Thread by @drtoddharper

Hi everyone.
I want to talk for a moment about a common narrative trope, "Person falls out of their normal life into a depressed state and after a timeskip emerges from it a comically exaggerated fat person."

Probably the easiest to recall and most egregious example of this is "Fat Adama" from the Battlestar Galactica remake, but honestly, it's super common across cultures. One of my favorite anime, Yuri on Ice, uses it as their entire story hook for the first two episodes.

On one level: yes, this is kind of understandable. The idea that grief or depression makes you 1.) less active and 2.) more inclined to eat certain types of foods does suggest that you might put on weight in such a time.

I assume you can sense my "HOWEVER"

What gets me about the way this trope is used is not "this person got sad and then put on 10 pounds or so."

This trope is basically always "this person got sad, and then doubled their physical size in a month."

There's also a secondary concern where this trope is ALWAYS followed by a mini-"redemption arc" where the person snaps out of their bad mental state, exercises for like... an hour, and then is magically back to their "starting weight" at the end.

The issue here is that in these cases, fatness or weight gain aren't used in a "you might put on some pounds while you're grieving/struggling with depression" way.

They're used in a "the FAT PERSON isn't the REAL YOU; it's you being LAZY and SAD but you can FIX IT" way.

It buys directly into a ton of bullshit fatphobic cultural rhetorics:
1.) Your body is perfectly malleable as long as you Work For It
2.) The only cause of being fat is being weak (either weak-willed or physically weak)
3.) Fat people are pitiable
4.) Weight loss = redemption

And boy, the idea that any fat version of a character is "fake" or "not real" and is a problem that can be fixed with a montage or by them just "cheering up/getting over it" sure sends a message about the worth we attach to fat bodies, huh?

I'm gonna tack on to this that in screen media, the "Fat version" of the character is usually achieved through some spectacularly stupid contrivances, the big one of those being the "fat suit."

So it's not like they have any interest in how any form of weight gain or fatness actually looks or feels. Instead, we throw a fake pregnancy belly and some cheek pads on Jamie Bamber and go "See? Lee was super depressed and got fat."

What that signals to ME is: you are more interested in invoking the rhetorical specter of fatness, and our cultural attachments to it, than you are to thinking about the reality of body weight or fatness at all.

Kathleen LeBesco wrote once about the link between fat suits and blackface (tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108…)

Obviously not a 1:1 cultural comparison, but there is a strong similarity in "We're using an exaggeration of your reality to play to a normative audience at your expense"

What you have to understand about this fatphobic shit is that it's just like white supremacy, or heteronormativity, or patriarchy: it is so very deep into our cultural understanding of (in this case) fatness and fat bodies that it doesn't even get NOTICED.

And I know most of you body normative folks tune out the second I talk about this stuff with a strong Not My Problem field, but I'm gonna keep pointing this stuff out. Giving a name to stuff has power.

Anyhow if you can signal boost this thread in a meaningful way, that would mean a lot to me. Thank you.