Re: Good looking?
I've noticed that manga and anime seem to push that supposed "big eyes = cute" thing
A fetishization of exaggerated neoteny, boosted a bit by the fetishization of the double epicanthic fold. (Though the latter is partly due to the former anyway, and partly to European/US cultural influences during the colonial period and in Japan's case the Meiji restoration.)
There's good reason to suspect that neoteny fetishization is partly instinctual - it encourages the extended care human children require - but I don't like to put too much weight on sociolinguistic explanations.
to breaking point- and often past it. Because manga is such a common style nowadays, one often registers it as a cliche ("oh this one has huge eyes, so she's supposed to be cute") rather than noticing how anatomically weird they are (i.e. the eyes are half the height of the face and finish *below* the nose).
It's a fetish pump.1 There's a portion of the market that wants the fetish enough to demand it; then there's a large portion that ignores it. So on the whole it's economically advantageous to producers to include and increase it, until they hit a breaking point where exaggeration actually discourages a portion of the market that's larger than the enthusiasts. We don't seem to have hit that point for many manga/anime genres.
Note that there are "serious" manga/anime genres which prefer more realistic face and body designs. They tend to be more niche than mass-market, though.
1In the sense of the economic behavior, not the pornographic style from which it takes its name. (The pun on "pump" is rather felicitous.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
