Adaptational Attractiveness Cleanup

Adaptational Attractiveness is fairly subjective by trope standards, which leaves a lot of room for misuse.

It's subjective, so what exactly are you counting as misuse? Standards of attractiveness vary from person to person.

It's a trope. not YMMV, so it has to have certain criteria. I've seen adaptations run into some issues: what counts as an adaptation and what counts as the character internationally becoming more attractive? For example, characters in video game remakes are often listed under this trope, despite it not technically being adaptations.

As mentioned in the "Is this an example?" thread, this is near omnipresent in live-action adaptations.

The idea from this thread came to mind due to a few example on Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town. The subjectiveness of the trope came up.

Edited by Pichu-kun on Jan 14th 2020 at 9:27:44 AM

Seems this might be better served for TRS.

Probably the differences in usage come from what actually constitutes as "attractive".

Let's say there's a character in a book named Alice, who is described as ugly or average-looking. Which of these is correct use?

• In the film she is portrayed by Amanda Seyfried with no reference to how attractive she is actually seen in-universe.
• In the graphic novel she is drawn with Generic Cuteness like everyone else; no one makes any reference to her looks.
• In the adaptation she is considered a beauty in-universe, implied or otherwise.
• In the film she is played by Amanda Seyfried, but with a serious Beauty Inversion (she's still played by a Hollywood-attractive actor, but made up to be less attractive).

The description covers the first two. What's an example of a subjectively-written entry?

Edited by Synchronicity on Jan 15th 2020 at 10:50:22 AM

TRS is slow and full right now: I figured this trope just needed a short-term cleanup of bad examples.

Didn’t Ugly Guy, Hot Wife had a similar problem, in that the ugliness in question was subjective, so people just kept putting average looking people on the page?

So can you explain what you would consider a bad example? Like which of the scenarios are mentioned above are correct, and which are misuse?

From Characters.Harvest Moon Mineral Town

• Got one of the biggest changes in appearance in the Friends of Mineral Town remake, making his design a lot more stereotypically bishonen.

The main difference is just clothes and a more baby face. He was already a Bishōnen, now he's just arguably more fashionable.

From Pokémon: The Power of Us:

• Ash has rounder features, larger eyes, and a softer outline, giving him a more bishonen-esque look. It's in stark contrast to the more angular designs pre-Sun and Moon, including the previous movie.

From Characters.Pokemon Protagonists And Rivals Kanto:

• In the remakes. In the original [Blue] had a sneering, downright punchable face. The remakes changed it into a cocky grin.

Other examples from the main page:

• The Chronicles of Narnia. In the books, Lucy Pevensie is described as being not that pretty and a Tomboy, compared to her older sister, Susan. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, she also has problems with her self-esteem and constantly desires to be beautiful just like Susan. In the movie, Lucy is played by Georgie Henley, who has grown up to be a really attractive girl and is as beautiful (if not more) as Anna Popplewell. She is also more of a Plucky Girl than a Tomboy.
• Twilight: Alice is never described as ugly but is described as very short, compared to Ashley Green who's 5'6". Transversely Rosalie is described as very tall, but is played by Nikki Reed who is actually the same height.
• Final Fantasy VII: Cloud has gone back and forth a lot in his various cameos, from extremely beautiful (Advent Children, Crisis Core, Dissidia Final Fantasy) to more beefy and boyish (Last Order: Final Fantasy VII, Ehrgeiz, Super Smash Bros.) to downright unsettling (Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy VII Remake). A lot of this flexibility connects to the fact that his physical appearance wasn't even consistent in the original game, where his hi-res battle sprite looked noticeably squarer-jawed and more muscular than his prettier-looking in game portrait, his FMV appearance was somewhere in the middle, and his field model was just abstract blocks.

Edited by Pichu-kun on Feb 18th 2020 at 6:59:47 AM

@Synchronicity: The problem arises if both the original and the adaptation are visual medium, and neither really makes an explicit mention of the characters' appearance. In such cases, whether or not Adaptational Attractiveness applies to the character would depend on the audience's personal art style preferences and beauty standards—unless we have a stricter criteria for the trope (e.g. having a difference between in-universe reactions to the character's appearance), or change it to YMMV.

For example, if a character goes from looking like this◊ to this◊, I would say the newer version is more attractive because I really dislike Yoshitaka Amano's art style, but I know some people who do like them, and would consider the change a downgrade instead.

Likewise, when Final Fantasy Versus XIII was still in development (before it was completely rewritten to become FF XV, Stella's design was slightly changed from this◊ to this◊. When someone pointed out the change during an interview (I forgot where it is from, though), Nomura said that they wanted to make Stella look prettier, but a lot of fans find the old version to be more attractive, because of the different beauty standards.

Edited by Adept on Mar 11th 2020 at 12:19:00 AM