My first piece of commentary is up at Noble Cobra Magazine, discussing a trope I call “Not Pretty, But…”
Films often run into a problem where the story calls for the heroine to either be not particularly attractive, or for her to at least appear to be so to start with. The trouble is that when you’re job is to be looked at for a living, you really have to be easy on the eyes, so plain and homely actresses tend to be rather thin on the ground. Not to mention that if the script calls for an initially plain-looking girl to blossom into an unsuspected rose it tends to be easier to plain up a pretty girl than pretty up an plain one (to put it, ah, plainly). It’s even easier to slap a few unfashionable clothes and accessories onto a convenient knockout and trust the audience to use their imagination.
This is called ‘Hollywood Homely.’ But there’s also a related trope in book form, which I’m going to call ‘Novel Not Pretty’, or ‘Not Pretty, But…’ (not to be confused with ‘not pretty butt’, which is a different thing entirely). This is where the heroine is described as being “not pretty” or “not beautiful,” usually followed by a “but…” as in, “She’s not pretty, but she’s striking looking,” or “she was not beautiful, but her face had character.” Other times she might simply be described as “she wasn’t pretty,” or even “she was quite plain” with not buts about it. Only, since she is the heroine, the male characters seem to have an odd habit of noticing her and being drawn to her. She’ll usually have several different men taking an interest in her, and the hero especially will come to find her irresistible. More subtly, she’ll convey an impression of attractiveness to the reader; her place in the story will be that of an attractive character. I’ll try to explain this later on.
Read the whole thing here.
Serpent's Den 
Reminds me of Dave Barry’s parody of the Twilight series: “I glanced in the rearview mirror and scrunched my forehead in dismay as I realized for the millionth time that I do not consider myself at all attractive, although roughly 85 percent of the male characters I encounter either fall in love with me or want to kill me, or both, and in the movie version I am portrayed by a total babe.”
Seriously, though, we really do need to get some kind of affirmative-action program going to counteract the Hollywood frowstiness deficit. I mean, just on general principle, what kind of industry deliberately limits its own resources this way? Sometimes you need plain actresses, or you spoil the effect. Take Mrs. Miniver, for instance: here’s a film where the whole point of the protagonist is to be a quintessentially ordinary English housewife, and they go and cast Greer Garson, of all people. I ask you. (And then, on the other end, when you really want to make a point of a character’s beauty being something exceptional, how are you supposed to do that if it’s taken for granted that any female character who appears is automatically going to be drop-dead gorgeous anyway? The old Syndrome principle: when everybody’s a beauty queen, nobody is.)
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