“This is a tapestry I made myself! I just finished it!”
“…. this is…. big.”
“Eighty feet long, ten high, in forty panels! It was originally going to be sixty feet, but then the Thomas Malory Arthuriana got big and I had to put more stuff in.”
“… Malory published in the fifteenth century.”
“Do you have any idea how long it takes one person to embroider eight thousand square feet of tapestry?”
“You’ve had a lot of free time in the last eight hundred years, haven’t you?”
You ever notice how the fat kid is always the bully in media when in real life it’s the complete opposite?
Being fat is literally the number one reason why children are bullied. More than any other category, which includes race, sexual orientation, disability, religion, and academic ability. Yet it’s always fat people who are demonized and portrayed as the bullies in media.
Me: *makes a post about the deadly oppression fat people face*
Every person who has ever been said something mean to by a fat person in the past twenty years:
I wanted to answer this ask, and thank you to @desasterdan for bringing up some examples as well! Here’s a picture I found when I searched for pictures of cartoon bullies online:
Literally four out of five of these are fat. All of them are “big” in some way. Then you have characters like Harold and “Big Patty” from Hey Arnold. “Big Patty” literally has the word “big” in her name.
You have one of the three bullies from The Proud Family
Pete from Mickey Mouse
There’s also characters from movies
JK Rowling literally ties evilness to fatness with Dudley, Vernon, the fat aunt who gets blown up, Crab, Goyle, Mrs. Umbridge, you name it.
Now you might be sitting to yourself and thinking “Okay, but that’s only like…sixteen people! I can think of skinny bullies from media too!” But you have to think to yourself:
Where is the other fat representation?
Because not only are fat people so often portrayed as bullies, villains, unlikeable, undesirable, ugly, etc., that is often the ONLY representation for fat people in any given piece of media. (And keep in mind that the list of characters I’ve given is really just bullies, not fat villains as a whole, which makes an even more enormous list).
Tell me where a nice, positive fat character exists in Hey Arnold. In The Fairly OddParents. In The Simpsons. In South Park. In Phineas and Ferb. In The Proud Family. In Megamind. In Mickey Mouse. In Harry Potter. Name five in each because there are certainly dozens upon dozens of skinny characters in all of these pieces of media, so coming up with five non-fatphobic/non-villains who are fat should be easy, right? Tell me where the fat representation is AT ALL in these shows besides the bullies.
I will tell you right now: It’s none for the vast majority of these shows. I guess Harry Potter have Hagrid and Ron’s mom? But like…that’s two characters out of a series that has at least fifty characters. And they don’t outnumber the fat villains/bullies at all. They certainly didn’t put any fat extras in any of the movie’s scenes. It’s skinny people all the way down unless you want a villain, bully, someone to mock, or someone known for being big so you have no choice but to make them fat.
So if every piece of media either has fat bullies or no fat people at all, what message are we sending here?
As an added bonus, here are some images I found when I searched for bullies on Google Images. Keep in mind that I did not write “fat” anywhere in the search bar. This is just what it gave me, one of these pictures even being titled “bully with a fat belly.”
This is exactly what we mean by the name of our blog! This touches largely on TV, but the same is true for so much media. Fatness is used as a shortcut for “bad”.
Do you remember Cupcake from Rise of the Guardians?
I actually loved this character, I loved what they did with her. At the beginning the other kids were afraid of her, as if she were a violent bully, but then she was shown playing and having fun with them! She was a normal kid who liked unicorns!
And at the end she joins the other kids and helps save the day. It’s a nice little subversion… but that’s just it, it’s intentionally a subversion. That’s how commonplace this is. When picking traits to mislead us into thinking this girl would be a bully, “fat” was on the list - and it worked, because as an audience we’re so used to “fat kid” being code for “bully.”
Notice how the rest of the kids are thin
The irony of people who support these depictions claiming themselves to be against “bullying” and discrimination while actively bullying and oppressing the children who are already targeted and harmed the most.
You guys, I can’t. I thought I had seen it all.
They did this bigoted trope with characters that are goddamn VEGETABLES!
Hate it when TikTok farm cosplayers and cottagecore types say stuff like “I’m not going to use modern equipment because my grandmothers could make do without it.” Ma'am, your great grandma had eleven children. She would have killed for a slow cooker and a stick blender.
I’ve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have historically been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.
Taking these screenshots from Facebook because they make you log in and won’t let you copy and paste:
This is actually such a crucial part of healing from neglect and abuse and I have to add to this.
Because indeed, people who like you will not roll their eyes and sigh at the idea of accommodating your needs, they will value your voice and be upset with you about injustice done to you, not at you for “being difficult”. They will be happy when you find a way to live a better life, and help you to get there. If you are struggling, someone who loves you wants to see you smile, not tell you to smile because “you have it so good”.
the more educated you get on fat issues the more you realize that almost everything that supposedly justifies fatphobia is actually complete bullshit.
most of the health conditions that are treated as almost divine punishment for being fat (like heart issues and diabetes) are being revealed to actually *cause weight gain* instead of being caused *by* it.
this goes for social ‘consequences’ of being fat, too. is that “neckbeard” redditor actually fat because he spends all his time online, or is it that he spends all of his time online because he’s not treated like a person if you can see that he’s fat, so the internet is his best option?
everything is less accessible to fat people. seats on busses, at restaurants, and even at things like amusement parks, are frequently too small to comfortably sit in for a fat person. people treat you worse if you’re fat, or even try to avoid you entirely. you get judged for doing leisure activities, or even for exercising at a public gym, (which proves the claims of trying to motivate you to get fit are bullshit btw) getting filmed and laughed at, posted online for your body to be a punchline.
if you want to be progressive or body positive you *need* to be examining your beliefs. oppressed people are routinely forced into positions that, from the outside, may justify the narrative about these people. black folk are pushed into poverty, so that crime is often their only means of survival, enforcing the idea that black folk are criminals. queer folk are made unsafe in public so that we use codes to identify each other, enforcing the idea that queer folk are trying to secretly seduce people to be gay. and yes, fat folk are forced indoors and online so that they can enforce the narrative that we are lazy shut-ins.
