Basic Trope: Obesity is the norm 20 Minutes into the Future.
- Straight:
- In 2225, most people are overweight and subsist on fatty, sugary food.
- By 2225, most American children are too obese to ride hoverboards.
- Exaggerated: In the 2500s, most people are far too fat to even move without hoverboards and have never even seen vegetables.
- 5 million years in the future, evolution has resulted in humanity evolving into a race of Fat and Proud Kevlards of Posthumans as heavy as the Mammoths of the past.
- By the year 50 million, humans have become so huge they now occupy megafaunal niches that were last seen with the sauropods.
- Downplayed: In the future, everyone is pudgy.
- Justified:
- The setting extrapolates a possible future based on real-world rises in obesity rates.
- At this point in the setting, obesity is incredibly common and becoming thin is incredibly difficult. Societal attitudes change and the population at large chooses to embrace it rather than fight it.
- Society becomes more dependent on motorized vehicles for transportation and spends all its time in front of computers and snacking on fatty, sugary foods.
- Vegetables, fruits, and grains are extinct, so nobody can get healthy enough. The little dairy and protein left isn't enough to sustain healthiness.
- The MegaCorp which rules the world (free of pesky external regulation), in order to keep people docile and profits flowing, markets to them a steady diet of addictive, ultra-processed foods, labour-saving robots, mobility chairs so they don't have to exert themselves, mindless televisual and computer-based entertainment which can all be paid for on easy credit terms backed up by the wages from their sedentary, mindless, makework Soul-Crushing Desk Job, everything which might require the least physical exertion having been automated away by a Job-Stealing Robot. Bonus points: all those early-onset heart attacks mean there's no need to pay pensions!
- A well-meaning AI tries to attend to humanity's every need in an attempt to bring about world peace, ending world hunger included. On that front, it succeeds by making a breakthrough in cheap, easily mass-produced foodstuffs that taste genuinely delicious... too delicious.
- Inverted:
- 20 Minutes into the Future, most people are extremely skinny.
- People in the future are all ridiculously fit.
- We Will Have Perfect Health in the Future
- During a conversation, a Human Alien ambassador mentions their species used to have a generation-spanning obesity epidemic in The Dark Times.
- Subverted: 20 Minutes into the Future, most people that we see are fat. Only it turns out that was an exercise camp.
- Double Subverted:
- …in the only remaining country in the world where they are still mobile enough to exercise: North Korea.
- But everyone eventually gets fatter over time as junk food becomes more prevalent and exercise less so.
- Parodied: People have been reduced to immobile, greedy literal balls of lard in the future.
- Zig Zagged: Alice arrives in the future in a city full of overweight people. But in the next city she visits, most of the populace is lean and toned. She later travels to a city whose variety of sizes isn't much different from the present day, then a city where the average person weighs more than a half ton.
- Averted: The obesity rates stay roughly level well into the future.
- Lampshaded: "Why is everyone so fat? It's been what, 6 years?
- Enforced: All the health problems this causes may be used in an attempt to Scare 'Em Straight.
- Invoked: A Corrupt Corporate Executive and/or a One World Government secretly fattened the people on purpose in an effort to make them easier to control.
- Exploited: The small portion of healthy people, including Emperor Evulz, is able to manipulate the morbidly obese people by threatening to sabotage their mobility technology and/or deny them access to food.
- Defied: Troperia's leadership predicts that a huge spike in obesity may occur in the future. They lay out a comprehensive plan to prevent it that includes investing in sweets-modifying technology that retains flavor while reducing empty calories, improved exercise techniques and equipment (and easier access to these resources by poor and overly busy residents,) genuinely effective diet pills, bariatric surgery advances, etc.
- Discussed:
- Alice was put in a cryo-stasis chamber in the near-future, where not everybody was overweight. When she gets woken up in the distant future, her guide to the 24th century, Bob, is morbidly obese. He tells her that ever since medical science made it a perfectly viable option, it has become popular. Alice agrees that she would quite like to fatten up that much to be considered attractive.
- Conversed:
- Alice and Bob live in one era, but they start talking about what the future will be like. Alice suggests that, with advancing science and technology, there will be plenty of food for everyone, no need for physical effort, and excellent medical advances, making things like heart conditions far less problematic, so people will probably all become very fat. They agree that they are looking forward to it.
- Deconstructed:
- Obesity's long-term health problems prevent such a future from being sustainable in the long run.
- The Big Fat Future relies on specific circumstances staying the same for decades in order to continue. Outside factors such as advancement of weight reduction technology and scarcity of resources end up emerging and disrupting the trend.
- Reconstructed:
- Eventually, there are breakthroughs in medicine and technology (such as treatments to strengthen muscles and bones) that allow the people to function quite well no matter their size.
- With no means of stopping the obesity rates, evolution and natural selection will kick in and instead tweak humanity in a way that lets them function better as creatures with blubber than be skinny and scrawny primates. Perhaps their brain power multiplies to compensate for their lack of agility.
- Played For Laughs: People in the future are all portrayed as targets of mockery who are obese.
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