time-to-shank-a-bitch:

invernom: “this is art of her when she was young, before she was banished from the mermaid kingdom” (seriously it happens all the time it’s kinda insane here you go have a bunch of examples and this is really just the tip of the iceberg ugh (… Sit down for a spell and allow me to explain something. Thinsula (Or Morgana, if ya nasty) shouldn’t exist. The beauty of this character is that she IS AWARE OF HER FIGURE, That line, “And now look at me…wasted away to practically nothing.” Is supposed to be witty. She knows she’s healthy. There was a bloody song about it that they cut from the musical about this! I am not about to psychoanalyze my favorite Disney Villain, but there could be 3-4 reasons she said this. 1. She’s lamenting sorrowfully. 2. She’s being melodramatic. 3. She’s being facetious. or 4. It was JUST a deliciously delivered bit of dialogue. As for the Thinsula fans…far be it from me to shove my opinion about what an animated character is SUPPOSED to look like down your throat. Fanart is art (a medium that is full of creative outlets) made by fans (individuals who enjoy and/or obsess over a certain aspect of life, pop culture, series, and etc). Just know the source material… Ursula the sea witch was based and animated off of Divine (Glenn Milstead) a drag performer. Divine was massive in personality and size…I don’t think that Ursula, even in her previous years, was any less of what she was. An over-the-top performer with a SERIOUS flare for the dramatic. I do not like Thinsula, in fact I rail against it because it defeats the purpose of the characters overall stature and grace (ex: when Disney released the Ursula designer villain doll I uprooted a MIGHTY sequoia…the creators should have known better than to make thin one of their more fabulously full characters), but I will hardly ever argue with a persons creative interpretation. And how about this disquieting conundrum…what if people decided to draw the Disney Princesses as pleasantly plump? Would it be the same reaction?

I find your response to my post a bit befuddling, since you seem to be blending together passionate support for my argument against thin ursula fanart being at all okay….. with bringing me several squares towards victory in my big game of bingo.

The defenses in your comment were definitely close enough to count for the squares “People draw thin Disney characters as fat all the time, it should go both ways”, “It’s just fanart” and “People can draw what they want”.

To talk about “People draw thin Disney characters as fat all the time, it should go both ways” and “People can draw what they want” I’m gonna expand I wrote for “people should be able to draw any version of any character” in a previous post, a defense which is along the same lines.

Not all creative interpretations of characters are okay. If people want to “creatively interpret” POC characters as white, or queer characters as straight, or fat characters as thin, that’s not okay. A lot of weird radical changes and ships are fair game in fanworks, except for those which involve taking representation away from minorities, since minorities get so fucking little canonical decent representation we really don’t deserve having what little representation we have taken away from us, even in fandom.

So queering, racebending and fattening (for lack of a better word) straight, white and thin characters is empowerment, and doing the reverse of that is erasure, all because straightness, whiteness and thinness already get the majority of good representation in the media. So if we take characters from the privileged groups and make them ours it’s barely making the tiniest most microscope dent in their representation, while privileged groups really REALLY don’t need any extra representation, especially when it’s at the expense of minorities’ representation. I think this post about whitewashing further explains why this is so not okay really really well.

So that’s why chubby/fat versions of thin disney characters in fanart = hell yeah defy the norms & empower the fat people, while thin versions of chubby/fat disney characters = no fuck no you already have a bajillion canon thin characters leave us to our tiny handful.

If you think that doesn’t seem fair, please remember it’s infinitely more fair than the hand minorities are served in terms of canonical media representation.

As for “It’s just fanart”

that defense is bull firstly because there is nothing “just” about fanart, especially in fandom internet culture right now. Some pieces of fanart get passed around and viewed by thousands to even millions of people. (e.g. I know one piece of thin ursula fanart which is part of a series commonly known as “if disney villains were [sexy/beautiful/pretty/hot]” has been featured on countless sites and is really super well-known) When you google image search for a character, very often you’ll see lots of fanart of them alongside canonical images. (For instance, when you google search “Ursula” I’d say the images you get from it are 1/3-½ fanart, and ¼ of the total is thin Ursula fanart.) People cosplay fanart, sell fanart on t-shirts and prints and bags, and do fanart inspired by the fanart of others. Fanartists can profit greatly from their fanart, in money and/or renown, and make businesses out of it. Fanart can have lots of influence on people, especially in its fandom.

In terms of thin ursula fanart specifically, those images can have influence in spreading hugely fatphobic ideas, like A) the idea that thinning down a fat character is not only okay to do, but that it’s a good idea because people will praise how creative you are good-looking the character is in your version, B) equating thinness with beauty and youth and fatness with ugliness and age, C) the idea that men can only ever desire/have relationships with thin women (I’ve seen quite a number of Young Thin Ursula fanart pieces with descriptions detailing headcanons of how Ursula had a relationship with King Triton when she was young and thin before she got dumped and banished and ate a lot and got fat since she was so depressed) which leads me to D) the idea that fat people all overeat and that’s why they’re fat.

These I know because I’ve looked through dozens of pages of thin Ursula fanart on deviantart and seen them talk about why they chose to draw thin ursula and comments others make on the art, and also seen posts passing thin ursula fanart around on tumblr and other sites and what sort of fatphobic stuff people say pertaining to/inspired by the art. It’s truly sickening.

And anyways, even if fanart was something of little importance or influence on people, it’s a worthy endeavor to call people out on it when they do offensive shit even in the most seemingly insignificant ways. Even microaggressions and small acts of discrimination still hurt and can do people great damage, especially if they happen over and over and build up.

So yeah, all in all I’m not afraid to tell people how they an and can’t interpret and draw a character in fan works, especially when it’s pretty much that the things they CAN do category covers “just about anything you want, go fucking crazy”, and the only things they CAN’T do is “whitewashing, thinnormatizing, heterowashing or ciswashing characters”. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that people limit themselves to literally doing anything they want to do except being offensive minority-erasing assholes.

(via thattomcatt)