Needs clarification and a better description : Hollywood Pudgy

I was wondering whether or not this trope needed a subjective banner. However after reading the description, the overly long, extremely disjointed description, and examples I'm having trouble getting to the point of what this trope is. 

Half the examples are talking about a character who is worried or teased about of their weight despite coming across as having a average build to the audience and the other half seems to be talking about characters who come across being fat to a certain segment of the audience.

Either way this trope page needs to clarify what exactly this trope is getting at.

I never had a problem with this trope, though the description is very long and might use some condensation.

"and the other half seems to be talking about characters who come across being fat to a certain segment of the audience."

Uh, that has nothing to do with the trope, and if there are examples like that, they should probably be cut.

Well if that's the case then that would mean that the real life section needs to be cut from this trope

I think some of the real life examples can be qualified in the sense that it's pop-news sources arbitrarily declaring them fat rather than the fanbase. Other than that, though, some pruning might be in order.

Well if that's the case then this trope should have a subjective banner. Regardless of whether or not it's a fan or a pop news site, it's still someone's opinion, no matter how ridiculous they may seem.

I have a question unrelated to the above: Why was the previous picture caption changed? I thought that the "Pfft, whale." comment was not only hilarious, but a concise illustration of what this trope is about. The current caption is about 4 lines longer and, in my opinion, lacks the punch the previous one had.

Not only that but it's not even indictive of the trope. It reads more like Hollywood Homely

Do we not have a proper section heading for entertainment magazines and so forth? "Real Life" implies it's objectively true in real life - reality itself holds that opinion.

I think we have a Magazine Name Space that we can use.

So just wondering does anyone have a solid definition of what this trope actually is?

Going by the name? It should be about either 1) Hollywood definition of "pudgy" which would be a subtrope of Hollywood Homely or 2)the overreaction to being fat.

If there's something else, let me know, I'll take a chainsaw to it on my next pass.

edited 11th Feb '11 6:44:13 PM by Deboss

Bam. Killed most of the whining.

Well, All of the whining gone from the trope but there's not really a definition in the trope. All I'm getting so far is that a character who is Hollywood Pudgy is probably of an average sized build(which varies from location), and that's it.

edited 13th Feb '11 11:24:09 AM by captainpat

That seems to be the trope.

The laconic version of the trope is:

A character who would be a normal weight, or thin in Real Life is treated like they're grossly overweight either by the media or in comparison to the rest of the cast.

Just to ask, what constitutes "normal"? Because the weight of the average American seems to have gone up in the past few years, so someone who "should" be seen as overweight may be "normal" in comparison now.

And how do we handle cultural differences?

The height of the average American has also gone up, and the BMI grid doesn't really work well past the heights it was designed on. Nor does it work well on muscular people. The true metric would be measuring body fat percentage. Not just weight to height. Something that they tend to forget to tell you. Most people aren't overweight. It's just that the people who are tend to be grotesquely so. It's largely a shift in media perceptions.

edited 13th Feb '11 5:31:35 PM by shimaspawn

Hence why requested a YMMV banner. If then trope was limited to say thin fictional character like say Ms. Marvel◊ then there would be a problem, but what constitutes as normal varies by a lot of factors.

Also if the trope considers characters or real life people considered fat by the news media isn't that technically an audience reaction?

News Media is still media. It's not the audience reacting. It's just more media.

I would say if we're going to make this YMMV, we should excise the Real Life section.

How the hell is this subjective? A character/person thats not fat thats referred to as overweight despite being average at worst. I think tv trope really abuses the YMMV concept

Because what's "average" and what's "clearly overweight" is subjective.

There's this one trope out there (I can't find it right now) with, I think, one of the main Nazis in it in a trope about being burly or overweight or whatever. I put it up in Image Pickin' because I didn't think the guy was overweight enough to qualify to be considered overweight. I got all sorts of "what are you talking about?"s.

It's about as subjective as Hollywood Homely, the fact being the middle ground doesn't exist in Hollywood. But I don't know, I'm getting more and more disillusioned with the wiki community's ability to keep things factual and not turn objective tropes into subjective ones. Examples tend to make very broad conclusions without quoting direct statements like "From the way the people talk about him, he must weight 4,000 pounds." It's assuming intentions behind a comment or remark about someone's weight, while ignoring certain factors that might be something other than just the "Hollywood standard of beauty". Look at the Will And Grace example, which eventually gives a Justifying Edit that the remark was made by a neurotic individual.

I kind of look at the trope by looking at Home Improvement. Al Borland (Richard Karn) is not obese but he is on the hefty side, statements that he is overweight can be concluded as reasonable. Tim Taylor (Tim Allen) has a more athletic build but he isn't exactly in perfect condition either, (theoretical) statements that he is overweight would fall into the trope.

Technically, what's "average" is completely objective because it's a function of statistics. Though in the case of weight it would make more sense to use the median for comparisons.

In any event, I don't think subjectivity is too much of an issue here. Just looking at random examples, they mostly seem to be women who are clearly below the statistical average and have little or no visible signs of excess fat. I'm pretty sure that if they went in for a check up none of the examples would be considered "overweight" in the medical sense.

Statistical average of where? The world? Japan? The U.S? We can't measure a fiction character's BMI so figuring out whether or not they're clinical obese is out of the question. All I'm getting from this trope is "this character is not as fat as they or the story wants you to believe". Whether or not you agree with that is going to depend on a host of factors.