Hi. Problems with representing the weight of characters while reading literature related to this fetish.

Reading fan fiction about Nier: Automata(out of boredom, it’s hard to find, look in deviantart. I came across it by chance while scrolling through the collections of wg “progression”) by Dr-Black-Jack(Dr-Black-Jack - Hobbyist, Writer | DeviantArt) I found that modeling the characters of such a “movie” in the imagination is extremely difficult, probably not only for me. How to enjoy this kind of wg content? Do I need to be able to draw/model in 3D to some extent in order to better represent and have fun? Or is it the case when you just have to accept the imperfection of our imagination, meaning that accurately measure the distance, length, width, etc. in different “units of measurement” we can’t?

What do you think about it?

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Anything is difficult to imagine without experience! If I haven’t gained weight or been around someone who gained weight and obsessively measured themselves, the inches / centimeters around the waist won’t elicit any imagery for me. Same is true of lbs. / kg. sometimes. Therefore, I like to have references for this problem; see MyBodyGallery.

But then, there’s another problem of those who enjoy writing about weights beyond comprehension - beyond which there are common lengths of measurement to. That is when it is more effective to make comparisons like to the length of a firetruck (and yet still why I personally would struggle to imagine volumes past which there are lots of notable comparisons to, like the size between “earth-size” and “sun-size”). The job of the writer is to make their words stimulate your theater of mind. If it doesn’t do it for you, it may be that the work you read didn’t think about the reader’s perspective enough to evoke that imagery; or, it could be that you don’t have the visceral experience with their wording that they & those who enjoy their work have (ie. if I tried to read a story in British units of measurement, I would struggle with theater of mind).

The nice part about fan fiction is that this should be less of a problem. Two of the main advantages of fan fiction are

  1. sharing a sentimentality for the characters therein - that’s a lot of character & worldbuilding you don’t need to be established in your fan fiction
  2. already having a grasp of the imagery of the characters in writing. If you tried to explain how the characters in Nier: Automata looked in writing (and thus how they’re gaining weight, for instance), it would be way more difficult limited to just words, say if this weren’t fan fiction.

Hopefully that answers your question. Basically, it could be that you haven’t found your preferred style of writing / points of emphasis in whichever piece you read.

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Personally, I prefer a visual reference than count only on my imagination, the imagination isn’t totally accurate and sometime what we imagine will not match with what the author written on the body description of the character.
That’s why I prefer play on games, with some mods, it permit not only to guess the overall size of the character, but in more we not need to set the background at every session.
If the textual part of the description is not avoidable. In that case, like said leifwarfer, all is question of proportion and comparison example of a description, I wrote some month earlier on this subject :


Hyperion

Dec '20

I am sensitive to good descriptions when I roleplay, often a good description of the fatness on just a chubby body is more effective than just an huge weight gain without description. it’s not only a question of vocabulary but also of context and figure of speech’s use.

I love the weight gain and every details serving as clue witnessing the progression, must be used in all case.

For example if my (in character’s) girlfriend (We will call her Chloe and mine Audrey) started slim she can describe the scene like that :
After open the door of the room and entering, Audrey notice Chloe, relaxing in her armchair, reading a book.
The pocket size book obviously not hide the recent changing on Chloe’s body. Her past flat tummy don’t look so flat anymore and a soft bulge seems to peek a boo under the the tight and rising shirt. Also the small growing roll of flab look touching her fuller thighs.
The distance between her plump hips/thighs and the side of the armchair reduced since the last time.

I can’t give a list of the full small words that can be used in this style of scene, but I advise to read some weight gain story, it’s a fuel of fat vocabulary, scenes and metaphor. :slight_smile:

Like you see numbers are not a need for guess to the fatness and proportion of a character.
It’s like an universal language.

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i was reading a dragon ball wg story a while back and i got a bit confused because i innitially thought we were dealing with house sized characters but is just seemed to be under a ton. idk probally because i go for larger weights

Yeah I get the same impression when I read stuff past which there are standard weight & size measurements for. At a certain point, the measurements will become meaningless to me without reference.

For example, a parsec is about 3x the length of a lightyear. A lightyear itself is beyond my comprehension, so saying something is a parsec wide gives me no imaginative fuel. It’s the relativity of something that length - it’s totally skewed without comparison. I simply imagine the same size construct getting bigger on a backdrop of outer space. But for some, the prospect of just knowing the character is getting bigger works!

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When I write, I try to use the description of the scene or action to convey the character’s changing size as much as I can without going into measurements.

As an example, you could say, “a character is three feet wide”, or you could have the character enter a room and describe how their hips just brush both sides of the door frame as they pass through. Going for larger sizes, you could describe how people passing the character in a corridor have to press up against the wall to let them squeeze by. If you can describe the box they fit in, the reader can imagine how big they are.

Repeated action is another good tool for conveying a change in size. Maybe a character goes through a morning routine at a few points in the story where they weigh themselves on the bathroom scale. The first time pleased with the number, the next time shocked at the increase, and the third time they step on the scale, it breaks under the weight. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway since they could no longer see the display over their protruding gut. You don’t really even have to give the number on the scale.

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