Why haven’t I seen a fat woman in a lead role?

[cheddar]

On 12/11/2020 at 11:48 AM, Mr Froggy said:

forced diversity

Every post after these words were typed seems to verge on being abjectly unreadable. The primary reason you don't see fat leads is that fat actors are typecast and it is far easier for The Industry to bank existing stars than ones that physically can only perform specific roles. There might be exceptions given for actors/actresses gaining/losing weight for roles, but that's the thing: weight is dynamic - it's far easier to hire a skinny actor for a fat role than a white actor for a black role for Very Obvious reasons. So a burgeoning thick actress specifically has fewer roles available to them and the few they do have will see competition from thinner actresses.

Since roles -> exposure/more potential chances of success -> better roles, the Industry as it exists is built in a way that prevents fat female leads.

"Forced Diversity" is yet one of many myths and zinger phrases used to oversimplify complex issues and mobilise the Angry White Men that right-wing movements in the USA seemingly rely upon. This is an era of huge production costs of big movies and tiny margins for cinemas where risk aversion is paramount in the minds of execs. Diversity is a financial decision in a multicultural and multiracial society; the broader your viewing audience, the more butts on seats and merch you sell. If anything 'forces' diversity, it's shifts in demographics and consumption. If Straight White Men are too busy playing vidyagames to go sit and see a film, why pander to intolerance in your non-audience? Black Panther made a shitton of money, deal with it tbh.

So long as thinness remains an aspiration, mainstream protagonists will be thin. Just like the American Dream, it doesn't matter if you will ever look as thin as a Hollywood Star, so long as you can project yourself into that body, the typical movie-goer will ignore the contradiction of underweight leads in an overweight society.

[cheddar]

On 12/17/2020 at 4:24 AM, Mr Froggy said:

Plenty fallacies there

To appeal to fallacy without further logical argument is itself a fallacy. We both know that's a debating 101 bad faith move.

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racial/sexual diversity which may be unrealistically disproportionate for the setting, unfaithful to the source material and/or unrepresentative to the core of the materials target market

Okay, let's break this half down a bit. There's a bunch of assumptions being made within a statement like this even if taken on face value. For example;

1. We assume that other forms of diversity are somehow distinct and require 'unique' analysis
2. We assume that there is a universal, objective and measurable metrics for 'realism' and 'representativeness'
3. We assume we have perfect knowledge of authorial intent (primarily within a fictional setting) and/or its historical context (primarily for works situated within or derived from reality)
4. We assume that the purpose of media is to serve the interests and needs of predefined commercial audiences

Regarding assumption 1, I think it is safe to say that this specificity is intentionally designed to serve a 'culture war'-esque framing of these topics as more important than any other form of discrimination to one's identification within either 'conservatism' or 'liberalism'. Where do Religion and Class for instance, fit into this narrative? Neither one is truly contested by that 'conflict', so they are excluded. And yet, if you made a film set in Palestine and excluded Islamic characters, or took a film like Parasite and rewrote the poor characters to be the same as everyone else, I think it's hard to argue that these examples would be less egregious a twisting of reality. Why exclude these? Because that's not what's making The Right mad today. They're the only people whose perspective we should care about?

Assumptions 2-3 are fairly straightforward. Humans are not mind-readers that can 'know' each other's thoughts, nor is our understanding of history or even such basic facts as evolution and viral transmission (thanks, 2020) things that are universal and uncontested. In fact, science is built on uncertainty and challenging our observations. People will disagree on if something is realistic, depending on their frame of reference. Even if a bunch of studies debunk right-wing claims of ethnic purity and stasis within medieval Europe, there will still be people that moan if they see one brown face in a Robin Hood adaptation. It doesn't matter if the character has genuine explanations within that adaptation. It doesn't matter even matter if they're well-written or if the actor does a good job or not. The torch-bearing mob doesn't care.

Assumption 4 is where things start getting fun. Why should an author tell their own story? No, the purpose of fiction is apparently, to pander. To spoonfeed customers with what they want, unchallenged. Ghostbusters 2 isn't terrible because it was poorly written and executed, it was bad because it had WOMEN! And some of them were almost FAT! The new Star Wars Trilogy isn't bad on its own merits, it's because of the POC*! I never personally approved of this! The audacity!!!11!!!  Of course, fiction doesn't have to be popular to be good. In fact, it seems increasingly obvious today that works which specifically go out of their way to be critical are more successful.

Attacking a media property for lacking self-consistency is a different analysis to attacking it specifically because you don't like the presence of women and POC.

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This unrepresentative diversity is either cynically or zealously engineered;  either for nakedly political reasons - or because a media executive believes "Diversity" is such a hot cultural property, that pursuing it is a commercial no-brainer.

After all, most examples people bring up re; "false diversity" are commercials larping as media properties, since merch and licensing is where the real bucks are.

The existence of diversity itself isn't a bad thing. Calling diversity "fake" is done by specific people with an 'axe to grind' as you say, to encourage people upset over dumb corporate decisions to adopt positions further to the right politically.

It would be dumb and despicable to do straight adaptations of old racist films or ones that deliberately skew reality in the opposite direction. Women were and are regularly excluded from recorded history and yet you won't see conservatives complain if a work has too few women. A sequel straying from the original work shouldn't be treated so shallowly. There's a distinctively one-sided analysis going on here, isn't there? It's almost as if there's a dog being whistled...These arguments aren't made in good faith. It's angry people that vent about their pet political peeves and these over-reactions being itself exploited as free advertising for the 'other side'. "Don't like racist people? Come watch our film that made them mad!" Whether or not something is 'realistic' doesn't come into the equation either way.

And besides, when did realism suddenly become important in fantasy space opera?

Don't get me wrong, most examples people bring up of "false diversity" are genuinely bad due to the nature of corporate interference in the creative process, but these kinds of decisions are a fraction of the underlying problem. Most times a corporation markets its products as being 'progressive' it does so while simultaneously sidelining POC within the production process of such works. The Mulan remake flopped in China as well as the US partly due to this duality.

Falling for the "false diversity" narrative doesn't make you a bad person. It's easy to see how appealing it is to pretend that right-wing politics is anti-corporate (while it simultaneously enables Disney to become a monopoly). Corporations exploit both sides, after all - though I don't think it is hard to see which is the lesser evil these days. It is in the interest of both sides of US politics - and the corporations around them, to misrepresent the importance of big-budget media properties for their own gain.

So, yeah. TL;DR I don't think fat lead roles is an inherently bad thing and harassing people on this forum for their views (and choice of profile picture) is baffling and honestly rather depressing. Is Big-Budget Hollywood capable of having fat leads in a non-exploitative way right now? Probably not, but to say that "false diversity" is why furthers a political agenda, misses the whole picture and ignores any other possible representative media.

*Aliens, the actual racial allegories of Lucas' star wars films not included. No alien leads allowed. Only Humans will save the Galaxy Far Far, away.