angry rant about "ugly" characters

Writers are always reminding other writers that is is okay, even encouraged, to make your main characters unattractive.  I must admit, I have never had a particular problem making my characters go outside the realms of my idea of attractiveness: my first actual story had a cast of characters who were kind of misfits:

• A big-boned, muscular girl with a smooshed nose (I think the smooshed nose was probably the most described feature in the entire cast),
• a very pretty girl with quite terrible clothing,
• a very overweight boy with dirty hair and a smile that showed all of his teeth and gums,
• a tiny pipsqueak of a kid with a lisp and a mouth full of braces and rubber bands (he was always, always described as being incredibly ugly, although I apparently never said why),
• and an absolutely gorgeous guy who always looked unpleasant, and who was often called snot-nosed by the main character, who despised him.

So, yeah. I loved these guys. They were the best.

But. Other people did not like these character descriptions, and did not hesitate to tell me so. In later versions of this story, I quietly left things out instead of having fun and writing it the way I wanted to. Snot-nosed gorgeous guy stayed exactly the same, because he was pretty enough to get away with bad expressions. Pretty girl with bad clothing stayed the way she was for the same reason. The others became:

• blond girl
• boy with goofy smile
• small boy with braces

It kind of made me lonely, because a blond girl is so much less interesting than a hefty strong girl with manly shoulders who complains about her ridiculous smooshed nose and teases other kids for having dirty hair or ugly faces. I was friends with Smooshed Nose. Blond Hair just wasn't the same.

At any rate, long after sending this story to the scrap pile, I still think about this little gang of misfits, and the people who didn't like reading about ordinary looking people. It took me some time, but I've gone back to my (annoying to other people but enjoyable to myself) method of insulting my characters' appearance at every turn.

People (mostly my siblings) still rib me upon occasion about this, but I do not care. If they don't want to read about a fourteen-year-old who looks like a homeless flower-child Cupid, then they don't have to read it. I'm not going to reduce him to merely the color of his hair. The end.