Videogames:you can choose from twenty different eyelashes!!!! oh but you can’t be fat
Yeah, whine about how you can’t have a fat character that can scale walls, or sprint. Please whine more.
you’re so right kiddo….. games are very realistic……. like the parts where you die and then come back again? classic realism.
but we can’t have fat people in videogames because fat people are the real fantasy creatures and not like… the dragons. and of course, every thin person can scale a wall. sure sure.
Y’know what, here’s something that’s been pissing me off for a while.
Fat? Easy to gain. So so easy. Our bodies want to keep fat around, because we’re designed not to starve.
Dropping fat? NOT so easy. When people talk about “losing fat,” what they’re saying is “I need to override millions of years of genetics to convince my body I’m not dying and it doesn’t need this carefully-stored fuel.” Dieting? Your body thinks it’s starving. Work out like crazy? Your body thinks it’s in a situation where it needs to bring the hammer down on the regular, and that means you need more fuel – speaking just for myself, I want to eat the world after I lift. That shit doesn’t melt away, even if you’ve been training like a motherfucking monster for months and eating right, because the body wants to keep it.
So yeah, the “eat less move more” doctrine can fuck itself right in the face.
There are very, very active fat people, fat people who are experts at every sport and physical activity you can imagine. But because fat rests on top of the muscle, you don’t know when we’re jacked. Oh, sure, sometimes you can get a idea, if a person is WILDLY active, like for a fucking living. Here’s Samoa Joe, the NXT pro wrestling champion who was literally dethroned last night:
Yeah, you can see there’s a lot of power there.
But a lot of times you can’t. Here’s Vince Wilfork, two-time Superbowl tackling champion:
And here’s Holley Mangold, 2012 superheavyweight division Olympian:
These are people who fight (and flip, and do all kinds of crazy shit in Joe’s case), and run, and lift for a living.
And they’re not unusual, as much as you’d like to think so. The world is full of fat powerhouses, of fat runners, of fat Crossfitters, and they’re just as good at doing the thing as their smaller counterparts.
So realism? Fuck off. The only reason we don’t have fat game characters is because society is fatphobic as fuck.
Also? Saints Row lets you be fat, *and hot,* so don’t even come at me with “nobody wants that.”
“fat people can’t climb though”
(Exhibit A: Fezzik carrying 3 people up a cliff)
“yeah but that’s fictional!”
and video games aren’t?
Apparently weight weighs differently if it’s fat instead of, like, eight different machine guns and a rocket launcher?
Video games let you carry all sorts of shit, they can let you carry your own body.
(This got better) -V
I’m skinny af, have the stereotypical ‘athlete’ build and did Taekwondo for ten years, and until the day I quit, one of the worst people to spar against was the one kid in class who was asthmatic and obese. This guy was fast for his size, and strong as well. One kick would break clean through your block and send you reeling, and if he blocked you, it was like hitting a wall. On the off chance you actually landed a hit on him, guy barely even felt it, because the fat provided a layer of cushioning for his blood vessels, muscles and organs, aka the vital bits. Good luck moving him and driving him out of the box, by the way.
The other two ‘do NOT spar against them’ students were a martial arts nut and wushu black belt serving in the Navy, and a bad-tempered, skinny shrimp who could hit you twice and dodge out of range before you even got your foot off the ground. So you got Immovable Tank, IRL Terminator, and Speedster. But guess which two would actually see their body types represented in a video games, despite the Speedster actually being the least effective of the lot?
FantasyBoudicca 