i’ve been thinking about the new carrie adaptation again and honestly i want to kill peole. like it's 2026, we had many shows and movies and cartoons adding fat people taht weren't only jokes those past few years so we had the chance to finally give novel carrie (a fat "ugly" girl) the screen time she deserves but instead we’re getting another conventionally attractive skinny girl because god forbid an audience has to look at someone who isn't a bombshell for five seconds. it’s the same "she's a mess" trope where they just put a pretty girl in a bad outfit and call it a day. and i know people will jump in with "well skinny girls get bullied too" and yeah no kidding but we already have a million movies about that. i’m so tired of the industry being terrified of a protagonist who is actually fat and actually covered in acne and actually "ugly" by societal standards because heaven forbid we have to sympathize with someone who doesn't fit into a neat little box.
growing up as a fat bullied girl means that book carrie was everything to me and seeing her constantly stripped of her physical reality feels like a personal insult at this point. even if you want to argue about "beauty standards of the seventies so maybe she wasn't fat but she was just a bit more curvy" the text is right there. she has weight on her and she has acne and she's frumpy. by making her "hollywood ugly" they’re completely missing the point of why her story is a tragedy. it’s easy to feel bad for a beautiful girl who’s just a little shy but it’s a lot harder for a general audience to look at a fat weird girl and acknowledge her humanity and that's exactly why the story needs to be told that way
and i just know they’re going to make her a perfect little angel again because they’re too scared of her actual personality. in the book carrie is genuinely spiteful even before the prom scene (when we see her inner thoughts she has violent fantasies about hurting her bullies iirc amongst other moments) because being bullied for years doesn't turn you into a saint it turns you into someone with a lot of repressed rage. she’s a sweetheart deep down sure but she’s also weird and difficult. the whole point is that she’s an unconventional victim. she isn't "relatable" to the people who would have been her bullies and that’s what makes the prom scene so visceral
i’m just so genuinely mad that we are losing another fat girl.
