Can you just fucking not?
I knew in advance, thanks to a friend, that Resident Evil: Requiem was gonna have a fatphobic character. She told me because she wanted me to be prepared for discussion about it, which was gracious and kind. Truth be told, though... I didn't actually need to be warned, because I knew there'd be something.
Horror as a genre, after all, loves to use fatness as a stand-in for all sorts of things, as Canadian games scholar Sarah Stang observed back in 2018 at DiGRA in her work on monstrosity, and which I've also explored in my work on the subject of fat bodies in games.
The Resident Evil series also gave us Duke in RE: Village, and he is just... I don't even know where to start with that shit. Here's the immobile, ill-tailored, greedy fat guy! He's definitely a serious character and not a point-and-laugh caricature meant to contrast with our ripped AF masc hero.
Today I decided to look into this fat character in Requiem now that the game's came out, and... y'all. Discovering there's two of them, and they're named "the Chunks," fucking... I just sighed. So loud, so long!
Of course, I had also searched for info on these characters wondering if anybody had written about it, or maybe said something as mild and low-hanging a fruit as "hey, this was fatphobic and weird." What I got was pages and pages of strategy on killing the Chunks interspersed with some discussions on forums/reddit/etc. about how gross and weird they are.
So, please, Resident Evil creators: can you fucking give it a rest?
According to their wiki entry, both Chunks [teeth grinding intensifies] were a pair of brothers who had the part of their brain that triggers satiation removed or disabled. The result? They continued to eat, with wild abandon (one of them is described as eating pacemakers, and infusion pumps, i.e. those IV-looking things on a coatrack next to someone's bed in every hospital drama), growing ever larger.
Their fucking character model, as shown here, is just wild:
Hey look! We made a horror movie fat character! It has no clothes and looks like a huge, pale baby, just like real life fat people! We modeled the various folds and distortions of its flesh to be extra grotesque and creepy! Give me a fucking break.
Of the two Chunks, one is violently obliterated by Leon because it tries to eat him (of course). The other is mostly avoided by Grace, but if you craft and then stealth behind him to stab him with 3 special syringes, he literally explodes to leave behind a rare accessory or something. The one chasing Grace appears to do nothing but swear and scream at people angrily; the one chasing Leon is, as I said, attempting to eat him, the brain alteration having given him a taste for human flesh.
It's just... I dunno, man. What's left to say? I've been doing this work since 2015 and I might as well be screaming at the wall. The same tropes, the same mistakes, the same grotesquerie over and over again.
Some of you may be going, "Why are you being so sensitive? It's a horror game, these are monsters, what's the big deal?" Okay. Show me a fat character that isn't a monster or a trope. You might be able to manage that. Now show me five of them. Show me ten of them. Not so easy now, is it? But I bet I can conjure up 10 "fat slob" enemies in the blink of an eye. Hell, Stang identifies nine of them in her intro paragraph and that was almost eight years ago!
I'm out of clever or witty things to say on this subject, video game industry. Just fucking stop. Learn a new trick. Pick some fruit that's hanging a little higher. You're exhaustingly basic.