Trickery

Recently I received an email from a fan with the handle, TheNewChic, and they had some comments about one of my most basic plot devices. They wrote:

"I first learned of your site about 6 mos. ago; I enjoyed all the stories that I have read; although I was disturbed by one element. The fact that most of the women were tricked into the weight gain through magical means or whatever creative device you came up with. It is the tricked part that gets to me and gives me that chilling all over feeling, say like when you are reading a Stephen King Novel. So I view your site as horror erotica, or romantic still entertaining just with an edge."

The reference to horror erotica couldn't help but intrigue me. I'm an avid reader of dark fantasy, and I know fatness has appeared as the punch-line in more than one genre tale. (Even wrote about this in an early Dimensions article, "The Horror of Weight Gain.") Once as an exercise, I took an early story of mine ("Chubby Maker") and rewrote it as a straightforward horror story. The act didn't take a whole lot of revision.

The trickery theme in FA fantasy has several reasons for being. First is the pragmatic matter of plot mechanics. In our culture, it is difficult to imagine anyone wanting to become fat, hence the frequent reliance on subterfuge. I've written tales where the heroine becomes big on her own free will, but the setting this has been easiest for me to accomplish is the futuristic neverworld of Adipost Zone.

Then there's the theme of feeder manipulation - which crops up regularly in this fanta-sizer fiction. Its use says much about the state of male/female relationships in Western Culture, I suspect. In some weight gain stories (revenge tales, especially), the act of successful manipulation appears even more important than its results; the character's transformation is almost described as an afterthought. I've played with this theme in the past - generally to undercut it (e.g., Consuming Interests) - but I'd much rather focus on growth and its implications.

A much more prevalent form of "trickery" that appears in Fat Magic comes closer to "real-life" experience than any feeder scare tales. Stories where the protagonist is made fat through misapplied or partially understood magic can almost stand as a metaphor for those victims of diet culture who've grown larger from adherence to a diet regimen. The Diet Industry is the one of the foremost purveyors of trickery in the entire marketplace, yet its charlatanism rarely results in the happy endings that my stories have.

January 1999