"Shrill" is an amazing show
icon: "bodylove -- me (belly goddess)" (my bare belly and breasts covered in colorful washable marker drawings with spirals on my breasts and a butterfly over my belly button)"
Holy fuck the 4th episode of Shrill had me absolutely sobbing with joy. Bodies that look like mine, dancing and swimming and just happily existing in bathing suits and not a goddamn skirted 1-piece in sight.
If you have never been fat and you have hulu, please watch this show. It is literally the only show I have ever seen with multiple fat people in it and where being fat is never a joke and the usual trope of fetishizing food or eating a lot is not present. It's so goddamn real.
[vague spoilers ahead]
I'm so fucking annoyed with the piece of shit boyfriend but also that is such an important story to tell because I did that, and for similar reasons. I put up with greedy, selfish, useless, entitled fuckwads because for so many years it literally did not occur to me that I could say "no" to something my datefriend wanted. I felt like I had to make up for my "inferior" body by accommodating their every whim and soothing their every uncomfortable feeling. And this idea was so deeply embedded that I didn't realize I was thinking it until after I had stopped doing it. While I was doing it I could not recognize it.
Also I don't know if non-fat people would get this, but in the second scene of the first episode, when the barista and customer say that she reminds them of Rosie O'Donnell, that is almost as bad as the overt harassment. It says that the only thing they see is "fat woman." It was a second cut-down by people who were trying to be nice, and for me that hurts so much more. It is worse when people are trying to be nice and they reveal themselves as so ignorant and alienated from your experience that they accidentally stab you.
I don't like that the main character gets so self-involved that she doesn't listen to her friends' needs. I feel like this is a trope when fat (or fat-ish) femme characters start to assert themselves and value their own needs and I think it comes from the writers not actually knowing any people who go from full-time-comfort-blanket to actual-human-who-still-cares.