A few people have asked me what I thought of Fat Princess; unthinkingly, I replied, "it looks cute."
Oh, and then I realized that there's supposed to be a controversy, since we have a game where the object is to rescue an obese woman and drag her around because her captors have overfed her. Some people are insulted.
I feel a little obtuse that it didn't even occur to me to anticipate that anyone would be upset about this; then again, I have been a little tired lately. Turns out I guess I didn't get a crazy airplane disease after all, but that I have hay fever, which means I cough and feel tired every day. So tired, in fact, that my reflexive response is to say, "Oh, get over it, fatty, it's just a game," and crawl back under my covers.
Of course, you know how I feel about "it's just a game." Surely there are some cases where it applies, where we ought to lighten up, and this might be one of them, but let's think about it anyway.
"I'm positively thrilled to see such unyielding dedication to creating a new generation of fat-hating, heteronormative assholes," says this particular argument, sarcastically, against Fat Princess.
The crux of the question is, does Fat Princess encourage fat-hating? Is it a really mean game? I'm thinking about this, really. Obviously, we as a society have a very narrow range of "acceptable" body types for people to have in order to be considered attractive, and I guess our media shows us that slender ladies are attractive, while fat ones are, at best, comic relief. I get the argument that this arrangement sucks, and it's narrow-minded to promote these ideals, but what's the alternative?
Should the princess not be fat, or something? Should we just decide no women in video games can be fat? I'm thinking while I write this that I've actually no memory of ever having seen a fat woman in a video game that wasn't a monster (Queen Brahne?), and that the fat princess is awful cute, and it's a funny convention in terms of game mechanics for her weight to make the rescuing difficult.
Right, it's supposed to be humorous, and I can see, maybe, why fat people wouldn't want their weight issue to be a joke, an obstacle for video gamers to hurl insults at. But the let's-say-"rubinesque" female as comedic character is a convention as old as the princess-needs-rescuing chestnut itself.
But hey, I promised not to toss aside the argument against Fat Princess so easily. One could argue that there are all kinds of admirable female comedians who've used their fat as a kind of female power. I think you were supposed to laugh at their jokes and admire them for being non-traditional, and for surviving society's narrow-mindedness intact, right? So why can't we have a funny, non-traditional princess to rescue? Isn't it kind of cute that, for once, the knights aren't strong enough to lift the lady?
Honestly, even I have to try real hard to even look at this so deeply. I don't think about Fat Princess any more than I think about other fat cartoon characters. Which is to say it would be weird, and I'd think equally discriminatory, to exclude them because, why again? We can laugh at slender people but not fat ones?
I'm pretty slim these days, but I had a period of being a fat teenager. Would I have been insulted by Fat Princess? I don't think so; I never thought of myself as a two-dimensional, cartoonish pig. That was a fake ideal, a comic convention, and I was a person. Period.
As is usually the case with these sorts of things, there may be a larger social issue here that actually has little to do with video games -- video games seem useless and detached, easily edited, less entrenched in our cultural consciousness, so it's easy to blame them. It would be a bit unnecessary here for me to explore the reasons why people become fat and talk about taking responsibility, and lectures on accepting self and others don't really go here, either, but the real resolution to the argument probably lies somewhere in there.
So yeah, as you can tell, I'm finding this pool too shallow to dredge much. I'm just gonna go with "it looks cute" from here on out.
[Update: I elaborated a little more formally at Kotaku.]
