Just a day or two ago, I posted about how nearly every novel written in the mainstream or genre category features attractive protagonists.  I added that I find this especially galling in fantasy / sci fi because mine is a genre of limitless possibilities. i09.com picked up the post, and a great slew of comments were left.  I love a good debate, but reading through these, I feel it’s time for a clarification.

I am not asking for a change in the type of stories being written.  I’m not asking for experimental fiction or a stories written from the perspective of the face-eating alien.  These things already exist.  More of them couldn’t hurt, but it’s not what I meant.  My point is much more superficial.

While most of my protagonists are inhuman in appearance, they’re rarely inhuman in attitude.  Trying to write from a truly alien point of view is difficult, albeit not impossible.  (See The Bug Wars by Robert Aspirin for a great lizards versus insects sci fi story that hasn’t a single human in it.)  Such experiments can be wonderful, even fascinating, but they aren’t necessarily what I’m looking for.

In my own stories, my protagonists, while usually inhuman in one way or another, are still basically average Joes.  Mack Megaton might be an indestructible smashing machine who doesn’t always “get” human reasoning, but he’s still a good guy.  Lucky, the raccoon god of Divine Misfortune, might be immortal and irresponsible, but he has enough of a human perspective (as the original gods themselves did) to bridge the gap between mortal and immortal.

My current project is all about weird monsters from other dimensions who get trapped in our own universe.  While they might be bizarre in appearance and struggling with sinister desires, they’re also victims of circumstance and trying to make the best of those circumstances.  This alone makes them readily identifiable from a human perspective.

I’m just suggesting that there is more to being human than being human, that what can make a character sympathetic and interesting is deeper than how handsome they are.  It’s not even a radical idea.  Animated films have been doing this for years.  Wall-E is a fantastic love story all about robots.  Doug the dog from Up is very much a canine, yet a wonderfully animated and written character.  Kung Fu Panda is filled with anthropomorphic animals who are all very human in motivation, but also very fun and cool to look at without having to be classically attractive.

This is not a call to revolution.  This is just a suggestion that if you’re writing about a tough-as-nails space cop who fights marauding aliens that maybe, just maybe, you’d think about giving him an extra set of arms or bat wings or possibly a bug head.  At the very least, it’d be cool if he didn’t automatically come with a lantern jaw, a broad chest, and abs of steel.

Unless those abs are actually made of steel.