So Many Books... - 120 Hour Challenge - Day 4

The reason I'm not okay with it is because it doesn't arc -- it doesn't change -- and therefore it is feels to me like YET ANOTHER voice describing fatness as grotesque and weird

Yes, this does make sense, but I think it also makes sense to see it all from the shifted perspective where his fatness is just a fact which no longer signifies everything as it did for him in the past. If you look at that last page, that final voice doesn't describe his fatness as grotesque or weird any more than Curt is grotesque and weird, or the audience for that matter, who are just 'all the twisted, bony, warped parodies of hands reaching for me'. When he's saying in effect, 'What the fuck - my flesh may dangle when I lift my arms but what matters to me right now is playing the drums', and the final sentences are about what he has to say, and everything but the drumsticks and the skins fades into the background, I don't think I'd take away its being primarily a message that fatness is grotesque or weird. Or if so, only in the way that we can all be viewed as weird in our own particular fashion(s), as part of the sheer bloody fruitcake-iness of human nature.

I'll have a look around for anything else you might have said - but tomrrow, as it's late here and brain has packed it in, so will post reply while I can (and see what I should have edited later, no doubt!)

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I can appreciate what you're saying about final message. I don't think I agree, mainly because of the proportion; to me, the pounding in of the otherization goes on for so long that I don't really see it dissipating in proportion to how big it was for so long. Like, it was so blatantly negative for so long that I probably wouldn't feel comfy unless the turnaround was similarly blatant, which I don't find the ending to be. (Sorry, incoherence.) But that's just me.

Meta-pause: there are so very very few people doing fatpol crit of children's lit that may I just take a moment to appreciate that you do? :)

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Yes, I can see the proportion problem - as you've said elsewhere, it would be different if there were plenty of fat-friendly characters around YA lit. Now that I've defended, I'm going to do a 180 and say that I was a little unhappy that there was such an obvious reason for Troy's having got fat, and much more unhappy at how obviously unhealthy he was. A bit of HAES possibility would have been excellent! (Maybe that drumming...)

Thank you very much for the appreciation moment, which I appreciate deeply! :) You and gnomicutterance are wonderful teachers.

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