Are all Manga Club members secretly pretty? (Not that they are ugly otherwise, it just reminds me of that one romance movie trope)
https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/virgins_empire_ch147#5
I find the whole 'everyone is pretty' trope very interesting, because it applies to both live-action and anime/manga, but for completely different reasons. In live-action movies, Hollywood strives to cast attractive actors, and the bar of (conventional) physical attractiveness is so high that even an average supporting character in a film would look extremely attractive compared to random people on the street (this is partly because of eye-candy and partly because someone with glaringly 'unattractive' features could detract attention from the main actors and ruin the general mood of a scene- just imagine Jason Voorhees standing around in the background of a chick-flick while the leads talk about their love lives).
In manga, on the other hand, artists are generally taught to draw faces based on symmetry, often by drawing ovals and bisecting them with lines to get the position of eyes, noses and mouths. This means that your average manga character would have features that look perfectly symmetrical and correspond to the golden mean, and since people consider symmetrical features to be more attractive on average, everyone in a manga looks pretty (or rather, they aren't drawn with enough detailed features like wrinkles, crooked teeth or stubby noses, which might seem 'ugly' to observers). This makes it hilarious when one girl is described as super-attractive even though the faces of average bystanders behind her are drawn in the exact same way, or if her best friend looks like her identical twin, but with glasses and a ponytail. It's easier for your average manga artist to make a character attractive than to make them unattractive, which is why so many artists draw background characters without faces or with dotted eyes, simply to make a generically drawn lead stand out more. (Imagine trying to visually depict someone like Helen of Troy as the most beautiful woman of all time in a game like FGO, where every lady (and dude) is designed to be ridiculously attractive to induce otaku into whaling).
Torajirou is actually pretty good at averting this, since he gives characters a unique visual identity and has diverse body types and physical features. All his character designs radiate individuality without being necessarily pandering, and beauty, rather than a pre-established quality, is presented as the result of simply getting to know someone better and understanding their 'appeal' (to wit, the only two characters described as explicitly gorgeous upon their debut were Kaoru and Shizuka, both of whom are perfect examples of how external beauty doesn't equal moral virtue, and is likely to make you into either a self-assured predator or a victim for said predators).
