In short, good looking characters are not important. Not as important as having attractive characters and that's not necessarily the same.

Genre

Maybe Harlequin Romance novels should have good looking characters? I'm thinking a lot of them does. However, I don't think that's an explicit requirement in the romance category.

Maybe it's common in your genre? However, I don't think it's enough even if super successful authors have them.

Not if it doesn't make the characters attractive.

Message

What do you think about everybody being, or being required to be, beautiful and having "Greek God Looks"? Should it be a requirement for success? Or the opposite; everyone should be valued for who they are, not what they look like?

You reader will likely sniff out what your intentions are... and they better belong in the right target audience depending on that.

Then there's always satire. Maybe everybody looks like Greek Gods on the outside, but not the inside?

Or the risk that the reader will think it's satire if everyone is too good looking to be true...

Do you need looks at all?

There's always the option to skip descriptions of the character's looks entirely, or mostly. Instead of chiseled chins and batting eyelashes, go for sharp minds and bitter irony. And perhaps eye color and hair color... statute? Fashion choices? Car model? How many different ways do humans express personality?

If the readers find your characters attractive they will fill in the looks and they will likely fill in hotter, sexier details than you could even come up with, so as long as you don't burst their bubble by starting to describe the characters later in the text, you will likely come out on top.

Attraction

Readers read fiction for an emotional experience. One that they wish for. A sense that they are entering a world larger, scarier, and/or sexier etc, than their ordinary life.

One way to do that, I guess, would be to add out-of-this-world good looking characters... however, that's not the thing they necessarily want.

Readers want attractive characters.

The average reader is a bit more likely to be a woman than a man (depending on genre of course), so a big-boobed, hot blonde, may be exactly the wrong thing to use for attraction.

Making your characters attractive is about making them smart, fun, intriguing, quick, interesting. James Scott Bell describes it as giving them Grit, Wit, and "It".

Attraction by proxy

Another trick sometimes (often?) used is to make one character attractive by having another character finding them attractive.

If you do your job right, your reader will want in on the action just because your characters have this epic love story in the making!

I mean, is Juliet attractive? Why? Because Romeo is completely crazy for her? The same, of course, goes for Romeo and Juliet's passion for him making him attractive as well. Shakespeare doesn't objectively give them good looks... it could just as well be about hormones... or forbidden fruit, for all we know... But they are attractive!

Here's another example by Margaret Mitchell:

"Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm, as the Tarleton twins were."

Mitchell is using the Tarleton twins to make Scarlett O'Hara attractive even though she outright says she's not beautiful... Scarlett O'Hara doesn't have to be beautiful... she has to be attractive. And if the Tarleton twins want her, you'd better get over there and figure out what all the fuss is about, or risk missing out...

All kinds of attraction

This is just love-attraction.

There's also the I-want-to-be-that-person-attraction (a.k.a. envy) that doesn't have to be sexual at all.

Maybe there are even more kinds of attraction you could use to make the reader find your characters attractive...

I'd say good looks are not at all necessary to make that happen.

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