I personally don't mind albino, melanistic, or other special characters (i.e: characters with unnatural eye colours, characters with unnatural add-ons or pelt colours, et cetera). When I'm entering a realistic roleplay, I try to limit my creative physical characteristics so the character itself resembles (even if the resemblance has its faults) what it is meant to be in real life.
On the other hand, I usually don't roleplay as animals at this time, so this might be an otherwise unpopular opinion. But I do enjoy adding a bit of my own touch to characters; they're my creations, and I like having my creations with strange traits that make them stand out. Traits, whether personality or physical, that make them more important, diverse from others, and generally creative.
'Common folk'-- if I'm to call them that-- are usually those who wish to represent their characters physically in a natural way or like to make their uncommon traits that set them apart from everything else within the personality. I don't think that those who make characters albino, melanistic, or anything in-between are neccesarilly 'stereotypical' (although they do make common appearances). I see what angle you're coming from, but I personally view more commonly-coloured characters than anything else. People try to distance themselves from the things that they
do view stereotypical. It's basically an unspoken law to keep yourself away from albino characters; melanistic characters, though? A lot of people don't even know the actual term, and even with that in mind I've had friends with oddly-coloured animal characters who did not follow melanism or albinoism.
There are several 'colour morphs' of animals-- see this chart below that further details some big cats.
But, as I was saying-- I don't particularly have anything against people who make unnatural-looking characters, or natural but rare looking characters. I've tried to distance myself from it lately, because I like to live up to the saying 'it's what's on the inside that counts'. Some people just like to express their character's personalities or creative attributes with a different and therefore self-constructed physical appearance, even if its something as simple as changing the common eye colour or by adding scars to their appearance. Small things like being left-handed also make characters all the more different, and different stands out. You can consider all this stereotypical if you want to (and although it is common, I wouldn't title it that), but I believe that it's merely a matter of added creativity.
And that added creativity counts as added creativity en if that creativity follows a trend that is already present within the community, or anywhere else asides from the community. These trends are created by people who you might consider 'professional' writers because they make those trends by applying them to their own characters. Let's take a few characters from one of my favourite series for example.
Agent York from Red vs Blue follows the all-too common 'one eye damaged/missing' trend, but the injury has developed his character and is present even though this is a 'professional series'.
Then there's Agent Wyoming (also from Red vs Blue). His featured physical attribute isn't exactly common in serious plot lines, but regardless of that his character played a big role in the series. It symbolises a bit of his personality, too. He's incredibly ambitious and goes for big goals. Goals that are big, like his moustache. And he's a bit of a pompous moron, but that's for another time.
There's nothing wrong with them, really. Or that's what I think. I respect that you don't particularly like the ever-present trends that go on around Feral Heart, but nine times out of ten; that's just creative design that is inspired by already-present creative design. I admit that seeing a large group of albino characters that treat themselves as particularly special is a little irking, but in general-- all these strange and muted colours and everything else in-between-- is just that. Creative design and the wish to add that to a character.
