[tw: casual fat-shaming, equating food intake with weight, spreading misconceptions, body-shaming, abusive mentality, body horror artwork (in the website I link to)]

I’m fat and I’m a gamer. It’s bad enough that I almost never see a hero that looks like me but I was recently playing a Vita game called Soul Sacrifice and it has some of the worst fat-shaming I’ve ever seen. The game’s bosses are all former humans who have been turned into monsters thanks to their flaws. Greed, envy, cruelty, stuff like that. But this “Harpy” monster is based purely on being fat!

http://soulsacrifice.wikia.com/wiki/Harpy Click on “show Spoiler” in the bio section to see her story. She was once thin (and thus “pretty”) but then suffered a broken heart and began to eat a lot. and of course this makes her fat! She gets sensitive about her size and then one day sees an attractive man at the local market, which makes her eat more and of course that only makes her fatter. When the man disappears one day, she tries to find him but she’s too fat to travel for some reason? It’s then that she sees a demonic chalice (the object that transforms people into monsters in the game) and asks it to give her wings and it does so by turning her fat into wings. she flies to the man’s house and sees that he married some woman. and this is where it gets even more insulting! The now-winged-woman realizes that she was never in love with the man at all, but instead that she wanted to eat him the whole time! WTF! as if that’s something fat people do! So she becomes a monster and eats him, his wife, and their livestock. then the chalice grants her second wish: to be able to eat nonstop (yet another thing we do right?) and gouges a hole in her stomach so she can eat and never be full.



The way the game tells the story is even more insulting than my summary. It uses hurtful terms like “profound rotundity” “excess encumbrance” and the worst of all, “lardy surplus”. Lardy surplus! as if thin is our default size and the rest is a “surplus” that could and should be eliminated!

there is no monster based on thinness that I know of in this game. But no it just had to fat-shame people with this Harpy monster and what’s worse, the picture of the lady before her transformation is actually quite lovely! http://soulsacrifice.wikia.com/wiki/File:Harpyhuman.jpg but no we have to hate her because she’s fat and of course she’s fat because she eats a lot and of course she wants to eat people. WTF