What a female orc wants
Every other week, someone complains about the amount of skinny, sexy, half-naked women in World of Warcraft. And in every complaint, someone responds that the males are held to the same unrealistic beauty standard. But, as Natassha reveals, there's actually quite a lack of eye candy for the ladies in WoW compared to the guys. Humans look like gorillas, dwarfs are ugly, gnomes are short, night elves have disturbing eyes, tauren scratch themselves, trolls slouch, orcs don't look like they could hold up a conversation, and undead ... well, we don't need to elaborate about undead.
Most of the races are very muscle-bound, and the main one that wasn't (Blood Elves) got extra muscles after people complained they looked too effeminate. "It is quite confusing that so many guys think a lack of huge muscles is homosexual," Sparklegirl wrote about the Blood Elf male controversy. "Not only that, but are concerned about homosexuality so often." Any attempt to get a race of males that don't look absolutely stupid in robes is derided as "gay" by a large segment of the WoW forumgoing population.
I hadn't spent much time thinking about the attractiveness of in-game characters, since I usually play Horde-side females, but I've noticed that whenever I try to start a male character I get annoyed or bored at character creation. The only race where the males look better than the females, in my opinion, is tauren -- and the tauren scratch themselves every few seconds, even when they're about to face a dragon. Even the blood elf males aren't particularly cute. My attempt to create an attractive blood elf male resulted in this, which just reminded me that I really need to finish X-Men Legends II. And alliance-side .... well, this is the best I could do.
But after thinking about it, don't most people try to pick characters that could be considered attractive? Most female undead, orcs and trolls in-game use the same "pretty" faces. Most male undead don't have their jaw half hanging off, and most human males use some sort of facial hair to cover up that weird cleft palate clean-shaven human males tend to get. Very few dwarves, of both sexes, use the gray and white skin options. Heck, even male orcs tend to pick the least wrinkled and horrible-looking face.
Is it important to you that your character looks attractive? Should there be more customizable appearance options at the character creation screen? Or, as one of the priests in my guild suggested, should WoW take your picture so ugly people can't hide behind cute characters?
