Fat characters
I'm always a little annoyed by physical appearance denoting evil in submitted stories. But most authors these days understand that it's not appropriate to use skin color, say, or facial features associated with a particular ethnic group, to mark a character as evil, so it generally doesn't come up so often. Likewise with other characteristics, like effeminacy or thick accents. (All of that stuff still happens in mainstream movies, of course, but even there I think it's becoming less acceptable.)
The one area where this kind of thing does come up, though, over and over, is that fatness is quite often a signifier of evil, arrogance, laziness, greed, shrewishness, decadence, weakness of will, and/or a variety of other negative personality attributes.
I haven't done a count, but I would guess that at least three quarters of the characters in submitted stories who are described as being overweight are not just bad people, but caricatures of bad people.
I'm really starting to get annoyed by it. My main problem with this approach is a political one, of course, but I also think it's a sign of authorial laziness: it's shorthand characterization.
There are a couple of things that authors can do to help:
- Don't make your evil characters fat. Not that all evil characters must be thin, of course; just don't use fatness (or other physical characteristics) as shorthand for evil.
- Make some of your good characters fat. (But don't go too far in the other direction; I'm not saying fatness should be signifier of jollity, for example.)
- Perhaps most importantly, don't make your characters caricatures. Make them complex and interesting, even the bad guys. Then you can make them any body size that seems appropriate—bearing in mind, of course, that if you're writing about a real-world human society, body size and shape will probably have some effect on how others interact with the character.
(Exception: There are certainly contexts where it makes sense to have over-the-top caricatures as characters—Nazi villains in pulpy stories, for example. That's not the kind of story I'm talking about here.)
