sulfurousacid

I'll be here when it all gets weird

  • he him

37, huge nerd, ace/aro 🔞minors dni🔞
I like weird porn die mad about it



boarlord
@boarlord

In 2018 I wrote an essay about the videogame industry and its depictions of fatness for The Outline (RIP). In truth, it was about the logic of austerity and the need for a strong labour movement in tech. It got a lot of things right.

The essay has had a strange lifecycle: nominated for an award, mentioned on Kotaku and Longreads, attacked by incels and chasers alike. Recently, it appeared in Todd Harper’s excellent academic paper, Fighting/Fat: Fighting Game Characters and the Emptiness of Video Game Fatness, for the Journal of Electronic Gaming and Esports. Harper has studied the rhetorical usage of fatness in videogames for a decade plus and it’s an honour to be included in this piece.

It's also a good opportunity to revisit some core ideas in the essay with the benefit of distance.

We’ve seen from the multiple Activision/Blizzard scandals that toxic workplaces are enabled at the leadership level, just like academics have theorized and workers have always said. We’re seeing in real-time that any solution to ideologically compromised art begins with a labour movement that protects its workers. But in terms of advancing material justice for fat people through the medium of videogames, little has changed.

When Hades II was announced, I saw a lot of folks point out that the sequel may very likely repeat its predecessor’s anti-fatness.1

The trailer goes to great lengths to show off their normatively attractive—thin, muscular, abled—characters. It’s irritating, sure. Especially when media outlets claim that the makers of the game, “[continue] to hold the gay community in a chokehold with its sexy Greek gods.” Whose gay community? The characters, at least the ones they’ve chosen to share with the public, look nothing like, say, your average bear and the bear community is global with its own circuit party ecosystem. I’m a fat dyke deeply attracted to other fat dykes. Not musclebound dykes. Not chubby dykes. Fat dykes. The ones who are unequivocally fat. Where are we?

I often see fat people decry the lack of representation in most games. I get the impulse, I really do — I was there myself. But I stopped caring about representation as a vehicle for material justice. It's justice as gesture, really. Money making money.

I care about the fat workers that make the games we play. What’s the point of fat representation in videogames if real fat people are forced to crunch? Are paid less than their peers? Are afraid to speak up? Are they in a union? Will the union speak for them? Leftist in every way but dignity for fat people remains the default posture online. Here in Canada, it’s still very legal to fire someone for their weight. And all of this assumes fat people are even on the development team and in positions of leadership that can influence the quality of fat representation. To return to the example of Hades II, if a set of developers made a game where the only fat people in it are either punchlines or monstrous enemies, why should we trust that they’ll do better in the sequel? What proof do we have that they’ve unlearned and continue to unlearn decades of conditioning in the span of your average development cycle?

If these questions aren't front of mind, I don't think you're as concerned with the survival of fat people, in this case, the fat workers who make the games you play, as you think you are.

Buying power is useless when it comes to pursuing true liberation. You don't undo capitalism with more of the same. But you do make it easier for fat people to survive capitalism if you buy fat cultural works directly from us and the few straight-sized people who celebrate fatness without dehumanizing us. (They exist.)

I don’t care how self-serving this sounds. I’m a fat trans dyke making videogames about fatness. There are countless fat sex workers making glorious fat porn. An infinitude of fat furries making honest fat art. Support us instead.


  1. Could this all be a large feint and Supergiant might have a fat character in the works? Possibly. Why hide it? Look how people lost it for Ragnorok’s Thor or Resident Evil 8’s Lady Dimitrescu, whose dimensions, sorry internet, would make her fat. Not tall. Fat. It’s now a marketing bullet point to go loud with your most marginalized vessel first. Even Bungie released the Witch Queen’s height.


dirtbagboyfriend
@dirtbagboyfriend

this excellent post is making the rounds and I’d be remiss not to chime in and suggest the game my tiny studio is working on, Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 to as a small offering of a game with a bunch of fat characters of different sizes AND fat developers behind them! In fact our characters are all based on the devs or OCs of theirs and that’s why we have the range on screen: it reflects the range off-screen. We even have fat, trans lesbians (of color!) and all of the characters are romanceable (or not! Up to you!) with a salient ace romantic option.
Please check out the demo and maybe wishlist us so you can meet all those characters when the game is out later this year?
Click here to go to our steam page with the Story Mode demo
OR
Click here to go to our itchio page with the vibey af Endless Mode demo! We’re practically giving away most of the game for free lol


namelessWrench
@namelessWrench

Because it's the game everyone keeps claiming to want to see


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in reply to @boarlord's post:

its me, im fat furries making honest fat art!

cant believe they made the balders gate orcs twunks. disgraceful.

edit: you know what? ima go off. im so sick of these increasingly detailed state of the art character generation shown off in every AAA trailer but you STILL cant make a fat person. and if you can its tacked on in a way that it just looks stilted and unnatural and the textures stretch and make them look like a balloon. sometimes we get a race that looks inhuman enough i can relate to it. sometimes we get a pandarian. most of the time the only way i can relate to my rpg protagonist is to just make them my go-to olive-skinned-girl-in-a-leather-jacket that is guaranteed to be playable in anything with a character creator. I cant make a character that looks remotely like me so i have to jump to the other side of the uncanny valley or ill be looking at the weird box shaped, poorly uv mapped, fat people in sims 4 for the next 80 hours.

why is it more likely that I'll be able to play as an actual bear, than to play as someone who looks like me or my friends in the gay bear community.

This single card from the mtg pride set is like the only good Bear representation I've ever seen in fantasy

bearscape card

in reply to @dirtbagboyfriend's post: