Do we have young adult human characters of all classes that are portrayed heroically but are significantly above or below the BMI recommendations? Who don't appear to be particularly athletic? Who have acne or acne scars? Who have non-combat induced scars? Who have obvious vitiligo or haemangioma? Who don't look like they've had braces on their teeth earlier in life? Who look like they wouldn't be cast as a sorority or fraternity member in a stereotypical movie of the sort?
I gotta say I feel like these are the sort of very specific requests a total non-artist might make without even slightly considering how difficult and unlikely it is some of them could really be represented in any meaningful way in dynamic/heroic/adventurer-oriented fantasy art, as opposed to a bunch of extreme-close-up full-page headshot portraits.
Like teeth, I get what you're saying, let's have more British teeth (and I say that as a Brit, we really do tend to eschew braces and whitening and so on relative to Americans - but then so does much of the world), but how many images is that even going to come up in? I can't even think of an image of a character showing their teeth enough that I could tell whether they'd "had braces" or not.
Likewise combat-vs-non-combat scars? How on earth would we even know? Scarring is extremely complex and variable, and many non-combat scars potentially look like combat scars and vice-versa. That's a backstory element much more than something to be represented in art. Most of the few "distinctive" non-combat scars are likely to be covered in conventional situations, too.
Acne scars/pox-marks and so on are something actually seen sometimes in "gritty" fantasy art (and again, it's not easy to distinguish the two), but how often are we going to be zoomed in enough to see that kind of thing? No often, I'd suggest. And many art styles just don't really go for that kind of detail - it's usually only seen once you get into a certain kind of "realist" style, which is no longer prevalent in fantasy art. So it's a thoughtless demand, I'd say.
In general I think this sort of request without really thinking it through isn't very helpful, not even to the groups it purports to encourage representation for.
HOWEVER!
I do think that there is a
lot of stuff that could be represented better - weight is one area that really could be done better. I don't think your "un-athletic" comment makes any real sense for classes reliant on STR/DEX/CON, unless you mean "not looking like track and field athletes". Like we could definitely do with more art of characters who have the rope-y muscles and weathered skin of a seafarer (rather than perfectly toned gym muscles), we could also do with people who have both muscle and fat - something actually videogames have been getting better at - like this is Thor in the most recent God of War - and he's not a figure of fun or a joke or anything (unlike "fat Thor" in the MCU), he's quite a threatening and powerful character (also sorry I could find a better picture - in game he looks less conventionally attractive than he might read here - but has great presence).
Ethnicity and gender diversity and ambiguity and so on are also obviously very possible to represent well and don't require zoomed-in portraits to likely to be noticed (and to be fair, fantasy art has a long history of ambiguously gendered characters).
Body hair levels could also probably stand to go up - that can be difficult to represent well, depending on art style, but I do think that is an area that more likely to be possible, and it'd be nice to see fewer waxed chests, not more. This is also something that I think actually some "pro-diverse" art absolutely misses on, because the artists are unconsciously rejecting overly "traditionally masculine" imagery, despite the fact that many trans-masc and other people are actually keen on looking that way, and many hirsute masc people being somewhat excluded from conventional representations of attractiveness for the last three decades (a non-binary podcaster I'm a fan of is hirsute as hell for example, face, head and body). Also hair on femme characters is skipped when thinking "diverse", seemingly because it's seen as sexualized, which, frankly, is a bit pathetic. Sure, some people inevitably are howling like a wolf when they see femme armpit hair or the like, but more are howling like wolves at a pretty face or a good figure, so that shouldn't really be a reason. It's a sort of unconscious bias that I don't think has really been addressed yet by mainstream progressive ideas.
Re: attractiveness, whilst I concur completely with rejecting Hollywood-specific ideas of attractiveness, I think it's important that most characters that appear to be player characters should be, on some level, to at least some people, attractive, because to be real - almost everyone thinks they are attractive, and most people have evidence to support that, in the form of lovers/friends/fans whatever! It's notable to me that the only people I've ever come across who intentionally self-described "unattractive" characters (rather than character they found attractive but some might not) were the most down-the-line hetero-cis-white-male players and usually they were often playing pretty nasty characters. That's obviously very different from "not Hollywood hot", but I think it's worth noting. It's also worth noting that, being real, standards of attractiveness in 2024 are just a lot broader than they were in say, 1984. Being thin is no longer a requirement for men or women. Thicc is broadly a compliment, for example. Facial hair on masc people is neither a crime nor a requirement as it has flipped between in earlier decades. Neither long hair nor short is unacceptable on masc or femme people. Darker skin could still do with more representation, but the standards are still broader than they were. So a ton more diversity here whilst being attractive should be highly doable.
