A WALK AROUND THE WEIGHT ROOM
by Wilson Barbers

Got to admit I was plenty excited to see The Weight Room added to Dimensions' online website. Though I've been cyber surfing for close to a year now, a good 50% of the stories here were unfamiliar to me. I've got a cranky news server that only picks up part of the offerings in fiction forums like alt.sex.weight-gain, so it's a relief to finally see stories that had previously been just referenced in follow-up postings.

As a reader, I tend to enjoy FA fantasy that is detailed and focused on super- to mega-sized levels of growth. Some readers like their gains more moderate and "realistic," and while this can have its appeal, I figure that there's no point in restricting fantasy. With that in mind, I thought I'd discuss a few of my favorite offerings on the story list. This is by now means an exhaustive listing - part of the fun of amateur fiction is separating the crap from the truly inspired - but it does indicate where my head's at, anyway.

"Sideshow Girl" - I'm a sucker for material on circus fat ladies, so this offering from The Studio (one of the most proficient and prolific of the current crop of writers) was right up my alley. While some readers might complain that the heroine starts out plenty big in the opening, her "realistic" gain over the story itself is quite nicely delineated. This is one of the newer stories on the page, which speaks well for the future of this genre.

"Susan" - one those of those stories (you see a lot of this in amateur fiction) that starts in one direction, then its anonymous author veers midplot to go somewhere else. Not a problem here as the directional shift winds up with a mega-sized heroine, though the shift in perspective (from the title character to a hitherto unseen mad scientist and his female assistant) in the final pages is jarring.

"Millie's Revenge" - weight gain a revenge is a recurring theme, which makes sense when you consider the number of women who consider fatness a more horrifying experience than death itself. I've trafficked in this plot myself, and I tend to favor storylines where the "horror" of weight gain is subsumed by the sheer pleasure of overeating. This is a good example of the form, as both victim and victimizer wind up happily super-sized. Author Bruce Powell has been a longterm fixture on the weight-gain fiction scene and is a reliable name. His short-short, "Immobility," packs a lot of provocative detail in a short amount of space.

"Future Feeder" - one of the most frustrating aspects of amateur FA fiction (aside from continued stories that never get completed) is the way promising writers and artists can waft in and out of the scene. Wayne Malmros, the author of this sci-fi tale, was a regular in the short-lived F.F.I Newsletter (an early source for amateur weight gain fiction), but his byline hasn't been seen on a new story in some time. Too bad.

As I already noted, there are other nifty stories in The Weight Room, but I bet most of you already know this. (If you had a choice between reading a story and reading some guy blathering about a story, which would it be?) Have fun exploring the story list.

I'd also encourage those of you who haven't done so to follow the links that Conrad's set up. "Before and Fat After" is a great site: enhanced fattened photos of sundry men's mag models that range from plump to super-sized. (The provocative pic at the top of The Weight Room comes from this site.) This stuff isn't that easy to pull off - lots of amateur enhancements that have been posted on the alt.sex.weight-gain newsgroups have been flops. Most of BPMac's work on this site has both physical integrity and allure. Great fun.

"The 500 Club," with its real-life photos of five-hundred-plus pound women, presents a reality that Weight Room fiction can only hint at. This is a First Virtual site (which means to get the pic any larger than postage stamp size, you've got to pay a small fee), but its photos beat anything the current plumper men's mags are offering. So why not check into getting an account?

And while you're at it, why not take a look at this writer's Dimensions site, "Fat Magic"? Archived Barbers fiction and new stuff (available through First Virtual), all of it the type of story that brought you to The Weight Room in the first place. Plus, if you've made it through this piece so far, I also do a monthly column on pop culture artifacts, past and present, of interest (hopefully) to FAs.

But before this turns into an Advertisement for Myself, I should move onto some other links. GainRWeb is the pre-eminent gay and bi-sexual website for gainers and encouragers; if you're not homophobic, you might enjoy some of the material here, the story site, in particular. Occasionally, a straight FA will revise one of these tales to make them more "mainstream;" occasionally, a gay FA will work the same on a straight weight gain tale.

"Melanie Bell" is the sweetheart of the weight gain community, a longterm writer of gaining fantasies in both fictional and diary form. Her web page contains several multi-chapter stories characterized by a lyrical approach to the subject, diary entries and a way out-of-date weight-gain FAQ. As you might guess from the diary ref, some of the material on this website gets explicity personal, so those of you wishing to keep your fantasies on a more rarefied plane will want to avoid that part of the site. Still, Miz B. has been so successful at staking this territory that there are fans on the web who start to get worried when she doesn't make an appearance in some time (as seen in some recent postings on the WebBoard).

I almost forgot "The Image Mall," the other Dimensions' First Virtual pic site. The range of models is broader than the "500 Club," but if you can't be open-minded, then what are you doing here, anyway? The Mall will send you to several good sites for pics, and it also has the only decent set of circus fat lady photos that I've been able to come across. Wish Conrad would update 'em, though. . .

There's more, of course (are you into stories and pictures of women getting blown up like balloons? then check the Inflation Page and Violet Beauregard entry). The nice thing about the Web is the way it is constantly being added to. I don't know what the future will bring when it comes to weight gain fantasies, but I know the hearty denizens of The Weight Room will be there to track it.

Wilson Barbers

March, 1997