Anonymous
Wed 11 Oct 2023 18:42:19
772624
No.172907
First off: someone will complain. There are always complaints. A vocal minority will always write you off based on their reactionary instincts because they WANT something to whine about. Don't worry about receiving complaints unless it's for an actual design flaw.
Second, it's hard to really give specific advice without knowing anything about the character herself. If you decide on her background and exactly how you want her to be perceived FIRST, then it's easier to make a design with more mainstream appeal. What do you have in mind, and what do you know you want to include? And what are you going to use the character for?
The Dove ad is lame because it comes off as preachy and insincere, it's painfully obvious that it wasn't conceived by anyone familiar with the subjects it's supposed to address, and it's an ad for soap that doesn't have anything to do with soap. The character in the ad does nothing to earn the audience's attention in a good way, she's just a video game character that does the same thing twice with varying amounts of clothes. She's "plus size woman" and that's all, with a rather uninspired design that's a generic vidya woman one minute and a generic plus size character the next.
Your approach, then, has to be different. Start with a "hook," something that makes the design interesting. You can make a character as fat as you like, but as long as she looks good for the purpose she's meant to serve and, if she appears in a work of fiction, she's entertaining in a way that suits her role, most people will roll with it. You have two avenues:
1. Make a fat character who's played for laughs, which is the common expectation
2. Subvert that trope and inject nuance
And if you want to "empower" the character, as you may with the second option, don't try to take the physical handicap of obesity away entirely; this has been tried before and it comes off as insincere, not really wanting to portray the condition and instead turning it into something it's not. Acknowledge that it's a drawback, but treat it as an obstacle to overcome and, in some cases, a tool to be used. That's part of why Kung Fu Panda was able to succeed at the box office; Po's obesity is a problem, but he learns to rise above it. If it's not relevant, don't draw attention to it.
For what it's worth, I have an OC I'm commissioning right now, and I tried to take both the "funny fat guy" and "competent person who's fat" approaches at once. Everything below concerns how I came up with this character and what the end result is. I've talked to some other people about her in private, which isn't really too much mainstream exposure, but she's gotten good enough reception from those few, so take everything here as you will.
I initially imagined her as a Genshin Impact character in retaliation to one of my (many) grievances with the so-called "game," namely its character design. Every character is a skinny anime girl, a shitty twink, or a child. Nobody's super ripped, there are no manly men with Viking beards, and of course, nobody's a pound over the standard for a supermodel. I tried to think of what the logistical antithesis could be like while still keeping with the game's artistic conventions and having enough mass appeal to be well-received. Colored by my preferences, I tried to justify what a fat chick would be like in Genshin.
I started with that premise--this is a fat girl with elemental powers who fits in an action-adventure game somehow. So she needed to be athletic enough to run around and climb and explore the game's world while still being obese. It made sense to give her a practical reason to be fat rather than just being a lazy glutton, so I tried to think of uses for this in the context of elemental powers. One idea I liked arose from Japanese folklore: the god of thunder, Raijin, has an animal companion named Raiju who hides out in the human navel. When frightened, he jumps out, creating lightning. I thought, what if an Electro character had a pet Raiju who, because she was fat and had a deep navel, had taken up permanent residence in her bellybutton? So, that was the idea for her fighting style, which would inform her design; she'd be a walking lightning cannon who fights with her elemental companion.
From there, I took the Japanese roots and pushed them further. To give her more concrete visual design elements, I looked to a creature often portrayed with a big belly in Japanese art, the tanuki, or raccoon dog. I figured this was a good animal to base her around, and it let me make up lore to justify her obesity further. In folklore, tanuki can shapeshift and transform using their supernaturally-large nuts, so theoretically, a female wouldn't have this power. I decided that, in my version of the creature, males are more powerful shapeshifters because magic is stored in the balls, while females were restricted by their body mass, so my character would get fat initially to let her transform into bigger animals.
I liked this character enough to decide she had to leave the realm of "half-baked OC for a game I don't like" and transition her into an original setting. There, I built a little story around her: she's part of a community of female monks who gain weight to use shapeshifting magic. She one day befriended a raiju, and she has a part-time job as a wrestler, where she's challenged by being prohibited from using her shapeshifting to fight, which is the only fighting style she knows, so she has to learn an entirely new way to throw hands.
Personality-wise, I thought it made sense to make her a well-meaning dumbass. She's likeable, energetic, and determined, but she's also easily-distracted, dull-witted, and too proud to admit defeat. She's torn between keeping with her community's traditions and pursuing her dreams in the ring, which is why bits of both worlds are emblazoned on her body: a threefold tomoe symbol on her belly, symbolizing her folkloric roots, and a modern dragon tattoo on her arm, showing her ambition.
There, I had my direction. She's a tanuki monk/luchadora with a pet lightning elemental, which informs not only her body type but also her outfit and the artistic motifs you'd see in her clothes and other visual details. She has a direction that goes beyond "she's fat" and gives her an actual purpose, but doesn't ignore that she's fat and uses it to inform the challenges she faces. That's how I went about it, and the big takeaway is that I had things for the character to be and do before being a bbw.
