My most used Shepard:
In the interest of doing my due diligence to the topic, I went back and dug up my own most played FemShep from the first Mass Effect. She's in a relationship with Kaidan, despite my distaste for his overall flaky personality and the knight-in-shining-armor-nonsense he and Ash pull on Virmire. She also doesn't have any makeup, has short hair (topical to the qunari discussion about the feminization of long hair - something supported by the fact that my private school would not let guys have long hair when I was growing up), and sports the scars a rough and tumble sole survivor from that first game's storyline would look. She does, unfortunately, have the heavy mascara eyes, because I didn't notice how absurd they'd end up looking outside that game's CC.
I also let my renegade FemShep keep her scars in ME2. Not everyone applies the same one size fits all descriptor. I happen to think that once I've created a character it's those little flaws like this FemShep's apparently obsessive use of mascara (and dead eye thanks to weird tracking and some of BioWare's often suspect animations), and my MaleShep's decidedly fishy appearance after being imported into ME2, that gives them an extra layer of personality. That's what's beautiful to me, when part of their look becomes part of their character (my renegade FemShep also had unintentionally pouty lips that I grew to adore).
I'd post my similarly modest elf from DAO, but I unequipped all her items because I was playing with mods and didn't want that to cause problems importing into DA2 - also she has the same name as the default elf from the Keep and that's a bit weird and random. So she's nekkid and I don't feel like doing much more than taking a screen shot. Point is, as someone else said, this seems a lot like a judgement made based solely on a sample of people who chose to share, and often share characters that they've never even actually played - and it's fine that they do that, but that's not an accurate representation of the whole.
These are my characters and their meanings and design quirks, whether on purpose or by mistake, are part of my experience. I'd venture to guess a lot of people feel the same way, and so don't feel the need to share their characters. It's also not like I sat here obsessing over any of my characters and referencing pop culture sources for inspiration. I made something I thought looked good, quickly, through messing around with the sliders a bit. I'm sure that's how a lot of people who don't obsess over their characters do it - which is probably the majority of people who even bother to mess with the CC instead of just choosing a default. They take one of the defaults, mess with the sliders a bit, change a few of the features, get something that looks a bit different from the pre-made stuff and that they like and roll on with that.
It seems like when you allow people to create their female characters, men normally create someone who is overly sexualized while women while a bit tame, still go for extravagance in a way. You rarely see female Shepards/Hawkes/Wardens that are more on the Cassandra scale of things; attractive, yet not the typical "Hollywood", mainstream, or western ideals of what female beauty is.
This idea that most people obsess over meeting some mass market definition of beauty is patently false. The FemShep above is the type of female character I normally make, with the obvious variation in hair and skin tone and features that comes with haphazardly messing with sliders, and I'm sure other people have different types of characters that they normally make.
In reality, I'm pretty sure when you allow people of any gender the option to create a character of any gender, they normally ignore the CC altogether and just select a default option. Unless I'm mistaken, BioWare said that the overwhelming majority of players just used the default appearances in Mass Effect anyways, so by definition people normally don't "make" a character at all.
This is the point that everyone is trying to make. That boxing every single player into such a ridiculously small corner based on the creations shared by a minority of a minority of the player base that actually shares their creations is silly.
Faces in DA:I at least for me do not look beautiful as they all give off the doll/wax figure vibe, with the skin tone and stiff facial animations.
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