#fat folklore

[thefatisland]

There is a certain Google Drive album that is being shared around... If you passed across it, you know which one I mean. It is part of why I am becoming active again. And among its content I found these fascinating pieces of a fat character - especially fascinating because of how the reference to it lead me to absolutely nothing.

Because the pictures referred to a certain "Pet vs Zombie". Not only did I found nothing about it (outside of the Plants vs Zombie game) but as you can see it is Chinese, and I unfortunately do not know a lot about Chinese language...

Hopefully I asked a Chinese person who agreed to help me - turns out "Pet vs Zombie" is a yet unreleased game that was merely announced and these are but some of the promotional pictures. While I was also led to believe this was the fattened-up version of a character, actually no, it is just how the character regularly looks like. His name is actually a fictional creature, 鲲 , the "Kun" (Gon in Korean) who is basically an enormous fish or a huge whale-like creature, so big it is unmeasurable by humans (a bit like the Leviathan). Hence why the human character is a fat guy in a sea-side outfit X)

[afatlotofchance]

Recently I bought a beautiful and well-written comic about Norse mythology called “Vei”. It is a Swedish work by Sara Bergmark Elfgren and Karl Johnsson. I bought the full French translation, in one volume, but I know there is an English translation too, though it is in two volumes.

Anyway - the story takes place during the mythical times of Norse mythology, and so the Norse gods are quite present. And I wanted to talk about it due to its interesting despiction of Freyr. As fertility gods, both Freyr and Freyja are depicted as fat, heavyset people. It is especially telling as all the other gods are either svelt, skinny or muscular - they are the only two fat gods of the Norse pantheon shown. Even Loki, depicted here as a shapeshifter enjoying all sorts of body types, does not change himself into a fat person.

I can’t show much of Freyja because she spends most of her time naked, and Freyr unfortunately has a little role in the overall story, appearing just here and there as a background character. He is a strange mix of Nordic traditional body image (bearded, thick, heavyset, hairy) and “pretty boy” (jewels, long well-taken-care-of hair, a fair doll-like face). After all Freyr, due to his association with things like the sun, fair weather, peace and prosperity, tended to be considered one of the most beautiful male gods, alongside Baldur. (And sometimes people treated him as some sort of Norse Apollo).

Though here, interestingly, Freyr seems to have a strong design influence from the Greco-Roman figures of Bacchus and Dionysos, mostly due to the fact he is constantly seen drinking throughout the comic and is a played a bit as a joke as the “drunk god of the group”. (Bacchus himself was often depicted chubby or fat, and Dionysos also had the “pretty boy/feminine boy” vibe of Freyr here)

[afatlotofchance]

The Ragnarok controversy, aka Thor’s Thick

This is not fresh news and it has been a fight and debate that had spread over the Internet like a wild fire and now died out. However, as a blog dedicated to the kinky exploration of folklore and fatness in legends and mythology, I need to bring up this controversial topic that created one of our lovely Internet wars. Ladies, gentlemen, and everything in between, I present to you...

THE GOD OF WAR RAGNAROK THOR CONTROVERSY!!!!

So if you don’t know, God of War is a HUGE series of video games originally about a guy (Kratos) fighting bloodily and violently monsters and gods from Greek mythology. Since after several games he ended up wiping out all of the Greek myths, recently the new games have him move up North and fight the Norse gods. 

Now, for the latest piece in the series, “God of War: Ragnarök”, concept art were released of the characters. Including one of Thor, one of the most famous Norse gods, the brave (if a bit stupid) warrior of Asgard, the hammer-wielding thunder-god. Here was the concept art in question:

An ENORMOUS outcry happened. People started insulting the team for “soiling” and “messing up” and “shitting” on Thor. They accused them of disrespecting the character, of trying to please the SJWs by making the god fat instead of muscular, a red-head instead of blond, a rough guy instead of a handsome one, a...

Wait a minute. Muscular? Blond? Handsome? Wait a minute... Doesn’t this description ring a bell?

That’s right. What most of these revolted souls knew and were aware of was the “handsome bodybuilder” version of Thor, mostly rendered famous by Marvel’s version of the character (and no need to tell you that Marvel’s rendition of mythology is not the most faithful or accurate one). But Marvel’s Thor does stay one of the most iconic and well-known Thor in the popular modern media of the Western world (understand: North America). 

Now, technically speaking, Thor has often been represented as a muscular guy and not much as a fat one, true - though it counts mostly for recent culture. All the way back to paintings and gravings of the 18th and 19th century, up to “Age of Mythology” or even the more recent Magnus Chase series. This is because Thor is known as one of the strongest (if not the strongest) of all the gods, and a brute force of battle that uses violence as a first way of solving anything. 

But here’s where the most fascinating part comes. To this outrage (mostly fueled by people perception of the character through their Marvel-tainted glasses and their trauma after the Endgame weight gain incident), a wave of people formed themselves - people expert in Norse mythology (or simply people quite interested in it), people from actual Norse countries, all sorts of people that actually brought facts from the Norse mythology, facts that would support the depiction of Thor as fat as faithful to the original myths.

One of the main facts being that a recurring character traits of Thor is his gluttony and excess whenever it comes to eat and drink. I already mentioned a long time ago the myth in which Thor accidentally drank most of the sea from the earth (it was a challenged given by a trickster giant, Thor took the bet he could empty a drinking horn in one gulp, he did not know the horn was connected to the sea, he took three gulps and couldn’t empty it - but unknowingly emptied most of the sea, causing the tide phenomenon). Another myth illustrating this is how one day Thor was forced to disguised himself as the bride of a giant on her wedding day (long story, but trust me, he had good reasons). While he could hide his face and male body behind a veil and a dress, he could not actually hide his Thor-like manners, which included eating almost the entire wedding feast for himself: we are talking entire oxens and cows, tons of cakes, and three caskets of mead. His companions even had to keep the illusion of him being a pretty young girl and not the foracious thunder-god, by pretending the beautiful young maid didn’t eat anything for several days before arriving at the wedding, hence why she was so hungry. 

Once this mythological accuracy was pointed out, the discussion even went further. On one side, by pointing out how the typical “god body” ideal that people used in media and were familiar to actually came from the Greco-Roman art and religion, where gods were indeed “beautiful” by nature and this beauty corresponded to the actual ideals and canons of beauty of both Roma and Ancient Greece (for example, for the Greeks having a hairy body was not a pleasant thing, it was a very ugly thing, you could have just hair on your head and a beard ; the same way they did not consider fat as much of a “beautiful” trait, it being mostly either an ugly or humoristic body feature). For the Norse people, nothing said the gods were beautiful by nature (only a few of them are described as particularly beautiful), and even if they are, the idea of “beauty” from Ancient Norse people would have been very different from the one of Ancient Greek people.

On the other side, this also got people to share and spread the word about actually body-work and the difference between weight-lifters, bodybuilders and the like... Fat allows one to build up power and strength when coupled with muscles (hence why weight-lifters bulk up, why wrestlers can be heavyset, and why sumo exists as a sport). Fat also allows a form of natural body protection, a flesh armor quite useful in combat, plus also helps fight the cold (especially in the North - there is a French swmmer known for his records of swimming in the coldest seas and water bodies of the world, and to do so he decided to literaly turn himself into a walrus/seal, by eating like them and by gaining several dozen of pounds to build a natural body protection keeping him warm in cold waters).

All in all, this great outcry and debate ultimately brought up how a fat Thor would be much more accurate and true to the old North myth than Marvel’s Thor. Or rather brought it up once more, as people already knew the two were quite different (for example before the “fat Thor” debate arose, one common point that revealed to you if someone knew their Norse mythology or not was the hair color. Marvel is the one that popularized the blond Thor. In the old Norse texts, Thor is described as red-headed and ginger-bearded.)

To make a comparison, another interesting interpretation of Thor’s physique comes from the famous comic book “Sandman” by Neil Gaiman:

Neil Gaiman is a HUGE fan of Norse mythology (he even recently wrote a book retelling the great Norse myths), and so he wanted his depiction of Sandman (published by DC’s Vertigo) to be as accurate as possible to the original myths. So he depicted him as an enormously muscular, slow-minded, lustful and violent drunkard, with a disheveled beard and red hair. At the time (1991 if I remember?) many people took offense because they thought Neil Gaiman was trying to parody of mock Thor from the Marvel Comics (DC’s eternal rivals). They took a long time to realize Neil Gaiman rather wanted to have a very accurate Thor depiction and was just adapting faithfully the original myths.

And yes if you wonder, he is almost shown to be a big eater and a glutton in it:

[afatlotofchance]

Another fantastic species you can use for your kink supernatural OCs - daugrs. 

Daugrs are basically like the original vampires, but much less vampiery and much more humans. I am not a big expert on daugrs but here is what I learned from an article written by Edouard Brasey in his “Encyclopedia of the Fantastic”. 

Daugrs are a type of Scandinavian undead whose stories were often told in the Nordic sagas between the 12th and 14th centuries. Daugrs are basically just like living beings - they appear and act just like they did when they were alive. In fact you couldn’t tell that they are dead. Except that they are. Their animated corpses never rot and have no sign of death (no palor, no rigor mortis, nothing). 

The two other signs with which you can spot a daugr is that 1) while they keep their original personality they become very stubborn (mostly insisting on reclaiming their goods and continuing their life as if nothing happened) 2) they have super-strength. This is the main characteristic of the daugrs, and their main weapon - when heroes come to fight them, it usually ends up with wrestling and other type of combat in which the daugr is much stronger than the human hero. 

But here’s where things get interesting: while they look just like their living self, as time goes by the daugrs gain in height and weight. Basically they grow taller and fatter, until they look like overweight giants. 

If you want additional info about daugrs:

# They actually are only active during night-time. During the day they return to their funeral mounds/grave to return in a death-like stasis. 

# Daugrs cannot enter a house unless they were invited in it at least one time. If they are refused the invitation, they will keep wandering around the house and sometimes climb on the roof.

# Some daugrs can be destroyed by cutting their head off, but others actually survive that and walk around with their head in their arms (one for example used his head to knock on doors and as a weapon to hit people)

# The only definitive way to destroy a daugr is to burn its body to ashes and then dispatch those ashes over running water (a river or the sea).