To Ragh; Or, On Fatness

To Ragh; or, On Fatness

Hi! Below is an actual play mini-essay. These are written as part of a personal writing practice of thinking critically about actual play. I hope you find this reading engaging and know that all I write reflects my own interpretations rather than as an official representation/canonization of these shows.

Ragh Barkrock may be one of the most beloved NPCs in Dimension20. It would be easy for Ragh, a bloodrush player good enough to potentially play professionally, to be presented as hypermasculine. In fact, the freshmen year art for Ragh, when he was antagonist rather than beloved ally, showed him in a muscular, inverted Dorito shaped body typical of a jock.

To Ragh; Or, On Fatness

He's, obviously, built, and his cut jaw and cheekbones only bolster that image. As Ragh comes to terms with being gay at the end of Fantasy High, his countenance changes. When we see him again, the new art reflects a chubbier, happier Ragh.

To Ragh; Or, On Fatness

The show aligning weight gain with acceptance and happiness already works against prevailing stereotypes that use weight loss as a quick metaphor for improving yourself and being the "real you." Moreover, connecting Ragh's acceptance of his sexuality with what seems like a larger comfort in his own body is a strong indictment of hypermasculine gay culture. As Gabriel Arana writes, gay men "must reconcile their sense of masculinity with their failure to conform to its heterosexuality." Not doing so has negative mental health outcomes, as Arana points out, and contributes to a culture that devalues fat queer people (see the popular "no fats, no femmes, no Asians" that often is touted in masculine gay subculture).

All of this, I think, is why Ragh's art for Junior Year was particularly impactful for me as a fat queer person. If being a gay man (or half-Orc, in Ragh's case) means having to situate your life in relationship to failing compulsory masculinity, then it seems there is an inherent queer aspect to embracing, celebrating, and showcasing a beloved NPC in an explicitly fat and happy body.

To Ragh; Or, On Fatness

Ragh is still strong and he is still fat. His body radiates a commitment to the power of fat bodies to exist in spaces they are often violently unwelcome in, such as gyms. Existing in gyms and sports spaces as fat people means dealing the "impossible standard that rejects nearly all of us" and upholds a diet culture rooted in impossible, Eurocentric and colonial body standards. In TTRPGS or actual plays, there is a unique opportunity to think about how bodies might exist in worlds different from ours, to imagine bodyminds as otherwise. However, as queer critics like Paul Preciado have noted, sci-fi and fantasy representations of cyborgs and other transformative bodies often lean into "fixing" disabled people or moving gender nonconforming bodies more easily towards technologies upholding a normative standard rather than questioning the standard all together.

Spyre is a world that deals with similar issues to ours, even without direct one-to-one correlations, so it, too, is a place where the narrative and artistic choices should be examined in how it helps us interpolate the world the audience resides in. From the Applebees cultish adherence to a deity-based nationalism to the various representations of parental neglect and abuse and every side story in-between, Dimension20's flagship show does not shy away from difficult realities even when recasting them through fantasy. Ragh, as a half-orc gay son of a disabled single mother, then, I see the arc his fat body goes through as meaningful and intertwined with his self-acceptance and queerness. He moves away from the toxic masculinity engineered into his blood rush team to instead pursue coalition comraderie with his friends to the point that he and his mother end up joining a communal living situation with those friends and their parents. Ragh's body expands as his family does, as his ties to community do, and to me, the gift of his fatness is the invitation to expansion that it holds out to us as viewers.

More Posts from Zeebby-night and Others

1 year ago

Someone Worte that he could not stand to see the Palestine flag anymore.

Someone Worte That He Could Not Stand To See The Palestine Flag Anymore.

Sorry, but not sorry

Someone Worte That He Could Not Stand To See The Palestine Flag Anymore.

Reblog daily

Someone Worte That He Could Not Stand To See The Palestine Flag Anymore.

Free Palestine

Someone Worte That He Could Not Stand To See The Palestine Flag Anymore.

I am not done yet

Someone Worte That He Could Not Stand To See The Palestine Flag Anymore.

Only way to stop seeing this flag is when the oppression is over.

So you are tiered of this? you can end it, stop supporting Zionism!

2 years ago

This is something I need to get more into. During college and now after my mind is always thinking that any and all stories I read need to be in the mindset of possibly being published but sometimes you just need to write the mountain of the most plotless but chaotic amazingness that builds up.

i feel like all writers just need like....an oc story. and i dont mean like a story just with original characters. i mean like a piece of writing that simply makes your brain go wheeeeeeeeeee and its at the level of something your 13 year old self would write and post to deviantart. its liberating. its freeing. its comforting. my ocs are all gay and overpowered as fuck and there's really no plot to this but by god I'm having fun.

1 year ago

it's funny how Adaine might have been the perfect Bad Kid for Porter to corrupt yet he didn't even know her name. She was the younger unfavorite daughter in her family, prone to panic attacks and lashing out. She wanted to punch people in the face the first day of school, she's the first one of the Bad Kids who killed a person instead of a monster and she did it with a melee weapon.

Even after she is in a healthier environment she is actually more vicious than fearful like she was in freshman year. She lashes out against authority figures and injustice, she is proud of killing her father by punching off his head. everytime someone wrongs her she response twice as hard in a fury that even the rest of the party doesn't match.

And to make things worse, the Wizard teacher is a condescending bitch who talks down to her students. It would have been so easy for him to take Adaine under his wing. She's literally everything he pretended Fig was and now she's turning her anger on him. The guy is not only a bad teacher, an all around dick, but he's also as bad at proselytizing as Kristen is.

Frankly all of the bad kids were kind of perfect for him and his plans, if a bit too headstrong and willful, but he was never clever enough as he thinks. That's why he's being mocked by a bunch of teenagers when he tries to get them to debate him/ engage with his philosophy

*Edit*

I actually liked this idea so much I started an au if you're interested

Part 1 Part 2

1 year ago

listen. aging into your thirties rocks. yes your joints get a little creaky. yes you can’t sleep in a pretzel on the floor anymore after a concert or a convention. and you lose some friends. but the thing is that you sort out who your real friends are and you sort out who you really are. and you get to see your friends settling into careers they like, and adopt new dogs and cats, and you find a job you can stand, and get really good at arts and crafts, and maybe that book you loved as a kid gets a movie deal and it doesn’t suck, and you learn to like new food and bake your own bread, and you realize that the great portfolio of self harm scars you all used to curate are going white with age and not updated, and half your friends are a different gender now and so much happier and maybe you are too, and you know who you are, and that it’s a journey and not a revelation. it’s a direction you’re headed, and you’re enjoying the trip.

reaching your 30′s rocks. and i’m hearing good things about what comes next, too.

2 years ago

Fantasy High: Sophomore Year

I finally watched and finished the second season of Fantasy High. I had watched the first season on youtube before I gotten the dropout subscription. So, I was quite excited to start it up early last week. I finished it up just the other day and my heart.

From the very start, I could not have guessed that the story was going to the places and ways that it ended up going. This image of the Unnamed Goddess being reborn into deity-hood. It was so moving and it really tied everything beautifully.

The various NPCs added or expanded upon were such wonderful bits of the story to be all added in. Adya became a fast favorite of mine. She was an amazing addition and I love how fast she was able to bond with Adaine and Fig.

All of the characters had such amazing moments throughout this entire campaign. Everyone got such cool and moving moments that delved into and developed their own individual backstories. I literally can't choose a favorite moment from this entire season.

Side note: I love that all of the fanmade Fig and the Cig Figs songs were uploaded on Spotify. They were made so well and really capture the feelings of the campaign.


Tags
1 year ago
He's Been Here The Whole Time!

He's been here the whole time!

1 year ago

It's wild how many people took Kristen's line of questioning as her saying Tracker isn't taking her religion seriously instead of what I heard her asking which was:

How many of these people would be here if it wasn't religious Coachella?

1 year ago

This is a good thing to bring up. For example, where I live (Southern State plus a small town with less than 1000 for the population) we lost our tiny (volunteer) local library due to water damage of the building and it never recovered. I would have to go to one of the next towns over, which is at least a 20 minute drive, for which I don't have the means of going to as I am unable to drive. So, please be aware as much public libraries are nessacery and need support from the community more than ever- not everyone can get to a library unfortunately.

as a fellow Public Library Enthusiast i am begging people to consider the fact that not everywhere has an accessible public library or indeed public libraries at all. just saying “get a library card” at strangers when you have no idea about their background or their life isn’t very helpful. let them pirate in peace

2 years ago

Had some thoughts about the themes emerging in Neverafter so far in another post’s notes that I may as else clarify in my own.

(BBEG is Capitalism truthers beware ig, there’s a lot of me talking about why I don’t like that theory and find it reductive.)

Ok. So. I guess I’d like to start saying that I get why people enjoy a good “haha bad guy is capitalism” joke, because everyone who plays dnd hates capitalism—especially right now, considering current controversies. BUT, I find the common posts of “OMG Neverafter’s bad guy has GOT to be capitalism/Disney” very irritating because it feels less like people picking up on the clues the narrative is putting down and more hammering their own biases of what they want the series to be about into the narrative.

Like, some people keep saying the moral is that Disney sanitizing everything is bad but like… literally nothing about the setting (aside from some fairy tales Disney used appearing) suggests that. The stories are getting worse, darker, closer to their older versions. And the characters don’t want that! Non-Disney versions of the stories aren’t framed as better like you’d think a “Disney Bad” narrative would—in fact, several characters would much prefer to be in their Disney versions right now, whether or not they should be. That kinder versions of the story—which would include the Disney movies—are vanishing due to the carelessness of a select few is presented as a bad thing.

If the theme of the story was that sanitation of fairy tales is bad, don’t you think we’d start off in more “Disney” style versions of the stories? You could easily make a horror story about the dread of being trapped in a “perfect” world. But that’s not what’s happening.

One of the horrors of the Neverafter, courtesy of Cinderella’s visit, is that bad things keep happening no matter what you do. Cinderella’s mother always dies. She always becomes a servant to her Stepmother. Over and over again. Why? What is making this so?

It’s the horror of predestination, of bad things happening to you because someone has decided they should no matter what you want. It’s a much bigger and baser concept than Historic Versions vs Disney Versions, or even Characters vs Disney.

As the conversation with the Librarians and Mother Goose’s encounter with the Inkwell seem to suggest, the conflict is moreso Characters vs Authors.

The question Brennan seems to be posing through Neverafter’s world and story isn’t “Isn’t Disney So Awful?”, it’s “In a reality where storybook characters are real people, is it moral or ethical to make those characters suffer for a good story?”

Or, removed from the trappings of the setting, the question is: “Is it moral or ethical to make real people suffer to make a good thing?”

Good children, good spouses, good futures, good ideals, good communities—and, in a Capitalist society, good profits. But what is good enough to sacrifice people for? And what is “Good” at all?

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24 year old reader and writer

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