Basic Trope: A character longs to become beautiful.
- Straight: Melissa wants to become more good-looking, which becomes her primary motivation for her actions during the story.
- Exaggerated:
- Melissa wants to become the World's Most Beautiful Woman and will not stop until every single man and woman acknowledge that she is more beautiful than other women.
- Melissa wants to be beautiful so badly, that she's willing to sacrifice her best friend, her soul, all her belongings and a lock of her hair.
- Downplayed: Melissa wants to become prettier than she is, but won't go to ridiculous lengths for it.
- Justified:
- Melissa just isn't satisfied with the way she looks, and it harms her self-esteem.
- Melissa may be dreaming of a career in film or modeling where her appearance can affect her job.
- Melissa may be receiving poor treatment from other people on account of her ugly looks.
- Inverted: Melissa wants to become less attractive, knowing that she hates the attention she receives from the men.
- Subverted: ...but then it turns out that Melissa doesn't actually care about her looks, she was just pretending to so that her classmates/co-workers will underestimate her.
- Double Subverted: ...however, after spending so much time pretending to worry about her appearance, she starts to genuinely grow self-conscious and becomes worried that she's not pretty enough.
- Parodied: Despite being played by Penelope Cruz, Melissa considers herself the ugliest human being in existence, and believes her solemn duty is to become more beautiful for the sake of all of life as we know it.
- Zig Zagged: Melissa periodically loses all desire to seek beauty every time she hears an inspirational speech, or watches a film that shows that True Beauty Is on the Inside, but will then invariably go back to wanting to be pretty as the day-to-day realities of life wear her down.
- Averted: Melissa doesn't long to become beautiful.
- Enforced: "Everyone wants to be beautiful, so why don't we reflect on that?"
- Lampshaded: "Why's Melissa so obsessed with her appearance? She looks fine to me!"
- Invoked: Bob tries to make Melissa more conscious of her appearance by negging her, or comparing her against celebrities.
- Exploited:
- Bob realizes that Melissa longs to be beautiful, and designs a bunch of fake beauty products to scam her out of money.
- After deciding to Break Her By Talking, Bob realizes that he just needs to insult Melissa's appearance.
- Defied: "I don't have to change my looks. I'll just accept who I am."
- Discussed: "You know Melissa, the more desperately you try to make yourself look better, the more horribly you're going to fail."
- Conversed: "Sooner or later, we'll get a lesson about how True Beauty Is on the Inside in this episode."
- Implied: While never stated, Melissa is shown failing at applying make-up and gazing longingly at a Victoria' Secret catalog.
- Deconstructed:
- Melissa's repeated efforts to make herself look more attractive are met with repeated rejections, eventually taking a horrific toll on her self-esteem.
- Melissa spends so much money paying for beauty products, clothes and surgery that she eventually goes broke.
- Reconstructed:
- ...But because of those efforts, she eventually catches the attention of Charlie, who learns to love her for who she truly is.
- ...however, going through all those experiences taught her a lot about true beauty and the Double Standards that women face, and she resolves to do something about it.
Back to I Just Want to Be Beautiful
