#and all the images are of people with tiddies and soft fat

[distractionactivated]

Another day, another drawing fat people tutorial that seems to think the only people who get fat are people with estrogen-based endocrine systems and resultant fat distribution.

[nebulousmistress]

On Body Types...

Kylo Ren can be built like as many brick shithouses as he likes.

For Hux I need a different type of strength. Especially for my Hux. He kills people with his teeth, he can hand-to-hand a fully armed and armored riot trooper with only a pair of knives. And he weighs five pounds.

I’m drawing from somewhere a little personally dangerous for this but I have a spotter. She won’t let me go that far again, even if I’m accessing the very memories that drove me to anorexia.

I danced ballet as a teenager. At 120 pounds I was considered ‘fat’. I had Dem Hips even then. My B-cup tits were considered too large to be costumed properly because they bounced. My bare skeleton without flesh (the thinnest I ever got) was still a size 3, too wide to be pretty. After being turned down for parts and denied en pointe...

Anyway. Ignoring that. Ignoring that hard. I left it behind. I’m 16 years clean, and by clean I mean 16 years of eating relatively normally. I’m dieting now because I hit 210 pounds, not because I need to be tiny, and because my brain runs better on keto. That’s it. [/self pep talk]

I remember the type of strength we all had and what we looked like. Lifting each other on the practice floor because we were bored. Competitions for who could jump the highest, contests I lost despite clearing a meter from plie (I’d jump higher if I lost weight). Pulling and stretching each other’s joints just to see how far behind our heads we could stick our own feet. Muscles moving under skin despite the graceful curve of our arms and legs. I still have the ability to move every thoracic vertebra independently, to pop the joints in my ribs and sternum, to hold my arms outstretched and steady even if my humerus isn’t fully in the socket, and to move each toe independently (because fuck anatomy textbook lies, we had to prove we could do it in order to be considered for pointe).

Hux has never been well-fed. I would not be surprised if he’s had refeeding syndrome in the past due to Brendol’s mechanations. Even once Brendol dies I don’t expect his diet to change much because of bad habits and self-imposed restrictions. Yet he’s always been expected to survive, to excel, to rise above his peers to become something more. Even if the only expectations he met were his own. This is why I write him as weighing 5 pounds, hyperbole included. He’s managed to develop the strength of a ballet dancer because he’s had the grueling training of one and he eats like one. 

So yes. Kylo Ren built like a brick shithouse. He can keep his giant man-tiddies and his huge yet soft Alderaanian biceps. Sure he’ll beat Hux at a bout of arm wrestling. He’ll also find himself surprised when Hux grabs and twists and Kylo winds up in a shoulder lock with no idea how he got there. At first it’s shocking and odd but over time Kylo learns not to mind much, he could just stand up and walk off with Hux perched on him like a housecat trying to tackle a moose while projecting that exact mental image to everyone within radius.

[littlewalken]

Art rant

They seriously need to make the PBS show How Art Made the World and especially the episode more human than Human easy to watch on line. If more people understood how we are hard wired to accept different representations of the human body, as long as they aren't uncanny valley, and have been making human forms with big eyes, long legs, squishy butt cheeks, and giant tiddies forever.

What are some of the oldest sculptures of the human form ever found? All those tiny stone age 'Venus' figurines. They're pregnant/fat with soft round bodies and there's no doubt they're meant to be a human.

They aren't meant to be realistic or a beauty standard you're meant to achieve, they're a celebration of what the artist loves about the female body.

All those Greek and Roman statues with their impossibly long shins and lack of tail bones have small junk because that was part of their society's vision of the ideal male form. How many of their female statues have soft round torsos instead of flat stomachs?

No one bitches the statue of David's hands and feet are too big.

Why are you spending your energy complaining about the size of the ta-tas on a piece of artwork made by someone who likes to draw big 'uns?

And do you think it's fine for the Egyptians to draw furries because they're historical, or actual depictions of 'aliens', but shit on modern furry art?

Did you ever see the cave painting of The Sorcerer? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorcerer_(cave_art) One of the oldest depictions of a human being in the world and the dude's dressed up as a deer.

And animation, how much of that started with big expressive eyes and giant heads? How many ancient statues look like that? You ever try to make an image of a person? You ever try to sculpt/carve one? You ever see instruction books about that and how they say most beginners make flat faces with big eyes at first?

If it's a feature you like and you want to emphasize and exaggerate it people will accept it as a representation of a human being. We're just like that.