I’ve been wanting to comment on this for ages but my opinion is rather unpopular… M

I’ve been wanting tocomment on this for ages but my opinion is rather unpopular… My mother usedto say, after a thoughtful pause, when my sis and I asked whether a guy she wastelling us about was cute: “He’s pleasant,” and that’s pretty much how I envision Peeta. Ithink he was wonderfully ordinary to look at - “nice-looking” but notarresting/sexy/etc. - but he becomes very attractive indeed as we see himthrough Katniss’s eyes as she starts falling for him.   As I was rereading the above quote yesterday, Isuddenly thought, “ROBERT MARTIN!!”“What sort of looking man is Mr. Martin?”“Oh! not handsome–not at all handsome. I thought him veryplain at first, but I do not think him so plain now. One does not, you know,after a time.”I confess, I have yet toread Emma, asidefrom a few delightful quotes (though @ghtlovesthg​ is working onme!), but Robert Martin in the 1996 film adaptation has a great Peeta feelabout him - he’s a plain, stocky, hard-working farmer who clearly adores Harriet (and can write a good letter! :D), but when he first comes up tothe young ladies, as a viewer you’re inclined to react a bit like Emma - becausehe’s not “cute” and you naturally expect any thus-introduced potentiallove interest to be a “cute guy.”I certainly didn’tpicture Peeta as a “cute guy” when I first read the books, though once wehad the bread flashback - never mind Peeta was nowhere near established as alove interest at that point (though some fabulous groundwork was laid!) - Gale,who had seemed so handsome and promising just a few pages earlier (it’s theblack hair!), was out the window, and I just loved Peeta more and more as theseries went on. But there was never a point where I saw him as other than howKatniss physically describes him, and for me at least, much of what she givesus can be hard to envision as attractive. Stockiness? (STOCKINESS??) Wavy/curly ash-blond hair?? (Maybe that’sa generational thing - I was an 80s-90s child, and for the latter part of that childhood, curlyhair on a guy was cringe-worthy - and ash-blond wasn’t considered especiallyappealing either.) Blond eyelashes? He’s solid and broad-shouldered at sixteen, for heaven’s sake - a veritable lug!Yet somehow, within a couple hundred pages, he becomes the love of Katniss’s life - and ours in turn. <3I try to diligentlymaintain this image of Peeta in my fics (and kick myself for having done otherwise insome of my earlier works) because there’s a wonderful sort of magic to it. Oh,we know better than to judge a book by its cover (we’re readers, after all!),but we’ve also been trained to anticipate and recognize a love interest by hisintroductory description, and Peeta completely turns that expectationon its head. A lot of us started out writing canon post-MJ fic, characterized by the most incredible Peetas with scars and PTSD and a prosthesis, and I’d love to see more fanworks - canon and AU - that celebrate Peeta’s “ordinariness” too.This (Hunger Games: Hope by Verlisaerys) is my favorite fanart depiction of him for that very reason. **LOVE** Though an honorable mention has to go to this one (Katniss and Peeta - Survival by polkapills): -- source link

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