when it comes to larissa and body image, we should start with 2 things, which are her height and her build. she is 6'3" from a country where the average height for women is 5'3" and she is also broad-shouldered with a tendency to lose weight from her breasts and hips, so that when her body fat % is lower, she looks more androgynous. so.
larissa's appearance was not considered desirable by her parents, even though she has always been the very classic blonde hair, blue eyes, peaches and cream complexion which is the beauty standard in most anglophone countries. she sprouted up very quickly and was 6" taller than most of her cohorts by the time she was 11 or 12 and just kept growing. part of the reason she stopped dancing as a young woman was because her parents thought she looked ridiculous next to the other female students.
the crux of the issue is that she was not delicate-looking, she wasn't "girlish" in appearance; she was a tall young girl with big feet and big hands, and she also had a ravenous appetite for food (both as a consequence of her height and her shapeshifter nature) that both her parents and her peers found intrusive and revolting. moreover, as larissa began to develop her own sense of style, she moved away from the wispy femininity her parents imposed toward a different type of equally rigid femininity, that of old hollywood glamor.
so, larissa spent most of her young adult life not eating enough, and consequently making herself more androgynous in appearance as she kept her weight down, diminishing her hips and chest and enhancing the features she disliked most about herself. she desperately wanted to be smaller and less obvious; she wanted to be dainty and small. voluptuousness did not seem to be in the cards for her and she thought her best bet was to try to make herself very thin.
time has moved the needle on some parts of this, and a big part of that was the wild'n'weemsical era of her 20s, when larissa first experienced being found profoundly desirable. her partners loved her height, her legs, her hips, her shoulders, and so on, and relaxing into the physical fact of her body became easier with outside affirmation. and at a certain point as she became a teacher of outcasts she realized she was harming herself by not giving her body enough fuel to use her abilities, and that she would be a hypocrite to teach other outcasts about the importance of caring for their bodies as a part of learning their gift, while not doing the same for herself.
frankly, eating more and caring less has done a lot for her self-image. when she stopped obsessively restricting and her body filled out, it became more like the physical silhouette she really wanted--there would simply be no Weems T&A if she didn't eat her fill and accept all that came with eating enough, like some side rolls and a soft tummy. she does still have twinges of dislike for her body and especially her appetite for food, and she often feels particularly conscious of her "ugliness" when she's emotional because she wishes she made a prettier picture--she really struggles to get away from seeing herself from the outside this way, especially when she's vulnerable.
and i would be remiss if i did not talk about the shapeshifter part of her body image, and one of the significant ways i diverge from fanon interpretations of larissa. it's extremely common in fics and headcanons for people to write larissa as shapeshifting physically to please a partner, whether that's outright turning into somebody else, or by transforming her genitalia so that she has a given appendage. i do not think larissa would ever do this specifically because she has struggled so much with her body image. if she did do this for a partner, it would be confirmation of her worst narratives about herself. it would be outright cruel of a partner to ask that from her.
