When Villains Are Your Heroes

Are they just cooler, or are they more relatable?

Want to know a disturbing fact about me? My hands-down, no-arguments-will-be-brooked, yes-I-really-mean-it favorite Star Wars character is Jabba the Hutt. I will not be taking any questions nor accepting any critiques.

… Alright. I will elaborate at least a little.

I was a weird kid. One of the highest back-handed compliments I ever received as a child was from my uncle, who brought me a birthday present in the form of the Viper King from Spawn. He said to my mother, and I quote: “Find the toy that would scare the hell out of any other kid, and Stephen will love it.” And nothing truer has ever been said.

But we can niche down a little further than just any freaky, monstrous thing.

If you’d like to see a quick, curated¹ list of some of my favorite characters from my youth, here ya go. See if you can spot the similarities.

• Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars

• Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors

• Ursula from The Little Mermaid

• Mary Sanderson from Hocus Pocus

• Oogie Boogie from The Nightmare Before Christmas

• Dennis Nedry from Jurassic Park

• Blob from X-Men

• Hexxus from Ferngully

• Dom DeLuise in anything and everything I’ve ever seen/heard him in

• Ditto on John Candy, John Goodman, and John Rhys-Davies

Have you figured out a pattern here? The first, most glaring one is that 90% of that list is comprised of villains. Conceivably 100%, depending on the specific iterations of the listed actors (though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen John Candy play a true villain).

The other factor that should be quite obvious (for more than one reason) would be the, ah, dimensions of the characters. They are almost unanimously… big boned? Well rounded? Serving a five-course meal with seconds and dessert?

Let’s call it what it is. My favorite characters are all fat. (Or at least fat coded. You can’t tell me a man-eating, soul-singin’ plant is gonna be skinny, and something similar can be said for Hexxus.)

You may be thinking, “But Stephen… most of those characters are bad. Like, really unforgivably bad. Like evil-evil.”

I know. It’s a sore spot.

I can honestly tell you that I don’t like these characters because of their evil deeds (even if the bad guys always have the best songs). I love these characters in spite of their badness. But I don’t believe these characters would or could exist in their same forms as good guys, and I think that’s a shame.

Let’s take Dennis Nedry as an example. If you remove the fact that the heavyset actor Wayne Knight plays him, then I feel zero sympathy for him getting eaten by a dilophosaurus.

But when heavyset Wayne Knight does play Nedry, you get a 6-year-old me writing his first fan fiction about a Jurassic Park sequel where Nedry lives, horrifically scarred, and winds up in a buddy-cop friendship with a mercenary who gifts Nedry a flamethrower that is cathartically used on a pack of frilled-neck-dinos.

If you need further evidence, one of the only comic books I owned, and certainly one of the few I repeatedly read, was the Jabba the Hutt: The Art of the Deal comic collection. Yes, I know he’s an evil crime lord. He murders people so much, and I ordinarily hate that. But he’s a big, fat slug dude who’s large and in charge. I find that pretty cool, and I’m outraged that George Lucas thinks I’ll believe a big, fat slug dude has a crushable windpipe and no escape pod.

I could do this with every character on that list (and don’t tempt me, because I will). But let’s get to the point.

Typically speaking, if a fat character isn’t a villain, then he’s a victim or a punch line. At best, he’s a sidekick. This was even truer in the 90s when I was growing up.

But fat villains? They had what I wanted in my demographic: agency. I didn’t love these antagonists for their villainous plots; I loved them because they even had plots while being fat like me and my family.

I love these characters because they are heavyset yet aren’t made to be the butt of a joke, which becomes crystal clear with the appearance of John Candy on this list.

Yes, his weight is often mentioned or riffed on in his films. But it’s merely another physical feature, like his hair or his height. It seldom diminishes him from the spotlight or even the heroic role (see Uncle Buck and The Great Outdoors). His physical comedy is most frequently standard hilarious slapstick, not relegated to getting stuck in doorways or breaking chairs. He’s just a big guy who is still awesome and lovable and capable.

And writing that paragraph puts me in tears.

I watched loved ones be tormented just for being big. I walked on sidewalks while cars passed by shouting “fat” at my mother and me. I have endured being “affectionately” called “big guy” while comments are made about my “healthy appetite” or how I “could use some exercise.”

I have spent the majority of my life wondering if people look at me as stupid, bumbling, gross, lazy, or incapable due to my weight.

Is it any wonder then that I am drawn toward large characters who are crafty, skilled, charismatic, funny, talented, and immensely capable? And isn’t it a shame that a fat character who is any or all of those things is often a villain? And add insult to injury, they usually wind up losing to somebody with a sixpack.

Would my childhood have looked any different if Freddy Dukes, a.k.a. the Blob, had been a frontline X-Man instead of a grunt for The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (which, by the way, he joined due to being constantly bullied and harassed for his size)?

Who knows? But I do wonder if maybe a chunky kid somewhere wouldn’t feel a little less bullied and vilified if he could see himself as one of the good guys.²

That’s why I have every intention of putting heavyset characters in my stories as more than a crude joke, a dumb side character, or a salacious villain.

They can be heroes, too, and I’ll work to prove it with every piece I write.

I owe it to a chubby ten-year-old boy who fell in love with toys that scared the other kids, who rewrote their stories to be the good guys, and who wanted every one of those characters to know they didn’t have to be villains after all.

1. This is not an exhaustive list of favorite characters. I have plenty of non-fat characters, both heroic and villainous, who count among my favorites, but I’m making a point here. Work with me.

2. Two things to note here. I do not in the slightest want to be mistaken as a proponent of the “body positivity movement” in its current form. It has gone far beyond positivity and ventured into the realms of delusion. Should bullying and hatred be stopped? Of course. Is my heavyset body just as healthy as a fit body? Of course not. There are nuances to this conversation that I don’t wish to get into here, but suffice to say, I think that less emphasis should be put on a person’s weight in all regards.

Secondly, representation in media is… a conundrum. Or really, I don’t think it’s a big conundrum, and that causes a conundrum. I would never in my wildest dreams want any existing character to be reimagined as a fat person. Fat Thor was bad enough. But if a few existing heavyset characters were brought into the spotlight, or better yet, new characters were introduced in organic ways that didn’t shout, “Hey, Hollywood wants fat people’s money, too! Come watch our stuff!”, then that’d be cool. Representation without pandering or preaching. Is that so much to ask for?