to change schools because of the harassment she is forced to endure. Though it wasn't until her last school did she meet true friends that revealed to her how she could turn that curse into a weapon for her own gain.
  • In Midoriya Izuku. Quirk: Cuteness, Izuku is bothered by all the attention he receives becomes of his quirk's ability to make him cute, especially since people always dismiss his dream of being a hero on the basis that he's too "cute" and "fragile" for that kind of work.
  • Moon Daughter: Flavia, claims her beauty is a curse from Artemis to keep her a virgin forever.
    "I knew once again that Artmeis had cursed me, too many guys wanted me!"
  • Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, heroine of masterful Troll Fic 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!"
  • Quaithe in Ned Stark Lives!. So much, that she was raped by her own father and brothers when she was 12, and wears a mask when she wants to speak with someone.
  • An Elseworlds story of Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku! has little Eri become the mighty Shazam! with the powers of the gods. One of those gods happens to be the goddess Aurora, who bestowed upon her incredible beauty. As a result, Eri has stunning looks and a mature, womanly figure that causes older men to ogle her whenever she's Shazam. She's understandably Squicked by this, as she's just six years old.
  • A pirate version of The Nostalgia Critic wished once that he could disfigure himself because of this. It's not as pretentious as it sounds though, because he's thinking this while being traumatized from being gang-raped by Ask That Guy and the crew.
  • As Dr. Merlin of the original Mary Sue Litmus Test says, "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."
  • In Pigtails, Marinette gains some unwanted attention from a couple of boys because her temporary hairstyle makes her look more "mature".
  • Remnant's Blonde Bard: As Jaune gains levels in Charisma, he essentially gains a passive buff that makes him look like, as his mother notes, an airbrushed male model straight out of a magazine. This results in him getting increasingly inappropriate attention from older women, some literally old enough to be his mother, much to Juniper's rising concern and anger at how predatory some of the attention has gotten. Notably, Jaune doesn't seem to mind, making it a case of this trope where another person feels this way with no envy or jealousy.
  • Ultimate Spider-Woman: Mary Jane Watson is a gorgeous young coed who enjoys being the center of attention at parties and at the beach, and takes pride in how good she looks. Unfortunately, her beauty has also been a major source of grief for her:
    • The parents of one boy she was dating hated her because they were convinced she was a Gold Digger who was only using her beauty to try and get a share of the family money;
    • The parents of her current boyfriend despised her because she works as an actress and a model, and they see her as flaunting her body and sexuality to sell products. They're also enraged when they think that Mary Jane cheated on their son and that it's the reason he came home from a date with her suffering a Heroic BSoD. Mary Jane was Wrongly Accused, but she and her boyfriend initially can't explain the truth without compromising her Secret Identity. Even after her boyfriend manages to clear things up, his parents remain distrustful of her for a long time (also in part due to her natural secretiveness);
    • Some of the directors she's auditioned for think that she's trying to get by on her looks rather than her actual talent as an actress;
    • Another director assumes that Mary Jane only got a role in an indie film because she was sleeping with one of the film's major sponsors;
    • The middle-aged, perverted owner of one of the modeling agencies she worked for groped and sexually harassed her, then used his influence to keep her from getting work once she rejected his advances;
    • A particularly Loony Fan of Mary Jane in her identity as the spectacular Spider-Woman began murdering people to show his affection for her, up to and including becoming a Psycho Electro supervillain to do it. When Spider-Woman expressed her disgust and horror at what he was doing, the fan became determined to kill her for "leading him on".
  • The Naruto fanfiction Winds Of Change invokes this trope seriously, with some members of the Uchiha clan (usually male members), but with other characters commenting on it, instead of the characters themselves complaining, with the exception of Sasuke at one point, who winds up scarring himself and treats it in a half-humorous, half-creepy way with Hinata, who wistfully expresses the wish she wasn't so attractive when she keeps on having guys fall for her/lust after her. The creepy part is that one of her "admirers" is Eight-Tails, who wants to recreate Rosemary's Baby with her.
  • The hero of The World Well Lost mentions falling victim to something like this, although it's not due to hir being brain-breakingly beautiful, so much as it's because ze is beautiful and transgender, and some insecure straight guys react badly to this.

    Films — Animation 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Some real-life actresses have faced this issue, wanting to be taken seriously when everyone in Hollywood treats them like, well, Marilyn Monroe or Raquel Welch.
  • 12 Years a Slave has Patsey, played for all the horror it's worth. Patsey (played by Kenyan actress and model Lupita Nyong'o) is not only very beautiful but also really good at picking cotton, and her master Edwin Epps is crazy about her.... He rapes her and subjects her to beatings out of possessiveness, and his wife is also violently jealous of the girl. She is Driven to Suicide but cannot go through with the deed herself, and tries to pay Solomon to drown her (in real life, Mrs. Epps tried to pay Solomon to drown her, and Mr. Epps' treatment of her was more abusive than depicted - that's right, what you see in the film is toned down).
  • 300: Sparta's Ephors (old, inbred, diseased priests) "choose only the most beautiful Spartan girls to serve as oracles", and what do the Ephors do with them in their spare time? (hint: it's not predicting the future).
    Dilios: Their beauty is their curse, for the old wretches have the needs of men... and souls as black as hell.
  • Carrie (2013): Word of God is that this is the reason behind casting the beautiful Chloë Grace Moretz to play the titular social outcast, and actually downplaying the beauty of Alpha Bitch Chris Hargensen. In this adaptation, Chris bullies Carrie because she's secretly jealous of the latter's more natural beauty.
  • In Casino Royale, James Bond thinks that Vesper believes her beauty is a drawback and that she compensates by wearing masculine clothes and acting aggressively. Ironically, he points out that her superiors mistake this attitude for arrogance, which reduces her chances of promotion.
  • Bully the Kid complains of this early in Chinese Odyssey 2002, as he feels it makes him less intimidating as a bully.
  • The first thing that Forrest Gump said about Jenny is how pretty she was. Her beauty defined her life often for the worst; she was molested at a young age, she got kicked out of college after posing for Playboy, she became a stripper and she died from what's implied to be AIDS.
  • Griet of Girl with a Pearl Earring is so beautiful that she has a guy after her that tries to rape her.
  • Played straight in Gohatto. The male protagonist is so beautiful that one of his companions instantly falls for him, while his superiors exploit their power to sexually pursue him. And then people start dying.
  • The Gumball Rally: The 911 Porsche team loses time twice because men chase after them and force them to pull over to flirt with them. The first time (the girls tried to outrace them and the car's engine malfunctioned), the men were nice enough to fix it for them. The second time is a whole lot more unfortunate: they make it within minutes of getting to the finish line but they end up arriving at night, almost dead last (except for Lapchik the Mad Hungarian), because of a pair of highway patrolmen.
  • Beverly Marsh from It (2017) is an uncommonly pretty young girl, but her looks bring her nothing but jealousy from other young girls, unwanted attention from adult men (including her own father) and an undeserved reputation for promiscuity.
  • Parodied in A Knight's Tale, Jocelyn is chided by a bishop for giggling with her handmaiden over the antics of "Sir Ulrich". She says the following exchange in perfect monotone, and the priest is mollified.
    Bishop: Does this not shock you, ladies!
    Jocelyn: Certainly my lord. I just, I only laugh to keep from weeping.
    Bishop: Beauty is such a curse. Pray your years come swiftly, pray your beauty fades, so you may better serve God.
    Jocelyn: I do. I pray for it all the time. Why, God, did you curse me with this face?
  • Isabeau d'Anjou in Ladyhawke is so beautiful that everyone falls in love with her. When she chooses Etienne Navarre, the honorable Captain of the Guard, the jealous and corrupt local bishop makes a Deal with the Devil and curses both of them so they can never be together.
  • Legally Blonde:
    • Part of the film's premise is how no one takes Elle Woods seriously because she looks like a cliche dumb, shallow blonde bombshell. Her long-term boyfriend dumps her because he thinks she looks to silly to be a Senator's wife, and Callaghan only takes her as an intern because she's pretty and would rather extort sexual favors than teach her law. If you don't jump to conclusions about her extreme Girly Girl tastes, it quickly becomes clear that Elle is an excellent student, having perfect grades and able to ace the Harvard entrance exam first try. She doesn't even see how it's that hard, even though Harvard only accepts 5% of applicants.
    • Brooke Windham (nee Taylor) is played by late 90s super hottie Ali Larter and the prime suspect in the murder of her wealthy husband due to it being a May–December Romance. Even her legal team assumes she's guilty, assuming she was a shallow Gold Digger and having an affair with her pool cleaner. Both assumptions are wrong; she genuinely loved her husband and didn't need his money as her fitness empire meant she was actually just as rich in her own right. The actual murderer is her stepdaughter, who was so disgusted by the age difference that she was actually trying to kill Brooke herself. Being a murder target because somebody thinks you're too young and pretty is one serious curse.
  • Legends of the Fall makes many comments on Susannah's beauty. It sadly causes discord between the Ludlow brothers - as she's to be the wife of Samuel, but both Tristan and Alfred lust after her as well. After Samuel's death, Tristan uses her for sex and then abandons her. The family ends up divided partially because of their attraction to Susannah. Notably before killing herself, Susannah cuts some chunks out of her beautiful long hair - which has been interpreted to be an attack on the beauty that landed her in this situation. A deleted scene from the trailer even has the family patriarch blaming Susannah for the discord between the brothers.
  • Justified in a dark and diseased way in Lemora A Childs Tale Of The Supernatural, where Lila Lee's beauty and angelic singing symbolize her budding sexuality, which in turn attract so much unwanted attention that nearly all males in the film are predatory monsters. The only exceptions are her father, who is taken out of the picture early, and her reverend, who is clearly struggling with his feelings towards her.
  • Taken to an intentional extreme in the dark teen comedy Looks That Kill, where a young man is born with a face so beautiful it kills anyone who sees it.
  • Mad Max: Fury Road: While most of the women in the Citadel are hooked up to a machine to be harvested for their breast milk in Immortan Joe's tyrannical patriarchy, the most beautiful women of the Citadel get the misfortune of becoming his Sex Slaves. If they fail three times to give him a healthy baby boy, they are banished to the wasteland.
  • The Magdalene Sisters:
    • Pretty, confident Bernadette gets sent away to the titular laundries because of her beauty. Her teachers see her flirting with boys, and the nuns declare that she must be hidden away just in case she inspires boys to do sinful things because of her beauty.
    • Discussed earlier in the film between Bernadette and two other orphan girls, who ask if it's a sin to be beautiful.
      Bernadette: "Look at the Virgin Mary. She's beautiful. It's a sin to be vain."
  • Malèna: Malèna's looks spark lust and envy in the townspeople; when her husband dies in combat, the gossip only intensifies, to the point that Malèna is dragged into court to defend herself against accusations of adultery. When the women of the town refuse to sell her edible food at the market, Malèna has little choice but to become what she's been unjustly accused of being.
  • 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 (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."
  • In The Mexican, a character asks her kidnapper whether she's attractive enough to be raped. He explains that rape is about hate, not attraction.
  • The Neon Demon essentially revolves around this trope with the lead Jesse. While her captivating beauty helps her rise through the ranks of the modeling world quickly, it also makes her a target for envious models as well as two people who attempt to rape her. It only gets worse from there.
  • In the Mexican film Prayers For The Stolen, the story takes place in a poor village full of drug cartels. The protagonist Ana is a cute little girl, and one day her mother takes her to have her beautiful long hair cut off. The reason she gives is to control headlice, but it's actually because Ana is getting older and her mother fears her getting raped by the cartels if they find her too attractive. One equally cute friend Paula has to as well, and they continue to wear it short after a Time Skip. Their friend Maria doesn't have to, because she has a cleft lip and is presumed to be safe from potential rapists.
  • The Round Up (2010): In addition to constantly being leered at by Nazi collaborators, Anna is told that her developed figure will make it impossible for her to escape by borrowing the work clothes of a plumber in La Résistance.
  • She's Out of My League features this trope mainly from the perspective of a not-very-attractive guy who has landed a very attractive girlfriend — she really digs him, but his own insecurities and the pettiness, jealousy, and spite of the people around him work to poison the relationship.
  • Sound of Freedom: Rocio and Miguel are both undeniably cute children. Unfortunately, this makes them ideal targets for the traffickers.
  • Sucker Punch's heroine Baby Doll has beauty that makes her look like The Ingenue, and that means Blue wants to rape her. Likewise, some of the other girls in the asylum are quite pretty but it's implied they too are sexually abused by Blue and his orderlies.
  • This happens to the main character's daughter and her friend in the film Taken. After landing in Paris unattended, they're targeted and kidnapped by Human Traffickers to be made into Sex Slaves.
  • Lampshaded in The Ten Commandments (1956). An Egyptian overseer lusts after a female Hebrew slave, leading the other Hebrews to comment that "Beauty is but a curse to our women.". He takes her away to be a Sex Slave, despite her pleading, and while he's killed before he can rape her, she's just passed off to another man who blackmails her into telling everyone it's consensual by threatening to kill her lover Joshua.
  • Parodied in Undercover Brother.
    Penelope Snow: 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.
  • Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Jessica Rabbit is a Ms. Fanservice lounge singer and it's such a blatant case of Ugly Guy, Hot Wife, she's the prime suspect in Roger being framed for murder; Eddie assuming she's a Femme Fatale after catching her seemingly cheating on him. Not only was she set up to be in that position for the framing, she sincerely loves her husband, and bemoans how people judge her.
    "You don't know how hard it is being a woman looking the way I do."
  • A main plot point in Withnail and I. Poor Marwood (Paul McGann) looks extremely fey without even trying, and he's constantly Mistaken for Gay and, at one point, almost raped.
  • Jack Nicholson's character assumes this of Michelle Pfeiffer's in Wolf (Mike Nichols), and calls her out on it.
    Will Randall: You know, I think I understand what you're like now. You're very beautiful and you think men are only interested in you because you're beautiful, but you want them to be interested in you because you're you. The problem is, aside from all that beauty, you're not very interesting. You're rude, you're hostile, you're sullen, you're withdrawn. I know you want someone to look past all that at the real person underneath but the only reason anyone would bother to look past all that is because you're beautiful. Ironic, isn't it? In an odd way, you're your own problem.

    Manhwa 
  • Yvienne from Ciel ~The Last Autumn Story~ plays with this trope. One of her teachers compares her to an equally beautiful woman she knew named Saskia, who killed herself, and says that because Yvienne's been able to get so much so easily with it, she doesn't know how to value anything and will eventually think of everything as being trivial. Yvienne herself even says, "Have you ever once heard of a really beautiful woman being happy?" However, at the same time, she knows that it's a very real benefit to her, and has no qualms about using it to her advantage whenever she has to, and almost all of her complaints about it are just made jokingly.
  • Cynical Orange: Hye-Min is the most beautiful girl in school. All the boys love her, while all the girls tease her mercilessly and believe that she is a man eater. As a result, and possibly because of her 'cousin's' meddling, she is quite violent and anti-social. The girls all spend their time in her presence either insulting or threatening her, and the guys (except the one guy she actually likes) tend to either keep at a distance so they can ogle her politely or do things for her that inflame the wrath of the other girls. It’s not until Hye-Min finally stands up to her bullies and call them out on their jealousy do they stop.
  • Wye from I Wish used a magical love potion to make himself attractive to both genders. It worked too well and now, even the Sun wants a piece of him.

    Music 
  • Ani Difranco's lyrics, from "32 Flavours" include the lines "God help you if you are an ugly girl. Too pretty is also your doom, because everyone harbours a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room."
  • There was a SpongeBob SquarePants CD, "The Best Day Ever", in which Squidward sang that his beauty was a curse. Which did become an actual plot in an episode (see below)
  • Done more seriously and convincingly with Emilie Autumn's "Thank God I'm Pretty", which is about the impositions made upon pretty women.
    Thank God I'm pretty
    Every skill I ever have will be in question
    Every ill that I must suffer merely brought on by myself
    Though the cops would come for someone else, I'm blessed
    I'm truly privileged to look this good without clothes on
    Which only means that when I sing you're jerking off
    And when I'm gone you won't remember
    Thank God I'm pretty. Oh, oh...
  • Golem! has a song on their album Citizen Boris, based on an interview with the songwriter's grandmother, who as a child in Ukraine had nothing to do except brush her hair in the mirror and lament how beautiful she was. Hence the chorus: "Oh, God, why did you make me so beautiful?"
  • The Barenaked Ladies song "Jane" from Maybe You Should Drive (1994) hints at this, especially in the chorus.
    Jane, desired by the people at her school and work
    Jane is tired 'cause every man becomes a lovesick jerk
  • Dr. Hook's "When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman" features this trope from the perspective of the boyfriend/partner of said beautiful woman, since he has to deal with the suspicion and jealousy of watching everyone (including his friends) putting the moves on his girlfriend and the paranoid insecurity that she's having an affair with someone more attractive than he is:
    You know that it's crazy
    You wanna trust her
    Then somebody hangs up when you answer the phone...
  • The subject of the So Bad, It's Good single "Hot Problems".
  • Alluded briefly in the July Talk song "Paper Girl"
    It must be hard — To be a Pretty Girl
    It must be hard — To watch your body growing old
  • The traditional Calypso song "Marry a Woman Uglier Than You".
    If you want to be happy living a king's life
    Never make a pretty woman your wife
    Now all you have to do is just what I say
    And then you may be jolly, merry and gay
    Therefore, from a logical point of view
    Better marry a woman uglier than you
  • German band ''Tic Tac Toe has a song called "Spiegel" ("Mirror") about two young women and a guy in group therapy. The second young woman (Michelle, 21 years old) is beautiful and is an example of this trope, in contrast to the first one who wishes she were pretty. To translate:
    Cos even beauty can be a curse when you're 90-60-90
    Everyone thinks you have money and friends, often and by heaps, at that
    I know a lot of people but no-one that I could talk to
    And men want only one thing, I can't find a single one I could live with
    I
    don't like sex and guys stress me out like hell
    I was premature and was raped already at age 13 and
    I feel like screaming, everything's so shitty
    Only my mother keeps me from pouring acid into my own face
    Cos I don't want to be pretty anymore, no
    I know y'all must be thinking "She's got to be crazy"... yeah...
    But I know what I'm talking about, and I hate my job
    Even if that's how I earn my money, mostly!
  • Defied and mocked by DEMONDICE in "Appasayo":
    Back to bitching and crying, we're all friends with that kid:
    "Not all of us chose to be born so attractive!
    I always get hit on, like, what should I do?"
    Well, good golly gee, don't it suck to be you?
  • The Elton John song "Candle in the Wind" frames Marilyn Monroe this way, lamenting that the public's obsession with her beauty and body obscured the person she really was. The lyrics point out that Monroe was being objectified at the literal moment of her death:
    Even when you died, oh, the press still hounded you
    All the papers had to say was that Marilyn was found in the nude...

    Mythology & Religion 
  • In The Bible and The Qur'an, Joseph is Made a Slave and receives the romantic attention of his master's wife. When he turns her down, she hits him with a False Rape Accusation and gets him thrown in jail for several years. Based on this story, both Jewish and Islamic legends describe him as being one of the handsomest men to ever live.
    • He may have inherited it from his mother Rachel: Jewish tradition notes that when the family is meeting Joseph's Evil Uncle Esau, Joseph is listed as stepping out in front of his mother, while his half-siblings stood behind theirs. Apparently Joseph was worried that Esau would see Rachel and want to kidnap her for himself.
    • In the Book of Esther, the king of Persia has a nation-wide beauty contest to pick a Hot Consort. (He got rid of the last one for snubbing him.) Esther seems determined not to win, since she doesn't do anything to beautify herself before meeting him. Guess who winds up the new queen anyway.
  • Celtic Mythology:
    • Deirdre of Irish lore was the daughter of the royal storyteller of the king the kingdom of Ulster and her legendary beauty made her life suck so much (kings and lords, among other men, fought over her) that she is given the epithet "Deirdre of the Sorrows."
    • The knight Diarmuid of the Love Spot, whose beauty mark made all women who gaze upon him fall madly in love. This later kills him as the king with healing hands didn't like how his fiance eyed him (and ran away with him, and had children with him) and didn't treat his wounds until it was too late.
    • Cú Chulainn, whose beauty threatened the men of Ulster enough that they unanimously decided he needed to be married off before he charmed all of their wives and daughters into bed (which he did anyways, because he's Cu Chulainn). He met his end after turning down the wrong warrior-goddess.
  • Classical Mythology: Being pretty in Ancient Greece tended to get you one of three fates: cursed by a jealous goddess (Aphrodite if you were just super pretty, Hera if you attracted Zeus's affection), turned into a plant to avoid getting raped, or killed in the crossfire of gods fighting over you.
    • Helen of Sparta (later of Troy), from Greek Mythology, was "the face that launched a thousand ships" and kicked off the ten-year Trojan War between her lover Paris and her husband Menelaus. A war in which she did not have fun. If you read the myths that lead up to The Trojan War, Helen was living a moderately quiet and happy life before her status as "the most beautiful" got her tapped to be the bribe in a contest between three vain goddesses. She also got kidnapped when she was eight because her beauty was already evident, and nearly caused a war between her suitors. It took Odysseus's wisdom to prevent it. Poor, poor Helen.
    • Psyche was so beautiful that first, everyone was worshiping her as a goddess, but no one was willing to marry her and then, second, Aphrodite — the goddess of beauty — got jealous, and sent her son Eros to make her fall in love with something loathsome. Psyche was so beautiful that Eros, the god of love, fell in love with her himself and refused to carry out Aphrodite's instructions, instead taking her to live in luxury with him. Psyche ruins paradise by ignoring Eros's warning not to look at him at night and accidentally burning him with lamp oil, but, after a decent amount of suffering, Eros still loves her and convinces Zeus to elevate Psyche to immortality.
    • Princess Andromeda had a similar story to Psyche, with a little help from her Stage Mom, Cassiopeia, who bragged incessantly about her daughter's beauty. That got the poor girl Chained to a Rock and about to be eaten by a monster until her soon-to-be husband Perseus stopped by after killing Medusa and pulled a Big Damn Heroes.
    • Narcissus, this trope's most famous victim. He was so beautiful that every woman and man who looked upon him fell in love with him despite his lack of interest. Depending on the Writer Narcissus was either simply chaste and uninterested in romance, or was a jerk about it, to the point of urging at least one suitor to commit suicide. In the most popular version, Nemesis punished him for his cruelty by arranging for him to fall in love with his own reflection, and he wasted away due to his unwillingness to take his eyes off his own beauty. Other versions have Narcissus falling in love with his reflection as the result a complete accident brought on by Eros (Cupid) firing his Cupid's Arrow at a bad time.
    • Hyacinthos was another famous victim from Greek mythology. He was so beautiful that two gods fell in love with him, Apollo and Zephyrus. Zephyrus ended up killing him in a jealous rage.
    • Medusa, who in one version of her myth was turned into a monster by Athena because Poseidon "was overcome by her beauty" and raped her in Athena's temple. (In the original she always was a monster.)
    • Adonis was so stunningly beautiful that he charmed two goddesses (Aphrodite and Persephone) when he was a baby. While the two goddesses initially agreed to joint custody, the moment Adonis awoke to hormones Aphrodite used her powers to make him fall in love with her. The jealous Persephone told Aphrodite's on-and-off lover Ares about her new beau, and he killed Adonis in a jealous rage.
    • Ganymede, a Trojan prince, was so beautiful that Zeus fell in love with him, decided to kidnap him and took him to live with him in Olympus as cupbearer for all eternity, gaining himself the anger of Hera in the process. So much so that Zeus had to turn Ganymede into the constellation Aquarius ("Water-bearer").
    • Some myths from the Orphic tradition say that Persephone was courted vigorously by many gods besides Hades because of her beauty. Demeter had to hide her in a cave in Sicily to help her escape her suitors and she was seduced by Zeus in the form of a serpent. The whole thing ended with the famous abduction.
  • Sita in the epic Ramayana is kidnapped by Demon King, Ravana because of her legendary beauty. Although, part of Ravana’s motivation was revenge for Sita’s husband Rama cutting off his sister Shurpanaka’s nose in self-defense.
  • Draupadi is a legendary beauty in The Mahabharata and suffers at least two attempts at kidnapping/assault from Kichaka and Jayadratha because of it. She is also humiliated and stripped in the open court.
  • Ara the Handsome was an Armenian hero considered so fair that the Assyrian queen Semiramis waged a war on Armenia just to capture him and have him for herself. He ends up dying because of this.
  • In American Indigenous tales, Mt. St. Helens is often the heroine (or at least one of the heroines) among the Puyallup, Cowlitz, Klickitat, and Yakima nations: according to the Puyallup, elderly Loowitlakla, or "Loowit", was rewarded with eternal youth by the Chief of the Gods since she had preserved fire in her lodge for two nations, but the chieftains of each tribe, who were brothers and handsome young men but notoriously hotheaded, began warring because the fair maiden who kept the communal fire could not choose between them, a war that burned and buried whole villages and forests.
  • The Four Beauties of Ancient China. Criteria for being one of the four: being so beautiful that even nature took note (Xi Shi, for example, would make the fish in her pond forget to breathe and start drowning when they saw her reflection in the water, and Yang Guifei was so beautiful that flowers were embarrassed that they weren't as pretty as her and would turn away), having one's beauty be the cause of a significant alteration to Chinese history (usually involving a civil war, but Wang Zhaojun was part of a marriage alliance with the Xiongu tribes that ended up leading to a long era of peace because it worked out so well), and, usually, suffering a tragic fate because of said beauty. Wang Zhaojun usually escapes this with the worst thing happening to her being her having to leave her home to marry a foreigner (in a marriage that by all accounts was perfectly functional), but she has versions of her story where she commits suicide to avoid having to commit incest as a result of the Xiongu's customs. Xi Shi's story is split between the happy ending (she and her lover ditch politics and run away to live happy lives in obscurity) and the tragic one (where she ends up drowned for some reason- possibly revenge or You Have Outlived Your Usefulness), while Diao Chan ends up either committing suicide or getting killed to prevent her beauty from causing more strife, and Yang Guifei got blamed for starting a civil war (She was only tangentially involved, as the Emperor had given one of her relatives a government position and said relative had used it to start the war, but she made a great scapegoat) and the Emperor was forced to strangle her by public outcry. In fact, one potential beauty, Zhao Feiyan, was dropped from the roster in part because her story wasn't tragic enough; while she did suffer a downfall, it was because a minister she promoted seized power, and thus kinda her fault, unlike the other beauties who wind up dead for reasons beyond their control, like Yang Guifei being executed for being related to a guy who started a war despite making none of the pertinent decisions (the Emperor was the one to do the appointing and her relative decided to rebel, and there's no indication she had any active input in either case), and Diao Chan getting killed to eliminate the possibility of men fighting over her.

    Podcasts 
  • Ain't Slayed Nobody's "The Between": Sebastian Melmoth is blessed with supernatural beauty and charisma, and is exceedingly vain to match; priding himself on his ability to become the centre of attention just by entering a room. However, this has led to people killing themselves rather than be deprived of his presence, which he is unfazed by but which brings trouble from Scotland Yard in the form of Inspector Pettigrew... who quickly develops a Stupid Sexy Flanders crush on him.
  • The ostensible villain of the world of Death by Cliché wears a mask to hid his face not because he's ugly, but because he's so beautiful that anyone who sees it full-on promptly has their eyes melt, shortly before they drop over dead.

    Professional Wrestling 
  • In general, female wrestlers who come from beauty backgrounds — modelling, dancing, gymnastics, etc. — often have to face an uphill battle from fans. Usually the prettier the female is (and if she has a modelling background), she'll quite easily be dismissed as just eye candy. For years it was also assumed that model-turned-wrestlers either didn't care about the business or were using it as a stepping stone for other forms of entertainment such as acting (Not helping that some, such as Sable and Stacy Keibler have outright admitted as such). Maria Kanellis once unloaded with a speech defying this attitude.note  Lest you think this is just restricted to WWE's women, Marti Belle who trained on the indies (thus fulfilling the Paying Their Dues that is the main attack of the model-turned-wrestlers) says she faced the same attitudes when she was breaking into the business because of her modelling background.
  • Just sticking to the wrestling shows on camera, Torrie Wilson suffered greatly throughout her career because of her beauty. Nidia was jealous that Torrie was chosen to pose for Playboy over her, Dawn Marie ended up making unwanted advances because she was attracted to her, and Sable was a bit of both. Likewise, Kenzo Suzuki fell for her, leading to his wife Hiroko to get jealous and attack Torrie for it.
  • Trish Stratus suffered this from both men and women:
    • She was repeatedly targeted by several male creeps who didn't intend to take no for an answer. Paul Heyman demanded she date and sleep with him, and threatened a beating from Brock Lesnar if she refused. Eric Bischoff booked himself into a match with her where she'd have to spend the night with him if he won, but which turned out to be Bullying a Dragon when Trish kicked his ass and Linda McMahon overturned the match results after Bischoff won by getting Jazz and Victoria to provide a Villainous Rescue. Viscera also made no secret of his lust for Trish and used his massive bulk to block her attempts to get away from him.
    • Women started doing this to her once she Took a Level in Badass to become Women's Champion. Serious wrestlers like Jazz hated her because they thought she was getting by on her looks. The prudish Molly Holly hated her sex appeal taking too much attention away from the wrestling. And then Victoria just hated her in a crazy jealous way. Years later her beauty also caused her to have a Stalker with a Crush in Mickie James — who did not like being rejected.
  • Melina in her early days faced trouble for being considered "too small". While there grumblings about her paegant queen status too, they really didn't become too audible until in WWE where she was mistaken for a Diva Searchnote  girl — due to her background as a beauty queen and debuting on TV around the same time as several other Diva Search contestants. She had actually trained on the indies as Kyra, but many people overlooked her wrestling experience and thought of her as a Fanservice valet. Due to some of the Fanservice she provided — dropping into the splits on the apron to give the crowd a Panty Shot — there was a storm of controversy when she won the Women's Championship. Like many others, she shook this off through consistently good ring work. The cover of the October 2007 issue of The Wrestler asked, "MELINA: Too Beautiful To Be Taken Seriously?"
  • Krissy Vaine alluded to this when describing her battle with depression while in the WWE developmental system. She and the other Divas became paranoid about preserving their looks — "it's either be a perfect 10 or bye bye Diva wannabe" — even spending half their monthly pay on cosmetic surgery. Krissy also noted that when DSW was integrated into OVW, the only reason she wasn't fired along with so many other girls is that she had a modelling background.
  • In the early days of the WWE Diva Search, the contestants that got sent to developmental territories to train reportedly had a very raw deal at the hands of the trainers. One glamour model revealed that she and another woman were called to the front on their first day by Ivory who then said: "sluts like you all sleep your way to the top". Kristal Marshall also said in an interview that she felt the trainers resented the fact that she wanted to learn to wrestle and "I don't think they wanted me to get good".
  • Parodied by Crossbones, in a very snarky way, at CHIKARA Young Lions Cup III Night II, July 23, 2005. After his opponent Shiima Xion had introduced himself as the first Filipino model wrestler, Crossbones claimed to be the first male model from Parts Unknown. He added that he had to wear a mask because all the ladies would run to him if he wrestled without it.

    Puppet Shows 
  • In a discussion with The Muppet Show's guest of one episode, Miss Piggy claims her beauty is a curse. While her belief that she is beautiful is unquestionably present, how beautiful she actually is — and how much she believes it to be a curse — is debatable.
  • In The Muppets' Wizard of Oz, Kermit needs a brain, Gonzo a heart, Fozzie courage, and Pepe is "so sexy, it hurts."

    Roleplays 
  • In Survival of the Fittest v4, Charlene Norris's first thoughts upon realizing she is on SOTF is that "people like her, the popular girls with bodies to die for, were rape targets".

    Tabletop Games 
  • In Aberrant, novas (superhumans) with Mega-Appearance can have this due to Taint effects. Taint is more likely to produce deformities, but possible effects also include inhuman beauty that frightens rather than attracts, irresistible desire, or an inability to be taken seriously (known as the "bimbo-nova" effect).
  • Ars Magica has "Curse of Venus" as one of the Flaws that a character can take. Characters who have this Flaw are very attractive to people the character does not want to attract, who get crushes on him or her and will not be dissuaded. The character also tends to fall in love with inappropriate people in inappropriate circumstances, and the people the character is interested in tending to think that the character is vain and shallow.
  • In the Sword and Sorcery game Blade of the Iron Throne, the Legendary Beauty asset can be taken as either a Good asset or a Poor asset. While the Good version of the asset gives you bonuses for interactions with those compatible to you and penalties for interactions with those not compatible to you, the Poor version of the asset falls right into this trope, with the character in question receiving more than their fair share of unwanted attention from powerful but obnoxious suitors, leches, slavers and the like.
  • Changeling: The Lost has the Fairest, humans who were taken by the True Fae to be playthings, lovers, and toys. On the one hand, the lot of them are beautiful and have a buy-in with magic powers that give them unearthly beauty and influence. On the other hand, they were subject to the True Fae's personal attention and bizarre definition of 'good', making their Durances just as bad as those of changelings who were taken as outright slaves; imagine living a life that could go from Kubla Khan to Hellraiser with zero warning, or being crucified to a wall like insects are pinned in notebooks.
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • Played hilariously straight by the Nymph, a fey woman who is so beautiful that looking at one can blind or kill (in 3.5 Edition, the killing effect was replaced with a voluntary ability to stun people). She can, however, turn it on and off. (In Second Edition, whether the nymph killed or blinded was based on whether she was naked or clothed, respectively, and couldn't be turned off voluntarily.) The above being based on actual Greek Mythology.
    • Played more seriously with Medusas in 5th Edition. Unlike previous editions, 5E Medusas are supernaturally beautiful because they're people who foolishly made a Deal with the Devil for youth and beauty. Once the deal was up, they were cursed to become Medusas, but they retained their beauty and vanity, so if a Medusa ever catches sight of her reflection she'll helplessly stare at it until she succumbs to her gaze attack.
  • Exalted: There are no specific examples, but in a world with amorous jerkass gods, nightmarish demons, nihilistic ghosts, soul-sucking fairies, insane god-kings, eldritch abominations, and worse entities, being attractive enough to attract the attention of one or more of them definitely counts as a curse. For example, it's explicitly stated that concubines chosen by the Lover Clad in the Raiment of Tears... don't survive the night. And as the Manual of Exalted Power: Infernals puts it:
    Sometimes, Adorjan falls in love. Her hatred is safer.
    • And having a character with High Appearance stat (3+) and a few dots in Infamy is never a good combination.
    • There's also the fact that the Storm Mothers forbid any woman more beautiful than them from sailing on ships in the West and will often attack vessels for this reason. However, the Storm Mothers themselves are so ugly that you'd have to look quite hard to find a woman who doesn't fit the criteria.
  • In GURPS, good looks give you a reaction bonus. However, the highest levels of good looks can give you a reaction penalty if the other character already has good reason to dislike you.
    • If you try to use magic to improve your appearance above the highest possible level you gain the Terror ability because "too much is too much".
    • The point cost difference between the second-highest and very-highest level of good looks is fairly small. The rules justify this by noting that the very highest level exacerbates the negative side effects of good looks (in addition to the jealousy problem noted above, there are issues like being noticed and remembered when you're trying to keep a low profile or attracting unwanted attention from would-be suitors, stalkers or even slavers).
  • In the old James Bond RPG, attractiveness is a characteristic you have to buy for your character. Being average looking is actually far more expensive than being stunningly attractive because good looks make you more recognizable (generally a bad thing for a spy). On the other hand, average looks are also far more expensive than being remarkably ugly. This encourages players to re-create the James Bond atmosphere, where most main characters are either stunningly attractive or hideously deformed while requiring them to pay a price if they want to have looks that help them blend in with the crowd.
  • In KULT: Divinity Lost, a character with the disadvantage "Object of Desire" has something about them that tends to ignite deep and unhealthy desires in other people that they are unable to keep in check. The Doll archetype, whose life has been made hell by the unwanted attentions of others and seeks to break free and take control of their own life, has this disadvantage by default.
  • Ananda, Lord of Murder, the Infinite, and the Fourth Age in Nobilis has this. When he shows up, everything — and we mean everything — loses itself in rapture at his presence. In one town he visited, the humans went insane or died, the grass turned to crystal, and the birds fell out of the sky, singing until their hearts gave out. Even pictures of him cause physical/psychological damage.
  • Pathfinder:
    • Whereas aasimars have traditionally been portrayed as universally loved since they first appeared in Planescape, Pathfinder's Blood of Angels sourcebook describes them as having this trait to the extent they are Blessed with Suck. In essence, aasimars are seen as being so beautiful, special and talented that they are invariably accosted by superstitious people begging for lucky charms (such as locks of their hair), or for healing touches or similar, and who often get upset with the aasimar when they refuse, even if told that such trinkets and actions won't work. Many aasimars who fall to evil do so due to this making them feel all others are selfish, shallow, petty creatures. On top of everything else, the aasimars' beauty and their disconnect from their communities make them common victims of the slave trade.
    • From Pathfinder also comes the changelings, the daughters of humanoids and hags who are described as always being beautiful, but in such a fashion that the effect is eerily... off and so people find them unnerving more than they do attractive.
    • Nymphs are some of the beautiful creatures in existence in the material world, to an extent that their magic likely plays a role in making them the visions of beauty that they are. Anyone looking at a nymph is gripped by a supernatural obsession with the fey that will drive them to seek closeness with her by any means possible — and nymphs cannot control this. The result is that most nymphs need to live in hiding to know anything like peace, and while they're more than capable of fending off nosy mortals and lesser fey, things become rather more dangerous when someone like a powerful wizard or a demon becomes obsessed with a nymph.
  • Promethean: The Created has this as part of the Disquiet effect for Galateids, who are universally beautiful and, as the name implies, were originally created for purposes of companionship. However, their form of Disquiet initially manifests as a crush that slowly develops into an obsession (or, in the case of folks dealing with sexual orientation issues, severe discomfort) and from there turns into mindless adulation (for those directly affected) and envy and vitriol towards "that slut" (for the loved ones of those directly affected).
  • Ravenloft has the fan-created "Banshee" subrace of Calibans, a strain that always manifest as beautiful women despite being no less mutated than other caliban strains, but whose beauty, whilst technically unmarred, never grants them true happiness, as humans still find them inherently repellant and subconsciously loathe them. At best, their beauty merely exposes them to all the horrors visited upon beautiful women in a land like the Land of Mists. Mechanically, they gain a racial bonus to their Charisma score, but suffer the same Outsider Rating of 5 (which is a penalty to all Charisma skills (except Intimidation) and reaction rolls) as do any other calibans.
  • In Scion, Epic Appearance comes in two forms — beautiful and ugly. The problems of high-level "ugly" Epic Appearance are a given, but it can be nearly impossible to deal with mortals on an even level with high-level "beautiful" Epic Appearance. As a result, there's a Knack that turns it off for a while — leaving you either generically pretty or generically ugly. The Knack's name is "My Eyes Are Up Here".
  • A similar concept is discussed in the Unknown Armies sourcebook Lawyers, Guns and Money. One character is noted as being attractive though not amazingly beautiful, the ideal point for a con-woman. After all, being attractive sends a little false hope to the mark, a very subtle encouragement. Being amazingly beautiful, however, would instead raise questions: Why me? What do I have for this girl? As a con-woman, you never want your mark asking questions.
  • Vampire: The Requiem
    • The Nosferatu usually don't have to deal with this; however, one of their bloodlines, the Galloi, has the power to make its members beautiful through ritual immersion in specially prepared blood. Small problem — this makes them inhumanly, androgynously beautiful, so they still suffer from the same problem (having trouble relating to others because they seem... off) as they did before. And if they stop bathing... well, it gets worse. Much worse.
    • Also, in Vampire: The Masquerade, if a low-generation vampire has an Appearance stat exceeding the human maximum of 5, you are supposed to be so beautiful that you violate the Masquerade if seen by humans. Gamemasters don't always follow the book on this detail, though.
  • Warhammer Fantasy Battles: Chaos Champion Prince Sigvald the Maginificent is so beautiful (and so vain) that he has his bodyguards carry mirrored shields so that he could admire himself even in the heat of battle. If he fails a Leadership test, he can miss his turn because of that.

    Theatre 
  • Princess Eboli, Lady-In-Waiting to the Queen of Spain in Giuseppe Verdi's Opera Don Carlo, dedicates a setpiece aria, "O don fatale" ('O fatal gift'), to cursing her beauty ("Ti maledico, o mia beltá") when she realises that her affair with King Philip II has cost her both her job and her friendship with the Queen. In the right hands, the effect is awesome rather than angsty.
  • 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.
  • Sophia in Fools, who has to fight off the advances of the villain. Also, her ancestor's beauty caused the curse of utter stupidity that drives the plot.
  • A hilarious monologue in the mostly serious play How I Learned to Drive has the main character comparing her emerging boobs to parasitic aliens who have latched on to her.
  • In The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya, Fevroniya is gorgeous, which leads to Tatar invaders Bedyay and Burunday (whose army had just killed her beloved bridegroom) immediately wanting her for themselves.
  • Male example: in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, Grosvenor constantly complains about how he charms every young lady he meets. In fact, he's so beautiful that the woman he loves refuses to marry him because keeping him all to herself would be too selfish.
  • Referenced in the (aptly named) play Reasons to Be Pretty, where one of the characters comments on the problems her beauty has caused her, and hopes that her unborn daughter won't be too attractive so that she can be spared that.
    Carly: I really hope she's no more than pretty. That she's not some beauty queen that people can’t stop staring at because I'd hate that for her, to be this object, some thing that people can't help gawking at. Because if she is, if she ends up with a face that is some sort of magnet for men, the way I've been, I'd almost rather it was a situation where she was oblivious to it — not blind or anything, I wouldn’t wish that on her, but close. Some sort of oblivion that gets pasted over her eyes so she can go about life and not be aware that people are cruel in many ways, not just with their words but with the ways they look at you and desire you and, and, and almost hate you because of it.
  • In RENT, Maureen uses her beauty as an excuse for 'flirting with a woman in rubber.'
  • In Six: The Musical, this is ultimately the fate of Katherine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth wife. At first she's rather arrogant about her beauty and claims that she's the best-looking of the monarch's many lovers ("I think we can all agree / I'm a ten amongst these threes"). But then she starts going into her past—"And ever since I was a child / I'd make the boys go wild"—and explains that throughout her life, men have treated her like a sex object (in Real Life, for example, Katherine was only thirteen when her music teacher, Henry Mannix, began having sex with her—and he was thirty-two). Though initially Katherine claims that she likes all of the attention and power she derives from these relationships, she ultimately realizes that she's been a victim of statutory rape and abuse for her entire life, and the one time she thought she'd finally made a male friend, it turns out he just wanted to have sex with her too; to rub salt into the wound, it was her friendship with that man which ended up getting her killed, as she was accused of adultery. The fandom has universally dubbed her The Woobie for her horrible past.
  • Sweeney Todd:
    • In the original Christopher Bond version, Sweeney believes this about his wife, and with good reason — it's the reason he was falsely transported for life.
      Anthony: What was your crime?
      Sweeney: My wife was beautiful.
    • The musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (which is based on Bond's version) also follows this. Sweeney's wife was so beautiful that she attracted Judge Turpin, which kick starts the plot. Then her daughter Johanna is equally as beautiful and also attracts the Judge (despite him being her adoptive father). Sweeney himself is also cursed since he attracts Mrs. Lovett, which leads to several of the tragic circumstances throughout the story. So really the plot is because a whole family is So Beautiful, It's A Curse.

    Video Games 
  • In Blasphemous, Aurea. She was so beautiful people began to worship her. As a pious woman of the theocracy of Cvstodia, she was horrified by this, so she burned her face with hot oil and joined a convent. The Miracle saw to it that, as a reward for her devotion, the scar never healed — Cvstodia and the Miracle have a strange definition of "reward". This all led to her being worshipped as a saint.
  • In A Dance with Rogues, your character is either Extreme Omnisexual or this, because she's unusually beautiful In a World… where all men have their brains locked in permanent rape mode.
  • The Shieldbreaker in Darkest Dungeon was a talented and beautiful dancer who could mesmerize men with her movements. She was enslaved by an infatuated Vizier who had his men carry her off presumably for his harem, though she succeeded in escaping. It's shown in her Fearful or Paranoid state that she is traumatized by the whole ordeal (especially since she had to amputate her hand to save herself) and fears the Vizier's men are still hunting her. It also might explain why she wears a veil across the lower half of face at all times to hide her beauty.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, you hear that women are nothing more than enslaved broodmares in Caesar's Legion. Siri says that if you're too young or old, the legionnaires leave you alone... most of the time. One of the random bits you can hear from legionnaires if they're not hostile towards you is a rather creepy "I hear some of the new slave girls are quite beautiful".
  • Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: While the original game and Remake implied that Tifa had problem with people seeing her for her beauty, Rebirth shows that getting people to see beyond her body is an ongoing problem in Costa del Sol. Johnny's prospective girlfriend Jenny feels inferior to her and demeans her when the to meet, and when Tifa tells Aerith it's something she has put up before Jenny assumes she is humble bragging. And while Hojo is looking for candidates to create a new hero in his latest afront to nature he considers her a great specimen as he drops her in a tank with mutants with the implications he wants her physical characteristics to create ideal offspring with the creatures.
  • In Final Fantasy XIV, Yotsuyu was sold into Sex Slavery by her parents after her abusive husband died. Although she was not okay with this, the brothel owner continually offered her to customers because of her beauty and empty, soulless eyes that kept drawing business.
  • Fire Emblem:
    • In Fire Emblem Gaiden, Celica's mother, Lady Liprica, was the victim of this trope. King Lima IV forced her into his Royal Harem due to how beautiful she was (the remake shows that she looks VERY much like a lighter-haired Celica, who is very cute herself).
    • The Heron tribe in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn seems to suffer this, and its few survivors have to cope with the constant threat of poachers. A substantial mission in the first game involves saving Reyson and his sister from a beauty-obsessed noble collector.
  • Lucio from Granblue Fantasy is often mobbed by people who want to recruit him into some kind of business for his good looks and those people sometimes end up fighting to get to him. Lucio himself is displeased by all the fighting he causes and crowds getting in the way but doesn't seem aware of why they're fighting.
  • The whole premise of Haunting Ground is that you play as poor Fiona Belli a very beautiful and curvaceous 18 year old girl who is trapped in a creepy castle where every single male (apart from Hewie who’s a dog) wants to either "play with her" such as Debiltas or worse rape and impregnate Fiona which is Riccardo's goal. The only other female is Daniella who spites Fiona jealousy for being a "complete woman" while she’s not, though even Daniella gropes Fiona while she’s sleeping probably done out of envy... probably.
  • Black Magic from Heroes Rise is so utterly gorgeous that after his/her parents died and left him/her on the streets, s/he was forced into prostitution by the local mafia to survive. As a teenager. By the time s/he was able to leave, the damage to his/her psyche had already been done and s/he was left with the notion that people would only value him/her for his/her looks.
  • Miranda Lawson from Mass Effect 2 is genetically engineered to be perfect (in her "father"'s opinion). So she's a beautiful and competent woman... and can never believe that any of what she had was earned on her own merit instead of being engineered into her.
    • What really causes her to angst, is that she looks at Commander Shepard, and sees their accomplishments and feels that Shepard earned them through hard work rather than genetic modifications. She references their past and tells Shepard that she looks at them and feels inferior.
    • There's also the fact that although she is very pretty, she's also essentially a female clone of Mr. Lawson, because he was such a narcissist that he only used his own DNA for the project. And when we actually meet him in 3, we find that he's even worse than Miranda made him out to be. He turned a refugee camp onto a Husk factory. So every time she (or anyone who knew her father) looks at her face, they're going to be reminded of that.
  • Male example: Gannayev in Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer asserts 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 habit of bedding nearly anything in a skirt, much to the dismay of every Boyfriend-Blocking 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.)
  • In Pathfinder: Kingmaker Valerie is considered exceptionally beautiful and is thoroughly sick of receiving gifts and poems from her admirers. She doesn't mention any of her suitors being more than inappropriately persistent, but she did get the first poem about her beauty when she was nine. Not helping is she was in service to Shelyn, the goddess of love and beauty, which considered them a sort of religious devotion and required her to accept them all with good grace. She left because she snapped, tore up the horrible love poem someone insisted on reading to her, and faced censure for destroying a piece of art.
  • Persona 5:
    • Ann is a cute quarter-Caucasian girl who works part-time as a model... and she goes to a school where the gym teacher, Sugaru Kamoshida, is an outright sexual predator who the principal allows to run riot to preserve the school's PR. Kamoshida regularly harasses her, and blackmails her into accepting it by threatening to ruin her friend Shiho's prospects as a volleyball player. And when she stops responding to his advances, he punishes her by raping Shiho.
    • Hifumi, the Star confidant, is a very pretty girl who wants to become a professional shogi player. Her mom, on the other hand, wants her to make use of her beauty as a gravure idol, which essentially means she's forcing her daughter to do softcore porn (gravure idols never pose nude, but they do model much skimpier outfits than regular glamour models), despite Hifumi absolutely hating it.
  • Fall-From-Grace doesn't actually complain in Planescape: Torment about all the attention her looks get her — that would be unladylike. But it's got to suck being a blazingly-hot demon that normally gets its jollies through seduction and having willingly taken a vow of chastity...
  • Maguro Sasaki in Puyo Puyo has this problem since, according to Ringo, he possesses an incredibly handsome face that's only obscured by his bangs. If anyone were to get even a small peek at his full face, they'll be so overwhelmed by his dazzlingly good looks that they'll either pass out or fall madly in love with him. And yes, it even works on males (just ask Klug) and FISH (as Suketoudara can attest to). He's not very comfortable with it at all (not helping matters is Ringo and Amitie insisting on stress-testing that trait of his).
  • Viola DeWynter in Saints Row: The Third was none too happy being the very well-endowed comic character, Bloody Canoness, in the mission to capture Nyte Blayde. Viola's opinion is pretty valid, given that the Bloody Canoness' default outfit has a Navel-Deep Neckline that is a lot skimpier than Viola's normal modesty-preserving clothes.
    Viola: I feel ridiculous.
    Player Character: Really? I think it looks sexy. Slutty... but sexy.
    Viola: I didn't get a masters in economics to look like a slut.
    Player Character: Isn't it nice to know you can surprise yourself?
    [...]
    Player Character: Not gonna lie, I thought this whole thing was a stunt for Pierce to see your tits, but it's actually working.
    Viola: I don't care if it works or not, I'm not making going out like this a habit.
    Player Character: See? You're already making nun jokes. I knew you could get in this.
    Viola: I hate you.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic: The Sith Warrior's Twi'lek companion Vette and her sister Tivva were enslaved in a mine as children along with their mother. Tivva grew to be beautiful even by Twi'leks' Green-Skinned Space Babe standards, and despite their mother's efforts to conceal this, was eventually sold away as a Sex Slave.
  • In Tales of Destiny Leon's beauty was an annoyance to him, but not all that big of a problem, but when it comes to gag omakes and bonus skits, he gets roped into many of Rutee's get rich quick scams because of his beauty and popularity with women and some men when he just wants to be left alone.

    Visual Novels 
  • Elcia from Area X is sometimes affected by this, as altohugh her beauty helps sometimes, but it's also gotten her unwanted attention, like people propositioning her as a prostitute (when she was 12) and Pedoe wanting to marry her.
  • In Cupid (2016), both Rosa and Guilleme have led hard lives trying to evading this curse. They have tried to scar themselves to appear less desirable, mundane or invisible. Unfortunately, it isn't beauty that's the problem, but desire itself. One character advised to appear aristocratic or powerful to give people another reason to find them attractive. Otherwise, the curse will confuse most people, pushing them to violence or jealousy.
  • Danganronpa:
  • Fate/stay night:
    • Gilgamesh's profile in the Visual Novel gives him Rank A+ charisma. "At this level, it is not so much strength of character, but more like a curse." Given who Gilgamesh is, this is probably a true statement. If Ishtar hadn't come on to him, for example, Enkidu probably would have survived longer. And he did look rather fabulous.
    • And Rider AKA Medusa has her a rather crappy backstory because she was so beautiful as well. She eventually ended up a horrible monster that killed everyone (Hint:Medusa!) that came near her before eventually being killed herself. And in the story, she's possibly the most beautiful character, has a beautiful voice and is bewitching in general, which Shirou finds to be rather unnerving. Especially the eyes.
    • From Fate/Zero is Diarmuid ua Duibhne, who, like his mythological counterpart, has women fall in love with him at first glance. It ends up killing him here, too.
      • Lancer's Einzbern Consultation Room spoofs it. According to Irisviel, being the Mr. Fanservice voiced by Hikaru Midorikawa racked up enough "hot guy karma" points to guarantee a Bad End.
    • Saber's natural Charisma rank may "only" be B, but that's still enough to make armies want to follow her and people constantly have gushing internal monologues about her beauty upon meeting her, even if she's about to stab them in the face at the time. However, as someone who has given up her humanity much less her femininity to be a proper king, treating her as a beautiful girl only tends to make her really confused and uncomfortable until she accepts her love of Shirou, and she is easily flustered by it. It also doesn't help that it may be a factor in why the likes of Caster, Gilgamesh, and Fate/Zero Caster all take an unhealthy interest in possessing her.
    • In both Fate/hollow ataraxia and Fate/Grand Order, Euryale and Stheno were both so beautiful that men regularly tried to abduct them, forcing their sister Medusa to defend them. Unlike Medusa, they were only ageless and had no special powers or fighting skills, meaning they were helpless without her.
  • Lair Land Story: In a Church event that requires Chilia to bear witness to a confession from the Duke due to Fay still being an apprentice priestess and Fay's mentor being unavailable, the Duke goes on a long ramble about allegedly feeling guilty about how attractive he is. The man has such a big case of Small Name, Big Ego about he appearance that he assumes that anyone less attractive who ever lays eyes on him must get Driven to Suicide over the gap in their looks, hence he claims to feel bad about the loss of life he's imagning himself to cause simply by appearing in public.
  • All the love interests in Nameless, being dolls turned into humans, are exceedingly handsome/cute/pretty. This attracts a lot of fangirls that they aren't interested in since they're all in love with their previous owner, the protagonist.
  • In School Days, the bullying that Kotonoha Katsura has gone through ever since middle school is related to her huge chest and her physical beauty. Many of the girls around her (like Nanami, Otome, and Otome's Girl Posse) hate Kotonoha out of envy and bully her, and this only increases after she gets tangled in the Love Triangle with Makoto and Sekai (who does NOT bully her for it, but happens to be friends with some of said bullies). It can be a plot point in the game itself: the girls can potentially decide to increase the bullying further to give Sekai the biggest shot in the Love Triangle, and if Makoto doesn't put an end to Kotonoha's torment... Sekai will pay with her life.

    Web Animation 
  • This is lampshaded in the Spanish web animation Cálico Electrónico. In the fifth episode, a female burglar, with a Femme Fatale look, tries to steal some jewels and is discovered by Cálico, but instead of fighting her, he flirts with her the whole episode, making her feel frustrated. In other episodes, a section with the characters answering fans questions was introduced. The same burglar was asked to dress like Tifa from Final Fantasy VII. She agreed to appear in the outfit, but then, to her dismay... you can hear the fan jerking off.
    Female Burglar: Well... for someone who asked me to be dressed than to be undressed...
  • Angel Dust is revealed to be this in episode 4 of Hazbin Hotel. We already got hints when he said everyone wants a piece of him and how he had creepy fan letters. Valentino regularly forces him into porn and forces him into sex with him on the regular. He is considered Valentino's favorite and is surely not bad looking at all.
    • Charlie is very pretty and is flirted with by Valentino very creepily the first time he meets her.

    Webcomics 
  • Hellsing's Seras Victoria occasionally complains about the effects of her rather stunning figure in And Shine Heaven Now. Her Love Interest counters that he can enjoy her company and respect her as a person and appreciate her chest.
  • Male Example: This trope is a genuine, life-ruining problem for Holden of Arcana. In addition to heightened physical beauty, Holden is also under a magical curse of unknown origin that makes people fall in love with him. But not just some people; practically everyone he encounters. Sounds like a cakewalk, but after having his psycho vampire stalker slaughter his current boyfriend and threaten to kill his brother in order for them to be together, the situation becomes a lot more heartbreaking. There was a reason for that, actually. Turned out Holden was actually the Harpy prince that was being sought after, he just didn't consciously know it until towards the end of the story. Apparently, Harpies in this world have that particular glamour about them.
  • Bastard: Kyun is repeatedly stated to be rather cute but this has only made her the target of two serial killers.
  • Minor aversion in Girls with Slingshots. There was a brief story arc where Jamie started dressing more modestly because she didn't care for all the negative attention her boobs got her; but she was rather taken aback when she discovered that not only had the bulk of what she thought of as otherwise normal interactions had in fact been swung in her favor by the cleavage, even one of her closest friends turns out to have been giving her a "boob discount". She eventually decides that she preferred the way people talked to her when her cleavage was greasing the rails and made peace with the fact that she was going to attract some leers as well.
  • Maxima of Grrl Power is a Statuesque Stunner with golden (it's made of a gold-colored metal) skin. She dislikes it because she feels people look at her as an exotic blowup doll, fueling her strong feminist mindset. Also, she's in the military and her large bust interferes with drawing her sidearm occasionally.
  • Homestuck:
    • Pretty Boy Rufioh is frequently frustrated that everyone he knows is in love with him or stalking him.
    • Jake is also subject to this. As he puts it:
      Jake: Why does everyone want to kiss me all the time! What did I ever do to deserve this sort of attention! I dont know what you all see in me, I just don't understand it! Can't you see I just want you to LEAVE ME ALONE? CHEESE AND STUPID CRACKERS I AM A MAN NOT A PIECE OF MEAT!!!
  • Played with on this Loserz strip with Alice complaining about men looking at her breasts all the time, but refusing to wear more modest clothes because she's so hot it wouldn't make a difference. According to her anyways.
  • Played horrifically straight in Marilith: In a flashback of Psycho for Hire hitwoman/mob enforcer Valentino's Start of Darkness, it's shown that she was the daughter of "purged" dissidents in the last days of the USSR. Along with other attractive young girls in the same situation, she is shipped to a secret gulag/training camp operated by party hardliners who want to mold them through Training from Hell into assassin-spies to compromise, blackmail or eliminate key individuals to stop the country's slide towards implosion. The grizzled, bearlike old general in charge of the camp mentions while discussing the plot with a co-conspirator that only God can give such a curse as beauty (the reason those girls were chosen in the first place). Then, as a part of training, the general brutally and repeatedly rapes the girls, starting with Valentino. No wonder she's a sadistic maniac...
  • DiDi of Ménage à 3 is so attractive that it ruins her sex life. No man she has ever slept with has been able to last more than a few seconds before blowing his load (one didn't even last long enough to start having sex with her in the first place, just seeing her naked was enough). As a result, she has never had an orgasm (though she eventually manages to finally have one). She also hasn't developed proper social skills, since her looks cause everyone to behave strangely around her.
  • Oglaf has a strip where a wish-fulfilling doll makes a girl so beautiful she can't get anyone to sex her up even if she begs and pleads because everyone considers her to be out of their league. Considering the doll was later revealed to be a Jerkass Genie, it is likely that the beauty is literally a curse.
  • Robber x Lover: Dojin was fired from one of his jobs (which also provided him with a place of residence) after his boss' girlfriend broke up with him. He took it out on Dojin because of the attention he was getting from female customers, kicking him out into the street. Afterward, Dojin was reluctant to ask for help at his other job, fearing that he would get women seeking to take advantage of him.
  • Shortpacked! plays the trope even straighter than Twilight — a mummy's wrappings are used to counter the curse (rather than to cover the rotting skin) in an obvious fashion. No one must know!
  • Subverted in Something*Positive: Kharisma considers herself to be a victim of this. While she is attractive, this is really just a sign of her vanity and self-absorption. She gets better...in a "horrid burn damages on face" sort of way. (Oh, and eventually actual Character Development.)
  • Strong Female Protagonist had a minor biodynamic character whose mutation was that she was a Green-Skinned Space Babe who complained about how nobody ever took her seriously because of her looks — everyone just viewed her as fetish material. Another biodynamic woman, who resembled a humanoid reptile, called it First-World Problems and said that all her problems could be solved with a can of body paint. As the conversation was taking place in a support group for biodynamic women, many of whom had far more extreme mutations than the second woman (including one who was a living liquid), this did not really do the second woman any favors.
  • 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.

    Web Original 
  • Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works] Abridged: Played for Laughs; everyone is highly attracted to Saber, many of them to a creepy and unflattering extent (especially Medea, whose primary goal is getting a threesome between them and Soichiro, who himself isn't opposed, Saber's consent be damned). Saber and Shirou have taken to keeping a list.
  • Springhole: A section on wangst gives advice on how to pull this off. It compares an examples of a teen model complaining about wearing designer clothes versus one who enters pageants to please her mother and is stressed by having total strangers criticize her for things she can't control.
  • Not Always Working: This new hire has movie-star good looks, which means that he has to get HR to send all employees an e-mail explicitly stating not to flirt with him as he's in a happy and stable relationship, and he can't socialize at work because if he did, people would get envious of the people he talked to and start fighting. He comments to the OP that he had to leave his previous job because it got too toxic with people fighting over him.

    Web Videos 
  • Rebecca Stone from Demo Reel. There's no Male Gaze on her, but she was sexually abused at a young age, bitterly complains about everyone outside of the main cast treating her like some Brainless Beauty, and is played by a part-time model who improvised at least half of the "sexism in Hollywood" speech.
  • This is the kickoff for the season one plot of Pretty Dudes.
  • The CollegeHumor video "POV: Really Hot Girl" zigzags the trope. As the title implies, it's from the perspective of an extremely attractive woman named Lexi who is going to see a male friend, Vinny, at a bar. On the one hand, Lexi has traces of being an Alpha Bitch, as she's used to not waiting in line or ever having to buy drinks ("Why do I bother bringing a wallet?") when she goes out, so she's not entirely sympathetic. However, as the video progresses, it becomes clear that Lexi genuinely doesn't realize that she's being treated this way because of her looks, especially because she has terrible self-esteem and calls herself ugly constantly. She also has to put up with men acting like obnoxious creeps even when she isn't trying to lead them on; furthermore, she doesn't have any friends because every straight guy she meets wants to sleep with her and every woman is either envious of her appearance or believes she's deliberately trying to steal their boyfriends. And just as Lexi is thinking about how Vinny is the only person who genuinely likes her, he comes bursting in to deliver an Anguished Declaration of Love, and given her frustrated and sad reaction ("Not again..."), it's clear that she's dealt with similar situations many times in the past.

    Western Animation 
  • Animaniacs: Minerva Mink's theme song in her two own shorts, "Moon Over Minerva" and "Meet Minvera" is "It's Not Pretty Being Me", referencing to the annoyance her beauty driving all the males causing her.
  • Adventure Time: Played for laughs with Slime Princess's younger sister, Blargatha. The slime people view Blargatha as super hot, but she's not at all conventionally attractive.
  • Betty Boop's figure and fashion choices (usually a Little Black Dress) often get her chased by bad guys who are attracted to her.
  • In Clone High, Cleopatra gets melodramatic about how life is so hard for someone so good looking.
  • Zig-Zagging Trope on Daria. The title character's sister, Quinn, will sometimes complain about how hard it is to be attractive and popular, despite the obvious glee she gets from having boys fight over her. However, over the course of the series, it becomes clear that she's internalized her role as a Brainless Beauty to the extent that she really doesn't think that she can be anything else, though she eventually overcomes this.
    Quinn: I mean, sometimes I'm walking down the hall with Sandi, Stacy, and Tiffany, and suddenly I'm outside of myself, watching, and it's, like, "Who are these girls? Can't they talk about anything besides guys, and clothes, and cars?" But then, what would we talk about? You have to be good at something. [...] I figure, being attractive and popular, that's what I'm good at. Maybe it's not that important, but, you know, it's what I can do. [nervous laugh]
  • Family Guy:
    • That episode where Peter has liposuction. He gets into a car crash because he couldn't stop looking at himself in the mirror.
    • In another episode Peter gets contact lenses, which makes his shrewish boss notice his beautiful eyelashes for the first time and she starts to sexually harass him.
  • Duchess in Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends is constantly referring to herself as an "absolutely gorgeous piece of art" and the like...despite the fact that she is the exact opposite of gorgeous. She does resemble a Cubist-era Picasso, for what that's worth. A Cubist-era Picasso of the elephant man.
    • Frankie suffers this curse in one episode where 5 guys competed for her affections.
  • In the Futurama movie Bender's Big Score, buxom and blonde Dr. Cahill gets annoyed when Fry calls her "Dr. Good n' Sexy''.
  • Kim Possible:
    • In the Season One episode "Mind Games", Kim and Ron have the following exchange:
      Kim: You make my life sound like cake.
      Ron: Let's see. You're smart, athletic, pretty and popular. Sounds pretty cakey to me.
      Kim: OK, flip mode - Playing video games, watching wrestling, and downing "snackage". It must be brutal being you.
    • The Season Two episode "Grudge Match" featured a scientist who couldn't get her work taken seriously because she looked like a supermodel. She got around it by making a schlubby-looking robot "boyfriend" who played the scientist role while she pretended to be his girlfriend.
  • In the Looney Tunes short Broom-Stick Bunny, Witch Hazel explains to the audience that she's "deathly afraid" of getting prettier as she gets older, and it's fully justified at the end of the short: After she gets turned into a gorgeous redhead after mistakenly drinking a beauty elixir disguised as tea, she meekly asks the genie in her magic mirror if she's still ugly. When the Genie sees Hazel's new look, he bursts out of the mirror and starts chasing her on a Magic Carpet, to her horror.
  • Tee Hee Tummy Tums from The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack is the most beautiful man in the world. He just wanted people to appreciate him for his combs, not his beauty so he would put a sack over his head to hide his face. Since the rest of his family has the sacks too, it's possible his wife is the same way and his children.
  • Fluttershy, in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Green Isn't Your Color", becomes a model to help draw attention to Rarity's new dress line. To her displeasure, doing so leads her to develop a huge following where she can't even walk down the street without getting mobbed by scores of admirers and paparazzi. Being a Shrinking Violet, this is indeed a curse.
  • In The Simpsons; Princess Penelope explained her love for Krusty because she felt he was the only friend she had when she was 12 since she wasn't popular for being more pretty and friendly than the other girls who in return shunned her.
  • In episode 43 of Sonic Boom Knuckles says, "I can't help being attractive! It's a blessing and a curse!" after he's accused of playing a part in burning down Tails' workshop because of a flirtatious female character. It turns out that the female's attention was all in Knuckles' imagination, and Sonic and Amy both look at him in disbelief when he calls himself attractive.
  • South Park:
    • Kyle, having seen a list made by the girls in class which ranks him as the ugliest boy, is getting depressed. However, Abe Lincoln explains to him that good looking people tend to have things handed to them in life and once they get to the age where their looks start to fade, they're left with nothing. Less attractive people, on the other hand, work hard to make something of themselves and in the long run, they have far more character. Kyle takes this lesson to heart when he learns the list was a fake but chooses not to find out if he was voted one of the attractive kids.
    • Bebe was the first girl to develop breasts (she's nine; they were comically tiny), which made all the boys inexplicably drawn to her until they devolve into acting like cavemen. They finally snap out of it when she comes to school wearing a cardboard box to completely hide her figure.
  • In SpongeBob SquarePants, Squidward getting a door slammed in his face makes him So Handsome, It's a Curse. He likes it at first, but soon tires of all of Bikini Bottom following him around everywhere. Mr. Krabs tries to take advantage of this by charging people to see Squidward, who gets SpongeBob to slam the door in his face again, repeatedly, to try to get things back to normal. Somehow, it turns him even more ridiculously handsome and muscled. And, somehow, he gets back to normal at the end.
  • The Spicy City episode "Love is A Download" features an extremely attractive woman who has spent her entire life being sexualized and is trapped in an abusive relationship, escaping her life with a modest-looking digital avatar so she can feel more normal. And on a lighter note, the narrator bookends the story with how frustrating it is that her looks make men too intimidated to approach her.

 
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Handsome Squidward

After Squidward enjoyed one day of being handsome, he finds out that it's not as good as it's cracked up to be when people won't respect his privacy anymore.

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