Five Fat Characters You Could Make Right Now If You Wanted
I had a pretty fucking miserable day, internet. I’m not gonna go into it, but as you can probably guess, it had to do with how fat people are treated, in public, by strangers.
Right now I’m making cookies for a work function, which means a lot of downtime. So I’m going to kill some of that waiting by writing this quick Tumblr post which I hope, in fact, will channel some of my combination of white-hot fury and soul-destroying hurt into a useful end.
So, without further ado:
1.) The Fat Character That Isn’t A Unicorn
Have you ever noticed that when a fat character appears in something, there’s only ever one of them? Of course, this is an artifact of our current thinking about characters that are not cisgender white heterosexual body normative abled people: their defining character trait is their difference. So there’s one fat character, and their character is being fat.
How about you have… two? Or ten? Actually you COULD make it so that the body types represented in your cast of characters isn’t a strict binary between “pitiable fat unicorn” and “sea of muscle toned gym bunnies.” There’s a range of what is considered “fat bodies,” after all, and in fact we treat that range differently in an intersectional way (e.g. accounting for gender, ethnicity, class, etc.)
2.) The Fat Fashionista
Have you ever noticed that most fat characters come in two flavors of costuming? There’s “dowdy plainclothes meant to hide their body shape” and “clearly ill-fitting or poorly chosen clothes mean to amplify the strangeness of their bodies.” It kinda sucks, esp. since finding good, enjoyable-to-wear clothes that fit and look good is a challenge for many big folks.
So here’s a thought: how about you make a fat character who is an utter fashion plate? And I don’t mean “fat person who dresses too extravagantly and thus comes off as delusional/incompetent when it comes to their appearance.” I mean make the character who’s at the bleeding edge of style in whatever it is you’re making, a fat character. Maybe they learned to become an amazing clothes maker themselves because of how biased fashion is toward very thin bodies. Metacommentary!
3.) The Fat Acrobat
When I talk about fat characters in stuff, particularly video games, people often ask me about Street Fighter 4′s Rufus. My answer is always more complicated than people looking for an “oh yeah he’s good! You have permission to like him!” want.
I don’t dislike Rufus entirely. My favorite thing about him is his fighting style. He’s a kung fu practitioner and his style is really acrobatic, flashy, and swift. This is not a way fat bodies are typically rendered in fictional combat, where their usual modus operandi is Sumo Sumo Sumo, or Bearhug, or I Sit On You And Hurts, a trope I want to fuck off directly into the sun at speed.
How about you make your fat brawler character the speed character? Make them nimble and graceful rather than lumbering and “powerful” (which is often code for “unintellectual / thoughtless”). If you’re working in a fantasy or fictional setting, this is easy as hell to explain, and you have literally no excuse when fools whine “that’s not realistic!”
Counterargument: Sammo Hung. Have a nice day.
4.) The Fat Heartthrob
Western culture asks fat bodies to be desexualized and asks fat people to desexualize themselves (through “modesty” etc). You’ll notice that the “fat person who has the gall to make sexual advances / have sexual desires” trope in media almost always centers on their apparent delusional inability to process that they’re Not Supposed To Do That.
What if the popular character in the thing you’re writing, the one who has all the girls/boys/enbys/GQs desiring/lusting after them, is fat? You don’t even have to go to the creepy extent of “they’re chasers!” or whatever. They don’t need to be admired FOR being fat. They just need to be desirable. People can find them hot. Maybe they’re the most wanted prom date. Maybe the princess from Planet Zebulon that the Galactic Star Hegemony has invaded to kidnap is a pretty big girl.
Maybe you don’t play any of this for laughs or set the desirable character up for a fall and just let people be into them. Bonus points if they get to score with someone by the end of the story, if that’s an appropriate story beat for your narrative.
5.) The Fat Person Who’s Okay And Who People Are Okay With
I feel like options 1-4 are a pretty low bar, though they do seem a little geared toward various fictional permutations. But if you feel like you just can’t bring yourself to try one of them, here’s my final suggestion:
Make a fat character who’s basically okay in life. They’re healthy, they’re happy. People like and respect them. They just happen to be fat. They’re not defined by a diet, or the abuse of others. This doesn’t mean you don’t mention it, ever. But it just becomes one of a range of details about that person, not their whole self.
So, there you go. Five easy ideas. And when I say easy, here is what I mean: you can just do these. You don’t have to explain to anyone why you’re doing them. You don’t get to hide behind “It doesn’t make sense!” as a reason to maintain a harmful status quo. You, the creator, the person with the power, can just do this.
Try it. I promise you won’t regret it.
