Sometimes, I'm very amused by threads in the forums, like Who's hotter, your villain or your hero(ine)? On the face of it, it's just harmless fun. But I wonder if all of this isn't just some sort of wish-fulfillment on the part of the writers. I mean, these are characters from someone's imagination, and if they're from your imagination, what's to prevent one from molding the characters into whatever they wish them to be? There's nothing really wrong with doing any of this, yet I don't feel it's quite right either.
I'm not saying that we should make all of our characters ugly and unattractive. I'm not saying that at all. What I feel uneasy about is writers putting in some sort of predetermined meaning on the things that they are writing about--putting forth a judgment about what the story and its contents are before a reader can see it and put his or her own interpretation on it. I subscribe to the philosophy that the reader has the ultimate decision on what the meaning of the story is. Undoubtedly, the writer has strong influence, but it's the writer's job to present the story as a sort of argument. The writer can't just say that Character X is hot while Character Y is just a Plain Jane and expect everyone else to accept it as gospel (that would skirt the territory of Certain Unhinged Famous Authors Who Take Their Works Too Seriously). If the writer is successful in telling the story, the reader will get the gist of what the writer is trying to convey without the writer doing some heavy duty Spelling-Things-Out. Readers are not dumb.
Anyways, I have no doubt that the replies on that thread are nothing but some writers just brainstorming about their characters. It's very similar to me brainstorming about the plot on this blog--I'm just throwing out ideas and possible interpretations (which no one will read anyway); I'm not telling anyone how to think about my story. As for whether I think the protagonists or antagonists in my story are hotter, I will only say that I have a penchant for ambiguous bad boy characters. Other than that, you'd just have to read along and form your own opinions.
