Fat Princesses

Growing up female in North America, one of the many female "role models" we have in children's popular culture is the fairy-tale, oft-Disnified princess. Unlike many of my peers, I am not nostalgic for the Disney Princess. My deconstructive lense is often way too far into overdrive to find them anything better than questionable, yet I am fascinated by why they're so ubiquitious and why some young women hold on to their images with affection. Among the troubling sameness that is the Disney Princess* is her thinness. You ever check out the waistline of Sleeping Beauty or Jasmine? I don't know if they had corsets in medieval Agrabah (or wherever the crap that Hollywood-derived, vaguely Middle Eastern city is supposed to be), but that ain't natural!

Years ago, when I was a teenaged "photographer" and deviantART junkie, I came across an unusual series of drawings. The artist had taken several Disney Princess characters and redrawn them as very, very fat (see Jasmine, Alice, and Maid Marian from Robin Hood). Interpreting them as subversive, I favorited them with glee. Reading the descriptions now, it is obvious that they're anything but, the artist made them as a joke. Because in our culture, the idea of a fat heroine is laughable.

In July of last year, a capture-the-flag-type video game was released called, you guessed it, Fat Princess. The titular princess is the flag, and to insure that the opposing team will not capture her the player feeds her cake until she is so fat that she is literally immobile. In this case, though the princess' fatness is sorta kinda positive, it's a means to make her an object, a holy grail of sorts, with no volition of her own.

I chose the Princess because she's a powerful archetype in our culture, an ideal of beauty and feminity that is to be emulated and worshipped by little girls, but you could probably apply these principles to other types of characters. Yet the message is always the same: fat is laughable, debilitating, and undesirable. And therein lies the problem.

*In this case I mean any main heroine, often in Disney movies, as they are mostly princesses. But not all the characters that follow the tropes of the Disney Princess are literally princesses.