www.inverse.com: The slug-like Star Wars alien licked his lips and flicked his tail with slopping sound effects to match. Next to a bronze-bikini-clad Princess Leia chained by the neck, he and his supposedly prodigious appetites were designed to evoke disgust.
Simply by existing, a fat villain highlights the thin protagonist’s virtue, Canadian sociologist Fiona Whittington-Walsh tells Inverse. Through Christian values, she says, “The fat body is the symbol of your moral shortcomings and your evidence of sin.”
3 comments:
This is something that I hadn’t thought much about. Unfortunately, there are plenty of tropes that society has put onto plus-size actors and this one just must have never crossed my mind. My biggest takeaway from this article is the point made that “simply by existing, a fat villain highlights the thin protagonist’s virtue.” This is a significant point made within the article because it shows how actively, though subconsciously, people think about actors in these roles. I definitely agree with Payne, “once you start seeing it, you can’t unsee it,” now that I am looking for it I am able to see it “baked into pop culture”. My first instinct was to say that this idea happens primarily to men but then I remembered Ursula and of course, there she was at the top of the article. As a whole pop culture, at least as long as I have been alive has always favored thin bodies. This has drastic effects on the young people who are seeing this media, there is a mold everyone has to fit into. I hope that demonizing fatness in media is something that can be undone so that these toxic ideals stop driving the love that people have for themselves.
Growing up as an overweight kid, this was definitely something I noticed and internalized. I was always searching for fat characters that were portrayed as attractive, intelligent, or well-liked, and was usually left disappointed. I really appreciate this article connecting the portrayal of fat people as villainous to medical bias and general fatphobia; the hatred of fat people is something that is deeply ingrained in American culture and when entertainment feeds into that hate, it is more difficult to convince people that thinness does not equal goodness. The article also brings up actors wearing fat suits to portray fat characters, and the Tweet from Guy Branum definitely resonated with me. Fat people aren’t space aliens, it’s not necessary to spend 8 hours gluing prosthetics on an actor. While the role of Rae in My Mad Fat Diary was quite focused on the character’s body issues, it was one of the first roles where I felt like a fat character had a complex love story and friendship dynamic.
Growing up, I watched a lot of the media mentioned in this article: I will tell you right now, this trope is not something I even began to notice until very recently. But, it absolutely affected me. Fatphobia is so common in our society: from the medical industry, to the workplace, to clothing stores, to diet culture, and I could go on. This came up in my psychology class recently; getting people to sign up for programs like weight watchers is inherently designed around fatphobia. So, it is never surprising to see this pattern in the media (as soon as I started reading this article, I thought of the Dursey men in Harry Potter– if you read the books, you know the written descriptions are just as bad). As such, this is such an important thing for people to realize: as soon as you hear about it, you practically can’t stop noticing it everywhere in the media. We need to be aware of the problem, and then we need to start changing this pattern. As this conversation has been growing, I hope to see this fat villain trope stop.
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