'the other had fair fair, too'

The title for today's post comes from Sayers's Gaudy Night. A mysterious woman corners a beautiful young man and tells him two things: that "Shrewsbury College was a place where they murdered beautiful boys like him and ate their hearts out; secondly: that 'the other [another young man] had fair hair, too'."
That bit of Gaudy Night has been in my head for the last day or so, as I continue reading Mercedes Lackey. She has plenty of main characters - the ones I read about were Darkwind, Elspeth, Skif, Lavan, Firesong, Dirk, Karel, Kris, Talia, Selenay, Alberich, Vanyel and Kerowyn. Some of them (Talia, Skif, Vanyel) have horrible childhoods, while others have trauma in their adult lives. (Talia gets raped and tortured, Selenay's husband tried to kill her, etc. Both of them, however, are as little scarred by these events as possible).
But I think it's worth noting that in my list above, only four aren't happy in the end. Karel's blinded, which is too bad, though Lackey makes it clear that he'll still keep his girlfriend and his career. So I'm not sure how unhappy he really is. In contrast, Lackey tries to make it seem as though Firesong is pretty happy, but really he's settling for something less than what he wanted, now that his once-beautiful face is scarred. The other two beautiful men, Kris and Vanyel, are the only ones in my list to wind up dead.
(And by the way, Kris, Vanyel and Firesong are the only ones in the series who are aware of their good looks. Especially Vanyel and Firesong, who dress carefully to match them. And oh, by the way, Firesong and Vanyel are the only openly gay characters, which makes all of this even more problematic).
Everyone else winds up more or less happy - ugly Dirk and plain Alberich are fine, and the attractive women are fine. So why does Lackey have this disturbing propensity to wreck the lives of her good-looking (and, in two cases out of three, gay) male characters? A friend suggested that Lackey makes everyone go through angst, to make the story more heroic, and my friend is (as usual) right. But in every other case, the hero lives through the horrible events.
I can't remember whether Lavan in Brightly Burning is especially good-looking. He certainly winds up dead, though.
So - I don't know. I don't have the answer to this. Despite my colleague's good sense, I can't help but wonder whether Lackey's psyche is something like Shrewsbury College.