#at least the fat wawas i've seen don't seem fetishy to me?

[russenoire]

i haven't seen an inability on the part of fan artists to draw fat people outside of this patently unrealistic uniform roundness in my primary fandom, thankfully. i'm also not sure i'd characterize all the fat serizawa fanart i see as fetishistic, either.

though i understand the discomfort around fattening up japanese characters for art's sake when japan's obesity rate is so low (~7.5% of the population), and often take issue with applying one's own cultural lens across the board? here, i cannot relate.

many of the reasons for that statistic are healthy ones, like:

cultural norms around not overeating (the 腹八分 or hara-hachi-bun principle—eating until 80% full—being one example);

the normalization of walking everywhere;

excellent public transit;

exercise breaks in schools and in workplaces, etc.

some of them are not:

the harsh shaming of children, especially girls, for gaining even small amounts of weight;

annual workplace weigh-ins and government-levied penalties on companies with too many overweight staff.

members of my weekly anime binge-watch group have expressed justified discomfort with how fat people are depicted sometimes in the shows we watch, if they appear at all. i've started to take notice more myself: for every neutrally stout or fat character (keiichi ikari, paranoia agent) in my own watching, there's a frickin' skinny female character distressed about the possibility of gaining a kilo or two (koyomi mizuhara and tomo takino, azumanga daioh; sakura haruno and ino yamanaka from naruto). or a fat otaku dude who is relentlessly bullied until he loses the weight, or a fat character whose size is played for laughs.

anime is not always an accurate reflection of japanese culture, but character beats like these are dropped in without comment... in much the same way american media treats 'engagement' as just part of the marriage process, or show characters going out of their way not to visit doctors for whatever reason. it's not worth commenting on precisely because it IS common.

so i can understand why americans in particular do this. fatness is not rare here, but savaging and disrespect of fat people is customary anyway, and our media still depicts them as outliers. i cannot blame american fan artists for pushing back against all this culturally-encouraged self-hate and showing fat as something wonderful and worthy of appreciation too; perhaps this reads like fetishization to non-americans.

Fandom Problem #4042

fandom problem: this is a very small thing, but americans drawing anime characters fat because they feel like it’s “more realistic”…when said characters are japanese and japan has a much lower obesity rate than america. on top of that, the way fatness is talked about in fandom spaces feels almost creepy and fetishizing?