![]() Can the fat girl be the hero too? Can the fat girl win the guy (or girl!)? What about sex? Because there are tons of people out there, young people especially, who wonder about questions they don’t know how to ask. Why you should consider writing the fat main character: Because writing the fat girl is important. Wouldn’t it be cool to have someone other than a Hollywood girl save the day? And there’s nothing wrong with that! But when you look at your fiction, think about the people you know - or hey, even yourself. They dwell in YA, especially (romance actually has a lovely variety of people, which folks might not suspect if they don’t read it!). And, often, written main characters reflect the Hollywood thin and pretty the ‘average’ girl is, in fact, quite pretty, even unaware of how pretty she is. A lot of that can be fun - writing someone prettier than you, someone with that hair color you always wanted, someone who wears the clothes you’d never be able to afford. Writing is, in some ways, a way to put on a different skin and explore someone you won’t get a chance to be. Blur and the not-so-bad boys at school, all while juggling the tumult that comes with being the fat best friend to a certified knockout, and the massive amounts of emotional, physical, and psychic baggage that come with Growing Up Fat™. In Rae, portrayed with incredible, specific nuance by eventual BAFTA winner Sharon Rooney, I saw myself in a character for the first time: a terminally horny, fat teenager obsessed with the more nuanced talking points of Oasis vs. I was 23 and new to Los Angeles when my brethren of fat girls on Tumblr started incessantly posting about My Mad Fat Diary, a series adapted from Rae Earl’s memoir of the same name. Ask most people and their answer is some third banana on a sitcom who wore glasses and loved geometry, or a matinee idol who exploded their entire reality in one Saturday afternoon, but for me, the answer to this question was more elusive. When was the first time you saw yourself on screen? Not in the blankly aspirational hero-with-a-thousand-faces sort of way, but in the oh shit did these writers observe my entire life as a field study way, that marrow-deep connection to a celluloid hero that makes you sit back in your seat and shudder with recognition. ![]() ![]() I hope it can function here as a gateway to the larger conversation suggested within this piece, not as an insult to anyone reading. I understand that it is a loaded, complicated word for many of us. When Kate Hagen ’s mission to curate a cinematic canon for fat girls came up short, she searched out films that best transcend ‘fat girl’ tropes, and suggests how Hollywood can serve an audience neglected by decades of poorly drawn caricatures.Īuthor’s note : Throughout this piece, I use the word ‘fat’ to describe my own experiences, as well as the main descriptive word to describe bigger bodies, as I am personally most comfortable with the word ‘fat’.
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