So I’ve been a lurker for a while now, though I have taken a hand to a few things here and there off this site and there’s been something I’ve wanted to ask for a little while now:
Just what tropes are you tired of in your weight gain related material? What are some you think are sorely underused? Which ones do you feel even more passionately about when in a game format?
(Personally I’d love to see mind control/hypnosis used way more often.)
Interesting topic! I can’t think of anything on the top of my head that I’m just tired of seeing, mostly because compared to other media we don’t have a huge sample size of WG-based media, but given more time I’m sure there’d be some things that would make you roll your eyes as it’s so commonly used, or badly done. I don’t consider things like inflation, furry, etc to be tropes as they’re more their own genres.
For things that I like, I’m partial to the idea of a woman unconsciously eating a lot and putting on weight, all meanwhile denying the fact that she’s getting bigger. If you wanna go with “weeb” terms you could call it being tsundere about gaining weight, and actually enjoying it on a level, but never admitting it.
The most overused trope of all time has to be gaining a physically impossible amount of weight in under a year. Something like “Then she gained from 500 to 3,000lbs in the next six months and everybody lived happily after ever.” It’s not sexy, it’s really the exact opposite.
I agree with @Tightfit. I dont think there is enough to quite over saturate anything. I personally like loss of will power/control scenarios myself, where a woman cant stop eating. So hypnosis like you suggested or a woman unconsciously unable to stop eating like suggest by Tightfit are 2 I would definitely like to see some more of myself.
I was going to say something along those lines when I got more time to write, but you said it first so I’ll go into something else that bothers me.
The idea that getting fat is in and of itself the only goal of any piece of WG media. As in after the character or characters reach a certain weight, that’s it. No exploration of their world, no significant reaction from other characters, and to be blunt, no sex.
I understand that not everything needs to explicit or complexe to be good, but it’s all too often that I find a story gives you the most brief introduction to a character, they get fat then it ends.
Maybe that’s enough for some, but not for me. I would just like it if they would actually do something while they got fat, ya know?
In a word, pizza. And possibly donuts. Given the huge range of foods available it’s so often pizza. There are so many other wonderful foods, so many other wonderful Italian foods. So many different kinds of takeaways, of cuisines.
I like the idea of a voluptuary character, not satisifed with a stack of pepperoni pizza for each meal, but out to experience all that was on offer, perhaps trying several restaurants before satisfying more carnal desires. Making the food more of the focus than it’s consumption.
But, no, it’s pizza again.
I’m taking “material” to mean everything, not just games (the second question is game specific), so I don’t think it can be argued that there’s a lack of material to discuss. I suppose if I had to pick another it would be blueberry transformations (no, I don’t know of a game about this). It’s one chapter of a book I read as a child about a character you weren’t supposed to care for, so why so many blueberries?
I have to agree with @Poser though - having WG as the goal really isn’t satisfying on it’s own. The player character needs to have a reason to do so beyond just satisfying the desires of their player. In an ideal world it could even be incidental to the main focus of the game. That would also make the game accessible to those who don’t share the fetish. I return to Fable 2, not a WG game, but did have a WG mechanic, such that you could stand in the square, stuffing yourself, while some villagers cheered you on and others disapproved. Oh yes, and tucked away a global leaderboard for food eaten, and a gender swap too.
As someone who prefers the PC rather than the NPCs to gain, I find mind control style games problematic, as they are hard to do without limiting the players sense of agency. Some (outside the WG arena) work well, and manage not to (or at least well disguise) that you are being railroaded to a certain destination. I think the ones that work best are those that feel open and yet have a number of destinations which player actions gradually lead them to one specific end. The player gets to choose how the PC evolves against the PCs (apparent) wishes until the PC becomes compliant with the player’s desires.
I’m not sure if it’s exactly a trope, but I can say one of my biggest issues is when someone makes a character solely to just gain. No flaws, no strengths, no personality or delevopment of one besides “me wanna eat an be fat”, is one of the most glaringly problematic things in my opinion. Yes, the whole fetish is about weight gain (obviously), but if all you have is a shell of a character that has literally no other reason or purpose for why they exist or where they are, it becomes bland fast.
It’s honestly probably why I like hearing stories about force feeding because the character in that situation isn’t just the same one dimensional husk that the others are, and those situations almost require reasons to exist.
I always get vaguely annoyed at “secretly this was always what I wanted” in some of the… Less-polished bits of media. Whether it’s a relatively new writer aping love confessions they’ve seen in anime or someone who can’t… “Enjoy” themselves unless the character is emphatically on-board, too, it just never sits well with me.
Granted, I understand the latter to some extent. Regardless, at the point a character admits that they wanted to be fat or wanted someone else to be fat, I can feel the story simply going through the motions for the rest of its duration.
That’s not to say that eventually coming to accept or find comfort in their predicament is wrong. That’s just fine in my book.
Personally, I happen to prefer less realistic WG scenarios. I love the idea of someone gaining dozens or even hundreds of pounds in a matter of minutes via magic or some sci-fi techno-wizardry. I love to imagine characters watching and feeling their body slowly balloon to new, immense, unfamiliar sizes.
It’s similar to why I’m also into transformation, especially male-to-female gender swapping. With a new body comes new sensations, new physical abilities (or lack thereof), and new perspectives. How does a sudden change affect how someone interacts with the world? How do others see and act towards this person? Does the change make this person feel awkward and insecure, or do they feel liberated and content? Do they reject, accept, or embrace the change? Does this opinion change with time, and if so, how?
Reading a character spend months or years only to get just “decently fat” is… disappointing to say the least
I like my girls friggin huge and i want them right now
Hm…well, I think one Trope i could stand to see a little less of is ‘Weight Gain Health Complications’. Just…why would you put health issues in libidinous literature? I mean, I can sorta understand why some people enjoy scat, even if I can’t stand the stuff, but writing about a looming heart attack? Parts of the body starting to shut down?
Just, just no.
One thing I do like to see, though, is what I tend to call ‘real life difficulties’, which often have very little to do with actual real life, but can sometimes resemble it. So, ladies who have trouble fitting in to spaces, or getting clothes that fit can really rev my engine.
c̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶g̶a̶i̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶s̶p̶e̶c̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶g̶h̶
Having this fetish is weird to me because I don’t like, well, pretty much ANY other kink. This is the only thing I have a fetish for, so personally, all the “mind control”, “loss of self control”, “loss of own will” type of stuff rubs me the wrongest way possible. And I’ll be honest, there’s a lot of that stuff. I’m really tired of the “Loss of self control” trope.
Mind control doesn’t happen that often; though I hate it, I’ll be fair and say that there’s definitely space available for it. But the other two, “Loss of Self Control & own Will (or free will)” is really annoyingly common.
The stories with them always gravitate around the same concept: “I am struggling in one aspect or another, and weight gain is my only option- oh wait, now that I’m gaining weight, I don’t care about my struggles anymore, nor do I even remember what my past life was like, god damn this pizza looks good!” (Also yeah, Pizza is stupidly overused, dingotush definitely has that spot on) Suddenly, the actual “Character” is all but gone, replaced by some lardbag with no personality.
If I had to define the trope, it would be “Characters with personality being stripped of their personality and in return being injected with Fetish Fuel.” It removes any literal reason to have it be that specific character. So you slapped the name “Yoko” onto her, said she’s from Gurren Lagann; but what I’m reading is “Yoko becomes fat, and acts 100% uncharacteristic. Everyone else around her acts the exact same, feeding her past her limit, and some of them are even enjoying it.”
When you remove the personality of a character, it doesn’t even feel like I’m reading a story about that character anymore. It’s a total turn-off. I’ll read a story about a random character every now and then and I find it more enjoyable than one with a named, established character, even if it’s literally the exact same story.
This kinda turned more into “Characters with personality” trope, but I think the original ones still apply. Characters who lose their will/self control even when their personality, or the personalities of the people around them, wouldn’t possibly allow them to, aren’t really that character anymore, and more importantly, it just kind of becomes sad reading it, especially since most of the stories are always some sort of follow-up from a terrible situation.
Anyways, I think my point still stands. Of course, it does somewhat make sense for greed and loss of self control to come in this fetish; after all, we’re gaining weight here. You basically have to lose your self control for that to happen, especially if it’s fetish-related. The entire struggle of a fetish is trying to keep it under control, especially one like weight gain, since gaining weight is also an act of losing self control, even for the normal person. All of that being said, I’d like to see some weight gain stories that aren’t based on the loss of one’s will or their self control, and more on mutual respect between two people in a relationship. Let it be a little realistic, even if it’s in an unrealistic scenario! Let 'em gain a comical 100 pounds in one year and still be perfectly healthy! Just make it so that it’s two people who had agreed to this happening. Consent ain’t bad, y’know :^)
I am a bit of a counter to this idea, because there is something internally satisfying about a character degenerating to fetish fuel for me. Then again i am in this fetish for the control aspect, thusly mind control is something i like. Though i do agree mutual gaining is awesome, i probably think that for a completely different reason than you do. I like seeing characters degenerate to the fat fetish fuel because (in an admittedly sick and twisted way) it’s character growth, or to put it a better way, the character that you started with isn’t the character you end with. But hey, to each their own as they say, you like what you like, i like what i like, people will make content to cater to our tastes as well as their own.
I’m definitely with @White_Cat on this one. I avoid almost anything involving a named character from other media gaining weight like the plague, and it’s for exactly the same reason. That character just isn’t that character anymore.
And yes, I’m not a big fan of health problems either. I was posting some chapters of an interactive on writing.com, and got in a discussion with one guy about it. He was in the camp of “how big can they get,” and aimed for the medical wing/life support aesthetic. And while that may have been his cup of tea, for me, it’s definitely not. Once we hit the point of needing medical machines just to stay alive, that’s where I have to get off the bus. It does give me an odd relationship with immobility in weight gain fetish media. I suspect this is why I tend to favour fantasy settings and the like, even though my general preference is for a more realistic gain.
And I must continue the chorus: enough fraggin’ pizza already!
I understand what you’re talking about here regarding a character’s loss of self-control. I can’t help but wonder if this issue has less to do with the inclusion of this aspect and more to do with how a story is executed. Since weight gain is typically a slow, ongoing process, it makes sense that a writer would want it to be tied to a character arc. If that character arc is poorly executed, it could derail the appeal of the work.
For example, if you start with a character who obsesses over their appearance and physical fitness, they’re naturally going to be worried and appalled when the numbers on the scale start climbing. The weight gain might begin due to the character having a certain internal flaw or having a momentary lapse in judgement. Over time, however, their response to their rising weight changes. In order for these changes to be effective, they need to happen gradually, keep the character relatable, and follow a non-linear progression.
If the gaining character just flips a switch and is suddenly okay with what they were just fighting against, that ruins the experience for the audience. Instead, the character could go from denial about their gain, to trying to lose the weight, to questioning their feelings about it, to redoubling their efforts to lose it, to giving up, to finally trying to enjoy it. If the character is well-defined enough and their personal strengths and weaknesses are properly conveyed, then the audience will understand and sympathize with them every step of the way.
Regarding @White_Cat 's post, I 100% agree that it’s a turn-off when people take popular characters and strip them of their personality when there’s any sort of writing involved (Drawings don’t really bother me). I do understand why it happens though, since for so many they just want to see their favourite character(s) get fat, because that is something that they’ll never get from traditional media.
I think there’s always a balance that can be struck though, in many characters cases they would never get fat because that’s the type of character they are, there would have to be some sort of outside force interfering (for ex. mind control, villainous feeder, magical means etc).
Example Scenario:
Lydia is a fitness instructor that despises people who get fat, and has made it her life goal to make as many people fit as possible. But one day she’s possessed by a prankster spirit which takes control of her for an entire week before it gets bored and leaves, she has no recollection of anything that happened for the duration it happened, so it’s all the more shocking for her when she sees that she’s become a 280 pound woman.
She has to talk to her friends, colleagues and other people to piece together what has happened, all of them tell her how she suddenly changed and would neglect any physical exercise and turned to eat tons of junk food every day.
At this point in the story you could choose to go in a few different directions, but what’s most important is that you explore how Lydia would cope with the new changes in her body, and the fact that she’s become what she hates. She would naturally try to lose weight as the number one priority, but with her body craving much more food than she’s ever craved before that might become a difficult task, so she might seek other alternatives as excuses to satisfy her hunger.
This is only some of my thoughts on how you would tackle making a character gain weight without betraying their personality, you could of course have the personality change or grow for some character development, but don’t stray too far from the base.
All in all just make some research on your character of choice, think of a scenario that would make sense in your mind. But most importantly, don’t forget to have fun writing!