Present mood: quietly annoyed at how badly so many stories have missed and continue to miss the mark on "bad actors can appear beautiful or innocent" because their creators just HAD to reveal that the evil was actually a hideous monster and the beauty was only an illusion! After all, if something was truly good, it would be truly beautiful, and you would feel that... wouldn't you? Yes, symbolism, but symbolism falls apart when it's used in stories that explicitly deal with the ways appearances can be deceiving.
You cannot put the emphasis on the in-story, literal appearance of a character, then try to pivot into semiotics that hinge on the idea of "true" beauty, because then the story affirms rather than challenges our assumptions.
A symbol is an image that invokes an assumed meaning. Strip that meaning and it ceases to be a symbol. Thus the imagery of the monstrous--originally, not necessarily the way marginalized groups and especially otherkin use it--is not just imagery, it is a symbol for the assumption that appearance and nature are intrinsically linked. A symbol for the very assumptions that the "wolf in sheep's clothing" story form is trying to challenge... but of course, there's the problem, isn't it? The real parallel isn't a camouflaged wolf, it's a sheep that deliberately harms other sheep and then blames wolves for it.
Shapes, colors, and modes of expression are real. Attractiveness is not so much an illusion as a matter of social programming: real, but a made thing, not some ineffable element tethered at the root level of existence.
But beauty? Beauty is entirely subjective.
I would define beauty as the rapturous awe I feel when beholding things that seem sublime to me, but of course for me this includes both "people shaped in just the ways I like" and rather untoward specimens such as "reactors in meltdown! Active volcanoes! Nuclear explosions!"
Perhaps in truth I need not speak about this specific example at all, for it's but one of many spokes from the same hub: the American cultural imperative to equate moral goodness with pleasurable emotion by brute force. In reality, there is no writer curating your perceptions, ensuring with a timely sentence that you feel the appropriate revulsion to a secretly monstrous thing.
It'd be pretty horrifying if you couldn't tell... you know, it's just occurred to me how this trope implicitly victim-blames survivors of abuse. Mm! That'd explain why I despise it so much.
