Unexpected "Weight Gain Content" in Literature

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Hoka! Hoka! Hoka!, by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson is part of a series of short story collections about a race of space teddy bears who become insanely dedicated LARPers and spend all their time acting out bits of Earth culture. In the chapter "The Tiddlywink Warriors", the (human) protagonist's wife crash-lands on a planet and is taken captive by another race of aliens who think of her as a goddess and stuff her with fattening food. She disappears for most of the chapter, which is mostly focused on the protagonist's efforts to rescue her with a bunch of Hoka emulating the French Foreign Legion, but is reunited with him in the end, where he notes she's reached a state of "pleasantly bouncy plumpness" and that the seams of her clothing are starting to give way. 

The Science Fiction Weight Loss Book, an anthology edited by Isaac Asimov, is an entire collection of stories related to weight loss and gain.  It's mostly played for body horror, and almost all of them get pretty dark.

The Soprano Sorceress by L.E. Modesitt.  The protagonist is a pudgy middle-aged woman from Earth who finds herself transported to another world in a slim, youthful body, and she's got magic powers, to boot. Sorcerers and sorceresses in this world have to eat constantly to fuel their magic, and she spends a lot of time warring with her deeply ingrained resistance to overeating and worry about putting on weight, to the point she almost starves from overuse of her powers and not eating enough. Mostly just a tease, at least in the part of the series I read--she's losing weight, not gaining it. But it's not hard to think of some intriguing situations here...

Princess Ben by Catherine Gilbert Murdock.  A chubby princess falls under the sway of a nasty governess, who tries to turn her into a proper lady, including slimming her down. She discovers a secret passage out of the room where she's being kept captive and gleefully gorges herself in the pantry every night, gaining even more weight, much to her captor's despair.  

The Princess Bride by William Goldman. The very beginning of the book is the story of a beautiful chambermaid who's lusted after by a king. The queen discovers the chambermaid has a weakness for chocolate, and begins keeping huge quantities of it lying around to tempt her. The chambermaid "went from delicate to whopping inside of a season", but doesn't mind, and ends up happily married to the palace chef.

The Fairy Godmother by Mercedes Lackey. The main character is living a version of the Cinderella story, and notes that one of her stepsisters has been putting on weight, possibly as a side effect of gobbling extra desserts just so 'Cinderella' can't have them.

As mentioned earlier, the work of Jack L. Chalker is absolutely rife with transformations of all kinds, mostly body-switching or being turned into aliens but also including weight gain:

When The Changewinds Blow: A girl on a quest tricks a wicked alchemist into drinking her own love potion and falling for her, but the alchemist is a jealous, possessive lover and keeps the girl dosed with mind-clouding potions; when she eventually comes to her senses, she realizes she's put on a ton of weight from lazing around stuffing herself with starchy foods.  The enchanted gem sending her on the quest gets fed up and commands her to get back to it (also threatening to make her gain more weight if she doesn't comply.)

The Well of Souls series: The most notable example is unfortunately an underage kid, who's drugged and then wakes up to realize she's been overeating (I'm sensing a theme here), but there's a few other weight gain bits scattered throughout the books--I particularly remember a woman from a prehistoric-level human culture, but with odd psychic abilities, glutting herself to build up fat stores to fuel her mental powers.

The Messiah Choice: It's literally just one line, but I remember a character observing that another character "was having serious trouble getting her jeans on--she'd put on a lot of weight in a very short amount of time."  Oddly, there's no explanation of why, nor is this ever followed up on, so it really is just transformation for the sake of it.

G.O.D. Inc: One of the two main characters is detective Brandy Horowitz, whose weight fluctuates over the course of the books; she starts off plump, gets very fit during the first book, and eventually gains it all back.

 

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On 9/6/2021 at 11:45 PM, PrinceForFlabby said:

Found out about a fantasy series, Soldier Son by Robin Hobb. The magic and manna can be produced only through hedonism = feasting + sex. So all the witches and wizards are obese as hell, since the townspeople sending huge amount of foods for their wizard or witch to help making magic. 

Also its getting more significant in the second book
 

 

I decided to give this one a look. Three things I can say now that I'm most of the way through the second book:

1) It's a really good story - a narrative of the conflict between colonizers and indigenous peoples set in a low-magic world where the European-analogues have a birth-order-based caste system, told by a born soldier who finds himself trapped between the two groups.

2) The weight gain is pretty much exclusively male, with the only significant fat woman being a spirit of ambiguous age (always fat, but sometimes old, sometimes young.)  Not my thing - I still enjoyed the books a lot, but if you're just looking for women gaining weight, you won't find it here (unless it pops up in the third book, and I haven't seen anything to suggest that's likely.)

3) That said, if it is your thing, I strongly recommend Book 2, Forest Mage, which is a novel length slow-burn WG story that goes into the changes to the protagonist's body, and how he feels about them, at length. It includes many descriptions of the fit of clothes, eating scenes, teasing and humiliation, feeder/feedee relationships -- just about everything you'd expect in a WG story, but it's an actual full-length novel that's well-written and has a real story, too.  Definitely don't miss it if this is something you're into.

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Ha - well, I guess I should have actually finished the second book before posting this, because it does suggest near the very end that a woman will be joining the ranks of the magicians during the time of the third book - though I don't know how big a part she'll play.