we’re sorry but your princess is in another castle…

When I was 7 years old I got a Nintendo game system (NES) from my uncle. It was the one that had Duck Hunt and Mario Bros. and you shot and stomped your way through laughing dogs and fire-breathing flowers. Hooked up to an old plastic-wood-paneled television set in my mother’s bedroom, the NES brought me hours of isolating hilarity.

I always found the princess.

Today I found another princess, a fat one wearing a pinafore and eating some cake. I was intrigued by this princess, wondering why she lacked the beautiful gown and crown that my NES-filled days contained. I discovered she was a special princess. She was fat. Her goal was to get fatter. Then help blow things up.

Instead of getting saved, she was an obstacle. The more you fed her,the more challenging it would be for the other team to rescue her. Kind of like real fatties; the more you feed us, the more space we take up the less likely someone is to love us, desire us, hire us, clothe us appropriately.

The game creators say the cartoonist renditions of the scenes in the game are cute, that the blood and gore is great, that the fat princess is the joke. In fact in this interview she’s not mentioned once! And yet I wonder why a game entitled Fat Princess has less to do with princessness and more to do with a cartoonish fattie and some cake?

Making a princess fatter to spoil the other team seems to me to be pretty indicative of fatties in real life as well. Last week you saw your old high school buddy and boy was she fat or what?! The fatter the less attractive, the less likely to get saved, the less likely to be loved or deemed beautiful or successful. Success is the equivalent of…..less cake.

I would rather continue eating cake. Make it really hard for some team of bafoons to come waltzing in and rescue me from the land of fat. Since when is my body something to mock, some sort of fallen princess? I’ve got a tiara and I know how to use it!

• «Previous Post
• Next Post »