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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5377486" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't recall you making that statement earlier, so this is the first oppurtunity I've had to disagree with it.  I disagreed with the statement: "Except every time beauty has been personified in fantasy or fiction or anything it's been done so in an intensely ugly and objectifying manner."  I also disagreed with the judgment of what people should want, and I think that the currents of stories you find "ugly and objectifying" usually run a couple of levels deeper than you seem to consider.Let's take something that I think you can relate to easily, because its surface level is exactly where you seem to be at.  One of the classic explorations of the subjective nature of beauty is Rod Sterling's "The Eye of the Beholder", in which face of the woman who has undergone plastic surgery is revealed to be the beautiful Donna Douglas who revolts her monsterous surgeons with her horrifying appearance.  But we can go deeper and deeper into this story.  Below the first level reading of the story that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there is a fairy tale reading of the story.  The girls beauty reflects her true beauty, just as the ugliness of the surgeons reflects their true inner ugliness.  So maybe the story actually uses a beautiful girl in the role of its heroinne to express the inherent evil in rejecting someone on the basis of their appearance, or the evil in the insentivity that the surgeon pay to the young girl's ugliness, or the ostracism she experiences on the basis of only her appearance.  The story isn't an inversion at all, since it is in fact the beautiful girl with which we sympathize.  It's actually then a story very much like the tale of Fairyfoot.But that's just one level down.  We can go further into the story.  The story ought to have the exact same meaning if the girl is hideous and the surgeons are beautiful.  Afterall, isn't the point of the story that appearances are superficial?  So maybe the story is judging us for giving our sympathy to the girl merely because she is beautiful.  Maybe we ought to be sympathetic to the surgeons after all, since aren't we rejecting them primarily because they are hideous?And we can keep going inward, alternating our viewing between objective and different subjective frames, finding new angles at every level.   A good story is like that.  Far be it from me to take a story like Cinderella or Beauty in the Beast or Iron Hans and say, "Except every time beauty has been personified in fantasy or fiction or anything it's been done so in an intensely ugly and objectifying manner."  I have no basis for saying that at all, and I suspect you'd be rather hard pressed to defend such a universal denounciation of all of literature.  Feel free to try, but my guess is that you are denouncing by rote because someone taught you to say so.  You strike me as the sort that thinks we ought to look at a story in just one way and if we don't look at it that way, then we are evil, because you've littered this thread with comments exactly of that sort.Which is why I was disagreeing with: "I don't want that in my game. Nobody should."  What are your qualifications to tell me what I should and shouldn't think about?Now you say, "nobody should want ugly and objectifying implications if not outright statements in their tabletop game" and dare me to disagree with that as if you've made the fight hard for me.  But you went ahead and threw the beauty word in as if there really was some absolute standard of beauty and you knew what it was, and as if beauty was a really good metaphor for something.  So why exactly should this be kicking against the goads for me to point out that not only is it maybe worth while to think on ugly things from time to time, but if you are willing to call something ugly you must think there is something valuable to equating physical appearances with something deeper than the skin.  If that's the case, then a fantasy setting is just about begging for some objects that personify our types of beauty and its absence so we can dig a bit into that theme.</blockquote>

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