Pretty Saint, Ugly Sinner

One of these two kicks puppies for a sport. Guess who.

Go on, I dare you.

Very simply put, within media there is a strong correlation between a character's looks and their morality. Any protagonist, especially in a visual medium, is unlikely to be anything less than ‘Hollywood Common’(AKA real-life head-turner). Villains come with a little bit more variety; most ugly character can safely be assumed to be either moving stage-props, or bad guys, but there is also the Evil is Sexy factor to take into account. Generally however, the distinction between the two is made quite clearly, allowing any genre-savvy hero to safely navigate his story-verse.

This stereotype is so frequently used that aversions are becoming as common as the real thing, where beautiful characters are, against expectations, actually mean or evil, while ugly characters are kind. In fact, there are plenty of examples of stories who try and tell their audience not to judge a book by its cover: think Beauty and the Beast, or Wickham from Pride and Prejudice, who is handsome and charming enough in the beginning, but later turns out to be a jerk. Thus, a very wide range of beauty/goodness combinations are possible. This is especially true for more realistic media, which portray a vast range of beauty in their cast and has characters which are morally grey rather than black or white. Still, this stereotype remains present in almost all media. Maybe it’s just because people prefer to look at pretty people.

A person’s attractiveness has actually been shown to play a large role in the way they are approached by others. There’s a little thing called the halo effect, which explains how people’s judgements of another person’s traits influence their overall opinion of this person. For example, if someone is known to be kind, people consider this person trustworthy, even though these two are not necessarily related. And when someone is beautiful, people expect them to be friendly or competent as well. This system influences things like job interviews or dates, and is even important in things as presidential elections!

To give some examples:

I think there’s little need to point out who is the evil one, huh?

From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

To the left: kind and understanding teacher.

To the right: Malicious and child-abusing counterpart.

From Matilda

And this, dear children, is why you should never do evil. It is bad for the skin.

And the nose.

From Harry Potter