"Looks are superficial."
I really hate this kind of advice. "You're not supposed to like a character for how they look. You're SUPPOSED to like a character for what they do or their back story or how powerful they are and blah blah blah." But more often than not, it just comes off as an excuse to not make your character look interesting or cool. I mean, there is no reason you can't give a cool looking character an interesting back story or personality. You could give a cyborg anteater or something crazy and out there a well written story if you wanted. You can have an actually diverse cast of characters each with their own relatable traits. Your characters don't always need to have the same boring template to them.
This doesn't just extend to my usual rants. A lot of times in RPGs, in the rare case you DO get something unique and different, they are almost always the worst character in the game. It's really bad in Monster collectors. I swear, the ultra beasts from Pokemon are meant to be offensive. You have all these weird, ugly stick figure characters that are completely overpowered, but then you have this giant, menacing tank looking monster with a huge mouth, several arms and some legitimate size presence, and he is absolute competitive garbage.
I get it! Looks don't make the character, but are you seriously trying to avoid making your character look good just to live up to some stupid philosophy? And yeah, I also get that looked are subjective, but way too often does media Pander to one specific taste, like how RPGs Pander to an audience that ONLY wants visually human characters (skinny white humans to be exact) and nothing else, so people who want other characters get nothing, or how Pokemon seems to love adding overpowered stick figure after overpowered stick figure to their game while purposely making big menacing designs absolute garbage competitively. And that's not even a problem exclusive to Pokemon, but it seems to be common in Monster collectors in general where the strongest monsters are always really skinny and unimpressive.
And I'm sorry, but I care about looks. A character that looks interesting is one I'm going to be drawn to. It's the one I'm going to have the most fun playing as. Even if it's not the most relatable character, often times I don't mind that, especially when I can relate to so few characters in media. Making a character that does good deeds and has a tragic backstory is easy: getting me to care about a character is not. It's why I find myself relating more to an undead misanthropic rat who goes through an arc where he learns to have more compassion and let go of his grudges than a typical human monster hunter. Character that I like visually as well as a character that has an understandable story is the kind of character that I'm going to like the most, more than a character that I'm only supposed to relate to because they're the same species as me.
And I'm being honest, part of the fun of Designing a character for me is designing their looks. I am writing a book right now, and sometimes I get the feeling that I'm not making my characters diverse enough because the most prominent characters have an anatomical theme. I try to balance that out with characters that don't follow that theme but I often feel like I'm not going far enough. One thing that helps, however, is that all the characters are a different creature, which helps them more easily stand out. I could focus on one particular animal or creature that I like, but I don't find that fun. I generally prefer character casts that have multiple different species among them, and that's a big reason I'm writing a book in the first place is because I want to see more of that and I'm not confident enough in my skills with anything else. I'm barely even confident enough in my writing skills and I am constantly going through periods of self-doubt.
Edit: I already mentioned this before, but this is more in-depth. To be fair, looks are not the only or even biggest reason I like non-human characters so much, but they're one.
