I remember always being really jealous of how pretty other eye colors were and of other people with green or blue eyes. Granted this was just a symptom of the general "you're not pretty if you're not white" feelings I had growing up but Y E A H
yeah, I never thought my eyes were ugly, but the thought was always there that brown eyes are the norm and blue or green or whatever are the special ones
Yeah, like, I know for me a huge part of not liking them was because of the "beauty ideal" being pale, thin and with pale eyes. So it was just a huge mess.
It also didn't help that I would overhear white people also discussing how awful brown eyes were and how they were so boring so it was very mmmmmmmm yes I love a big ol dose of Racial Self-Hatred in the morning
I mean, most people have brown eyes and I always liked them, but in stories the special characters tend to have the more unusual or even unrealistic eye colours
That would get me so badly too, holy shit. My hair was always super thick and kind of messy and frizzy, so seeing the "perfectly straight, soft white hair you can run a hand through" messed me up a lot.
And yeah, in stories it was always the "special chosen one has Bright Green or Blue Eyes" and the "totally normal, unremarkable person that will probably die next chapter" has brown eyes :/
I mean, I do get it from a story-telling perspective especially with visual mediums to a degree, since the majority of people has brown eyes, so it's an easy way to make someone stand out
Ugh, yes, way too many modern beauty standards are tied up in dumb racist bullshit. Which I think is doubly stupid because even most white people don't look exactly like that.
I mean, I remember that I had a phase in kindergarten where I assumed it was fact that blonde and blue eyes = most beautiful, I just didn't care that much that I didn't fit it
I mean I'm within a stones throw of Almost Blond and Relatively Blue Eyed so I never had to deal with it but of even my lily white cushioned ass could see it happening then It Is Happening
i mean granted if i'd had different eyes i never would've discovered i was mexican and i say "discovered" because i lived in willful bliss and ignorance about my extremely mexican dad up until middle school because i grew up in a white area and i just thought he was really tan
Then there was that awkward phase of trying to reconcile the "but I thought I was white" with the "but Vanessa, you still have been experiencing racism your Whole Life"
WEEEEEE I definitely do some wish fulfillment with Mettaton in having him be like "no, every kind of human is beautiful I am enamored with All Human Beauty" because man do I not want to deal with him potentially learning the horrible standards of human beauty through magazines that fell down to the Underground :/
So he is re-disposed to being accepting, but it's hard to not imagine that he'd have some Very Wrong Impressions of the world initially coming up to the surface
I know that Mettaton wears a Newscaster Suit and Alphys formals it up by wearing a dress so I wouldn't be surprised if there is Internalized Gendering of Clothing
Okay, so, since there's a lot of physical varience between monsters, fashion and beauty standards tend to be more of a guideline than strict rules. Like, any given physical presentation isn't necessarily considered ugly, it just depends on how well the individual can make it work. It's like how with humans goth is a good look for some people, but not others.
This is part of why Mettaton is considered so ridiculously attractive in-universe: he walks around with boundless confidence and goes gleefully over the top with any style he's given. He acts like he's the sexiest person in any given room, and therefore by monster standards he usually is.
not to say people didn't try to be them though