Hi friends! You’re probably reading this after attending the Fatphobia in SFF panel at Balticon 60. Or maybe you stumbled onto this post while doing research about the subject. I wanted to provide my notes from the event in a simple post for those who want more context, thinking material, or further reading. I’m just simply dropping this in for now and will fancy it up later. The most important part are the links!
Fatphobia in SFF
SFF has a dreadful legacy of fatphobia. Fatness often is equated with villainy and sloth, or with a helplessness to be shed over the course of the story. If they’re not dying first, fat people are usually the butt of the joke. Who is writing these types of characters better, and more importantly, how can the genre world follow their lead?
With Pallas A. Bane, Jen Finelli, MD, Christiane Knight, John Robison (Father John) moderator
Fatphobic character portrayals:
- Dune – Frank Herbert. Baron Harkonnen, specifically designed to not only be “grossly” fat but to revel in it, a bit meant to disgust the reader
- Thinner – Richard Bachman/Stephen King featuring a curse that causes a lawyer to drop pounds rapidly
- Jabba the Hutt – pretty much the same kind of tropes as Harkonnen, using fatness/grossness to signal evil
- Wall-E – fatness is used as a metaphor for sloth and overconsumption/consumerism and often fat characters’ weight is used as the butt of jokes [and I did like this film, but *despite* that] [oh yeah, and fat=disability also which is problematic at best]
- Harry Potter, which has WAY more wrong with it than Dudley Dursley but we’re here to talk fat
Depends on how you feel about it:
- Fat Thor, which was played for laughs but also felt to some folks like representation
- The Adipose in Doctor Who, “Partners in Crime”
- Kingpin, called “The Fat Man” but is also incredibly strong
- Ursula in The Little Mermaid – a character with agency and wit, iconic, but also monstrous, someone who stole Ariel’s voice for her own agenda
Some positive portrayals of larger bodies:
- River of Teeth – Sarah Gailey. Archie is a gloriously well written fat person.
- “Cloud Dweller” – E. Catherine Tobler
- “Maggies” – Nisi Shawl
- Dust Bowl Revival – Marianne Kirby – Henrietta Goodness is a fat hero that other fat folk can relate to
- Six of Crows – Leigh Bardugo
- T. Kingfisher, Terry Pratchett’s books
- Brimstone & Roses by Mei Rothschild on WebToons – MC Bea is definitely flawed [I mean she summoned a demon to be her date to her ex’s wedding] but lovingly written and drawn
- Avatar: The Last Airbender – Uncle Iroh
Some thoughts I only shared in part on the panel:
Humanizing people, instead of othering them, is the key to writing well balanced fat characters. Their fatness shouldn’t villainize them or be a characteristic that demonstrates their vileness. Nor should it be the most notable thing about them. If you wrote me as a character, how would you describe me? More importantly, how would I describe myself? Is my fatness important to the roles I play in my life? If it’s notable as more than a description to round me out [yes, I chose this wording on purpose] in the reader’s mind, why? What does my fatness as a character serve? These are all important thoughts to consider when writing a fat character. At the end of the day, in this world at least, my body size and shape are the least interesting things about me. In a science fiction or fantasy setting, that may differ but there had better be a good reason to dwell on it that doesn’t diminish me as a person.
Leaving out fat characters is also fatphobia. We are everywhere in daily life. We deserve to be on the page and the screen, but as fully-formed people, not a distillation of our body shape and the usual tropes that go along with fat characters.
Please investigate the essays and writing of fat activist and excellent writer Meg Elison, author of the Road to Nowhere series. Also, she and Marianne Kirby offer an on-demand master class on writing fat characters over at Writing The Other.
Also worth checking out: the Fat Books Database, hosted on Google Drive
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10W6b3Dmeh6xCv4rQlScVDgXPFXQQisJIF6DaZBYooPw/htmlview
More Links:
Writing Fat Bodies w/ Marianne Kirby and Meg Elison – https://writingtheother.com/writing-fat-characters-2023/
A scathing critique on The Whale from Lindy West – https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/mar/10/lindy-west-on-the-whale
SFF’s Big Fat Problem by R.K. Duncan : https://www.tor.com/2022/10/25/sffs-big-fat-problem/
The Fat Body Problem by Meg Elison: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/the-fat-body-problem/
A Small List of Large Characters: Fat Representation in SFF by Jessi Cole Jackson: https://www.sfwa.org/2017/11/28/small-list-large-characters-fat-representation-sff/