Originally Posted by Ragnarök
I never got warm with Shadowheart’s personality during the Early Access nor do I fancy her looks. Actually there isn’t a single attractive female origin companion. If you’re not particularly into freaks, you’ll give Lae’zel or Karlach a hard pass. (No problem with fantasy races, after all this is D&D, but that doesn’t mean you have to find them attractive.) I really wished for a romanceable pretty human or half-elven female in BG3, but as it seems I got disappointed. The original BG series got way better options for romances as a straight male.

In general heterosexual female players in BG3 have better (in the sense of more attractive) choices than hetero males in my opinion. So far the only options are Shadowheart and Minthara. But if you don’t want to kill the druids, that only leaves Shadowheart, which is a pity.
I agree that Shadowheart and Lae'zel are unpleasant, and that Lae'zel is ugly. But I don't think Gale and Wyll are any better, in terms of either personality or looks. I have no idea what the canon on Astarion is, but to me he seems like he's gay so maybe he's the best choice for a male Tav to romance (although he's a big, dumb jerk, like they all are). Any of them, it's not just scraping the bottom of the barrel, it's flipping the barrel over and scraping off what's underneath.

In terms of Lae'zel's looks, there's a mod that makes her look more or less human. I imagine it's almost a certainty the mod maker will update it to be compatible with release, unless for some reason the release version of BG3 changes something about how easy (or hard) it is to mod.