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!
Do you ever think about how a single misguided study on wolves in captivity has resulted in both the most widespread toxic pseudoscientific theory in the manosphere and what is arguably the weirdest genre of graphic kinky gay fanfiction and depending on who you are and what you’ve seen you’ll hear the word Alpha and either think of the platonic ideal of a cis het man or one feral mediocre middle aged actor’s dick knot impregnating another’s slick-drenched hole. Isn’t the internet a wondrous place.
I know they say amnesia is a bad trait in d&d/ttrpgs but in my most recent campaign I made a character who was voluntarily memory wiped for magical powers and gave my dm permission to make up a backstry that I don’t even know. So we show up in this town and get intercepted by a bunch of gangsters who were like “heyyy there’s our lawyer with no conscience!” and my character is like “well i still dont have a conscience, how hard can law be?” and that’s how we started the ace attorney plotline
Found a TikTok account that is actively documenting plus size brands. Please share!
@mayakern i can’t speak for shipping to nz but i love my skirts and button ups from her!!
aw thank you!! we do ship internationally but unfortunately as we are a small business and only ship out of the US (ie we don’t have fulfillment centers elsewhere) it does get pretty pricy
but yes we do clothing from XS to 6-8X depending on the item!
so some news about AI. It seems Discord is apparently just. going to unconsentually add Clyde AI to servers in a slow roll out. The way they are doing this is rather than how we initially suspected he would show up as an option via the integrations tab on server settings, it appears that he is apparently being added into servers as a user who is part of the server that the admin would have to manually kick. He cannot be banned, but we can kick him repeatedly. The issue is it’s unclear if there will be a greeting message for when Clyde arrives into servers and he will attempt to infiltrate again and again. Small servers this is easy to spot, big servers this is an obvious issue of sifting through who is in your server.
if you see this man in your server kill him
Important to note this has only been seen so far in a friend server and I have only seen it in one server so far. Community servers might be different it is simply something we do not know yet.
Here is an article from Discord about this thag updated about an hour ago
Aside from that I was able to go into permissions and make it so nobody in my server could interact with Clyde. I still do not know what information Clyde and by extension OpenAI has from what it might have taken from my server to “make Clyde better” there was no warning and no message despite how discord had pitched this. It says in this article that it will notify users but Discord did not do that at all.
Fuck AI
Another update! You can only kick Clyde in mobile if you are a server mod and you have to go through server settings and then members and click on clyde and then block!
and here’s your annual reminder that jack-o’-lanterns were a tradition irish immigrants brought to the u.s., where (widely available) pumpkins fell into use over turnips & other root vegetables
(personally i regret this switch, as it means many of us missed the opportunity to grow up seasonally surrounded by friendly faces like these:
