“But Fey,” you say, “your fursonas have almost exclusively been fat!”
Yeah, and none of them were the unvarnished, true self, untouched by performance, by masking. They were characters, or perhaps even caricatures of the self, ideal wants and needs and desires written on shapes and selves that reflected wants but never the one who bore them, and if the one who bore them wants a little damn tummy as a treat they should get it, I think
And indeed, that making her body match my own would impart a degree of euphoria, they and I being the same in that regard, but it really isn’t that simple- for reasons I’ll struggle to get from thoughts to words, but I’m going to try.
Fatness is neutral, like the color of one’s skin, their assigned gender, their eyes. Nobody is better or worse for it. This is important to preface with because the thing is… I have a complicated relationship with my own fatness.
Yes, I personally think it’s cute. I think it can be incredibly uplifting for characters to be fat and just as capable of things as anyone else is- which bears out in reality, too. But coming out of the kink scene, being known only for drawing characters on the extreme end of things, usually to chase comfort in it, find positive reinforcement, there is a serious… lack of agency you find yourself with even with- especially with that kind of reputation. People start to crack jokes about your size, act like you’re a punchline or like you’re always horny about it- even when you mostly just… depict yourself or your characters simply existing. You find that there’s a sort of… expectation about you, that you’re a one-note book, that you’re The Person To Go To about these things, the Person To Show these things regardless of your relationship with someone.
I become entirely just that scene, that art, and there’s a degree of… infantilization that always bugs me- you’re not just a person who is fat, you’re “huggable”, you’re “a soft bean,” you’re “squishy”, and yeah, sometimes you want to be these things, but instead of having the agency to choose, you’re just… locked into it in some people’s eyes.
And I.
Can’t stand.
My agency being taken from me.
I love the fatfur scene, I love my friends I’ve made so very dearly, but these are real problems I’ve had to contend with, real struggles I’ve had, and it’s made me a lot less open to people who think they know me only because we share that single, frayed connective thread. If I don’t really like someone but they’re in the scene, that just… doesn’t magically give them a friendship with me! It’s surface level, I’m not friends with everyone with brown eyes, either!
So the question becomes- do I want to take myself, my true self, into that place? Expose myself to that, a self that matters so much? Do I want to risk becoming a caricature again, or do I use a fresh self, cleaned of these expectations, to… have a break from it all for a time?
I don’t know.
I wish it was easy, that people didn’t place these expectations on one another. But we don’t live in that world, and it’s something I have to think long and hard on.
