Dungeons and Diets: Antifatness in Baldur's Gate 3
Some thoughts on the approach of Baldur's Gate 3 and games more generally to fatness and the links to antiblackness and antiqueerness.
Hello! Everyone and their mum has been burying hours and hours into Baldur’s Gate 3! However unlike a lot of people and some of their mums, I’ve got some critical thoughts on its ideas around fatness - so hope you enjoy!
Media Roundup:
Fox and His Friends [1975): Utterly devastating work incisively taking on class violence in queer communities. Also some phenomenal outfits.
Guts - Olivia Rodrigo [2023] - it's really fun to see her stepping out of the shadow of Paramore and making some real powerful stuff
Theater Camp [2023] - It turns out Ben Platt can be really compelling when he's self-aware! Also an incredible Noah Galvin performance that was Deeply Relatable (though I have less anxiety).
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A defining moment of my BG3 experience was opening the character creator and realising there were only two body type options. In a game of innumerable possibilities and possible interactions and choices that are often fun and difficult, the choice to be fat was simply not available. Then as I've played more of the game, it becomes clear that every one of your possible party members is Thin (with the exception of Halsin who is large but not in a way I would readily call Fat). Now I could write the obvious end important essay about how this reduces player agency (a fun games writing buzzword) and doesn't allow for the full diversity (another fun buzzword) of players to feel represented (and that's Bingo!). But fuck that! You know in this newsletter we don't go for the basic dear reader - so let's dive deeper.
NB: this is a long game and the writing is based near exclusively on the first two acts! But it seems deeply unlikely that things will change so fundamentally in act 3 that my analysis becomes invalid.
Numb - Antifatness as racecraft
BG3 takes the coward's approach to DND race stuff which is changing the stuff that's easy (removing stats and alignment tied to race, also having some elves be black etc) but still basically maintaining the Lore's approach w/ darker skinned races (duergar + drow) only really appearing in evil capacities. Outside the obvious, racecraft is also happening in more subtle ways.
One of the things with a game of this scale is you end up having some writers actually doing interesting work on race. E.g. one of the baldur's gate societies wanting to basically kidnap a githyanki child to train the bloodlust out of them clearly being weird and evil! But that's not consistent as an approach - and if we look at how fatness is addressed we can see that anti-blackness still persists.
Following the writings of the likes of Sabrina Strings and Da'Shaun Harrison we can understand that racecraft and anti-fatness are intrinsically linked. Strings points out that the origins of anti-fatness as exists in the West is in seeing the body variation in Africans they sought to colonise and deciding that Fatness must therefore be morally wrong to distance themselves from those who they had decided were inferior to them. Harrison pushes Strings' studies into hard conclusions and says that anti-fatness does not just originate from anti-blackness but is indistinguishable from it - to hate fatness is to hate the Black people inherent to the drawing of the line between Fat and Thin. Kishonna L Gray encourages us to see games as racial projects, and I think given the co-substantive nature of antifatness and antiblackness we should analyse the relationship between games and fatness through that same lens.
Now if we are to apply this logic to Baldur's Gate 3 we can understand that racecraft is still being done even when the characters in question are white. The specific character I want to use to exemplify this is Thisobald Thorm/The Brewer. An undead boss in the cursed Reithwin Town, he is one of the nepo babies of the act's big bad who has been warped by the shadow curse. However when you read through his diaries you understand that he was a terrible person in life as the landlord of the Waning Moon pub and this state of undeath was meant to represent that. How we are shown his state of depravity is through a bloated gut/body and the growth of extra stumpy legs.
While most of the undead have some sort of warping, his is only one in the Act that very specifically makes him bestial. It's impossible to separate that from his position as one of the few fat characters who appear in the game. Drawing on afro pessimism, Harrison understands humanity to be a thing constructed around whiteness. The Black can never be Human and by extension the Fat never can either (and certainly never the Fat Black). The phrase/concept of the human being (rather than a much looser idea of personhood or Mankind) first became preeminent in the 16th/17th century alongside a burgeoning field of scientific classification. At the same time as this field was emerging, chattel slavery was hitting a fever pitch, and part of how that was justified was by understanding Black (and Indigenous) populations as not Human and therefore not subject to the natural liberties etc proclaimed by the Enlightenment and broader contemporary political thought. Through the link being made between fatness, (over)consumption and Beast, Thisobald Thorm is rendered not only undead but unHuman.
Tropes around fatness are also relevant to him mechanically. Until you go through certain steps to get him to drink himself to incapacitation (ie using the consumption central to his character against him), he is completely immune to bludgeoning, slashing and piercing damage. It's a long-standing trope that fat people are less capable of feeling pain and the same applies for Black people. This is a large part of how fat and Black people are persistently failed by medical systems, and how (as Harrison points out) the men who end up killed by police are larger. Once again if we return to the politics of Humanity, Neocleous points out that the nervous system has been seen as central to personhood (and later humanity) for centuries, so if the Fat are unfeeling they are once again unHuman.
When we understand anti-fatness as anti-blackness we can see that racecraft is being performed here even in a character who is nominally both Human (in the DnD sense) and white. It's not enough to simply have Black elves or completely avoid the issue or orcs altogether (though there is a weird piece of half-joking dialogue with Halsin speculating that he has faint orcish ancestry because of his size). To impossiblise fatness for near all but the most depraved and inhuman (see: the meat eating obsessed ogres) is to demonise Blackness and show that even in this fantastical world, whiteness is central to personhood.
Choice - Lacking an embodied fat queerness
In the slew of praise Baldur's Gate 3 has gotten (much of it deserved), it has been praised for being very queer. After all, you can romance any character as any gender and they will hit on you as any gender etc. Now there's a conversation to be had on whether that actually represents real queerness properly, by basically removing the idea of people who aren't attracted to a particular gender, but I'll let this Kenneth Shepard piece address that. What I want to focus on here is how the lack of fat queerness and what that says about broader understandings of what it means to be queer in games and beyond.
The one time you see a fat person engage in sexual activity in the first two acts is a sight gag about walking in on an ogre and bugbear shagging. In contrast to the slow intimate player centred scenes this one is rough and ridiculous - and it's hard not to connect that to the involvement of fatness when there are no other examples of fat people expressing sexual wants and needs! 'Hot' queerness cannot be fat, instead it is reserved for those who are Desirable (in this case, who are thin). Fat desire can only be grotesque, predatory or downright silly.
This is not a problem exclusive to Baldur's Gate 3 - it's crops up all across games. For over a decade now, Supergiant has been making some of the most compelling, stylish and mechanically interesting games around. They're also notable for having striking characters, and a range of very queer elements to their games (especially their latest Hades as touched on by Autumn Wright). Yet it seems to basically be company policy that none of the people presented as hot, engaging and compelling can be fat. As Wright points out, fatness becomes effeminising and queer (bad) even in games where queerness is rife and prominent amongst the Desirable characters.
Another critically acclaimed game that I love with a through line of queerness is Disco Elysium. The lead character's fatness is mocked but in ways that feel congruent with the world, and I'd basically have no issue with in a game where other embodied fat people exist. Where I would actually place the main issue is with the union boss Evrart Claire and the way his fatness is used to show him to be grotesque and almost bulging. While the game certainly isn't taking a photorealistic approach to its characters, the choice to place the focus of the stylising on his fatness is unique in the game. The stylising generally emphasises these characters' personalities and moral character so to have the fatness be the central focus of Claire is clearly demonstrating a connection being drawn between his sliminess/weak moral character and his fatness.
When it comes to recent widely acclaimed queer games, ValiDate and Dream Daddy have been the only ones to really scratch the surface with this stuff - and two indie dating simulators can’t exactly carry an entire industry/medium.
Games (both video and tabletop) are a space where autonomy is king - and the games which don't prioritise agency are defined by that lack. What traditionally distinguishes the player and their humanity is their ability to make choices in the world rather than being preset pieces of code. When that capacity for agency, self-embodiment and interaction is specifically stripped away on the basis of fatness, it is clear that a decision is being made on who is deemed Human and who is not. Furthermore, it is also determining who is a good/hot queer versus a gross/disgusting one.
I don't know a queer world that doesn't have fat people in it. So when people construct supposedly queer world in which fat people don't exist I am extremely suspicious to say the least. If queerness can exist at all as a radical force rejecting our current world and social relations then it must also reject anti-fatness (and by extension anti-blackness). Whether in art or in life, these struggles and issues are intertwined, especially for those of us who exist at the intersections and crosshairs. I’ll still be enjoying delving into the systems and dungeons of Baldur’s Gate 3, but I wish they weren’t let off so easy for their bullshit.
I’m less online lately, but whsiper on the winds and maybe you’ll fine me! Always appreciate your support whether that’s verbal, financial (ko-fi.com/tayowrites) or whatever else.