Fat Rant

[quigonginger]

No: HPFGUIDX 150607

> Potioncat wrote:
, a little taken aback by JKR's website. She rants, very 
> appropriately, about the push for girls to be uber-thin.  > (snip)
> I agree fully with JKR, don't get me wrong. And yeah, I know Molly 
is 
> plump. (She's one of the good guys, for the record.) But really, 
take 
> a look at how JKR generally portrays overweight people in the 
series. 
> Dudley? Crabbe? Goyle? Vernon? Umbridge?
> Yes there are bad thin guys too: Snape, Dark Lord, Petunia... 
(snip)> I just wonder if JKR knows she's doing all most the same 
thing as the 
> media she complains about?

Ginger:

Actually, I never really worried about her characterization of fat 
people.  

I'm a Two-Ton-Tess myself.  Always have been.  Back in my high school 
days, when I was 140 pounds lighter (really!) a guy was going around 
collecting money for the Save the Whales campaign to remove beached 
whales back to the ocean.  I had just moved there and it was 2 months 
before one of my friends finally blurted out "How can you stand it 
when he talks about you like that?"

I had 2 choices:  admit to being Queen of the Dork-people and tell 
her that I had no idea he wasn't really talking about aquatic 
mammels, or pretend I had known it all along.  I chose the latter, 
and said, "Why should I let him bother me?  He's just a stupid boy."  

It was the best save of my life.  My friends thought I was So Cool to 
take it in stride like that.  That's when I learned the single most 
valuable lesson of my life:  Your friends are the important people, 
not some blathering idiot; and if you can laugh at yourself, you'll 
have an ever-present source of amusement for life.  I find the whole 
thing quite hillarious now. 

I saw him again at my 20 year reunion.  We ate, drank and went 
bowling and had a fantastic time.  He's fat now too.  Hah.

Back to the Potterverse (now that you know I am truely an expert on 
blubber).

JKR's protrayal of fat people is two-fold.  The good ones are simply 
good people who are overweight.  Neville is a good kid who happens to 
be chubby.  Molly is like all the women in my family, what my Grandpa 
used to call "pleasingly plump".  (Except cousin Martha, but she 
takes after the other side of her family.)  

I'd be more worried if all the good people were svelt.  That, to me, 
would show a bias against heft that JKR obviously doesn't hold.  
There are plenty of people out there who have excess weight, but are 
nonetheless beautiful.  I think Delta Burke, Oprah, and Star Jones 
are among the most beautiful women on the planet, and none of them 
are bony.  Even without good looks, some people who 
are "gravitationally challenged", as my friend Ann used to say, have 
the charm or that French phrase that slips my mind that means that 
they have that "certain something" where they can carry it off.  
Think of the late Mama Cass Elliot.

For all we know, the Fat Lady is pretty.  Olympe Maxime, being half-
giant, is not small, but she is "handsome", which I think describes 
her features as well as her demeanor.  She is intelligent, charming 
and brave (treking off to meet giants with Hagrid), and she carries 
herself with dignity.  Much of the same can be said about Mme Bones.

The bad characters, on the other hand, are not just overweight, they 
are grotesque.  There's a difference.  Trust me.  For every Delta 
Burke, there's a 300+ pound slob who has a problem finding shirts 
long enough cover her belly, and who eats the whole box of mac-n-
cheese straight from the pan if she's had a bad day.

But enough about me.  Back to the Potterverse. 

JKR's bad'n'fat characters are not just fat, they are overindulgent 
or overindulged in other areas.  Pre-diet Dudley was not only fed too 
much, he is given too much of whatever he wanted.  Vernon wants to 
impress the neighbours by having more and better than what they 
have.  Umbridge, possibly the fattest, wants power and more power, 
and will stop at nothing to feed her gluttony for it.  Sluggy, while 
not a bad guy, is certainly a good example of the corrupting 
influence greed can have on a person.

In all these cases, it is not the weight that is the problem, but 
rather, that the weight is a byproduct of the problem, and JKR uses 
the physical description to convey that.

In short, the message I got from the books is that good people come 
in all shapes and sizes, and that greed and overindulgence is bad.

Ginger "I'd kill for a Melocreme", back to munching celery.  Again.