The Lara Croft on the right has thunder thighs and hips way wider than her shoulders. I'm not holding up the one on the left as especially realistic. (It's a fucking cartoon caricature in a game, after all!) I'm saying that the one on the right is perhaps an American's (or Brit's or Canadian's) idea of "realistic" in that the three fattest major nations on the planet would tend to see that.
And note, I'm also emphatically not saying that everybody should look like the one on the left (even in non-caricature form) nor that someone who looks like the one on the right is somehow a bad person. I'm saying that erasing the one on the left as if people like this don't exist is a bad thing.
@Roz said:
Either way, it's not equally bad or worse, since fat-shaming is connected to actual discrimination, which reduction of portrayals of thin women in media is not.
But you know what is actual discrimination? The backlash of "thin-shaming" that I've increasingly seen over the past decade. If we're to go with the typical shit I see in certain political circles, my wife is unhealthily thin. She's probably bulimic, the narrative goes, or at the very least anorexic. (Yes, I've had assholes have the nerve to say this in response to photographs that have my wife in them.) Never mind that she's one of approximately 600 million people for whom this is ordinary weight and build (along with that chick in the flood pic). They seem to utterly miss the point (big surprise there!) that fat shaming is bad because body shaming in general is bad.
Shaming people for their body, whether fat, thin, tall, short, long-fingered, stubby-fingered, dark-skinned, light-skinned, blue-eyed, black-eyed, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum is bad. Period. The fact that currently one body type is in vogue in media (thin) is not an excuse to dump on people who hold that body type. Fat people mocking thin people is just as bad as the opposite. Indeed I'd argue that it's worse because fat people are on the receiving end of such barbs a whole lot (trust me!), frequently being held up as examples of people with "poor self-discipline" and some form of "moral failure" and thus should know better how hurtful and unjust it is.
Demanding that all media everywhere match three fat nations' conceptions of normalcy is an additional pile of idiocy atop all that, especially when you get what would amount to "Thunder Thighs Croft" waddling around athletically through mazes and traps….