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."