Down With The Thiccness

Drawing random animals

#05 Big-eared Flying Fox.

What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.

They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.

I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.

I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.

And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.

Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.

They were all so fucking nice.

And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.

Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.

They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.

bob's meshi. they have a pop-up dungeon restaurant. louise made herself a beastman when no one was looking. practice safe magic and dont leave advanced tomes unattended

stay alive

stay safe

Drink some water

eat something

get back into the things you love

Unclench your jaw

do some self-care

Take a shower or bath

Of course, "King Lear" is THE fairytale play, due to it being historical evidence of the "Love like Salt" and "Jack and the Giant" motifs. There has been talks of "Cymbeline" in relationship to Snow White, and very often in fairytale media groups of three witches become Macbeth's Weird Sisters (from the "Damsels" comic to the "Eldraine" card game, and that's just two recent cases). Even in France we have that connection made ("Les Flammes de la Nuit" for example gleefuly mixes the fairytale and the Shakespearian).

I say all this because I was reading some of the writings of French author Marcel Schwob (I was encouraged to check it back due to seeing someone point out his "King in the Golden Mask" might have been an inspiration for "The King in Yellow"). And he wrote a preface to an edition of Hamlet, alongside Eugène Morrand. Not just any edition: a French translation he and Morrand did... and that was the play that Sarah Bernhardt played into in 1899. When the published version of the play was released André Gide was apparently particularly enthusiastic about the preface.

Now it is more than a century old, so it has dated info... BUT it is very interesting because in it Schwob includes "Hamlet" in the fairytale debate surrounding Shakespeare.

In this preface, among other things, he talks about the predecessors to Shakespeare's Hamlet, especially that one supposed "Ur-Hamlet" that was, at the time, attributed to Thomas Kyd (base on him writing "The Spanish Tragedy"). He then raises the question: did the character of Ophelia exist in Kyd's play? (aka what we would call Ur-Hamlet). Because, in Saxo Grammaticus' "History of the Danish", the usurper kng tries to discover Hamlet's secret by sending him his young sister-in-law, and in its loose translation as "The Historie of Hamlet" by the temptress is also present, as a "lady of the Court"... But none of those stories have an Hamlet in love with this female character. Schwob wonders where "the bitter and painful line of the nunnery" comes from... And he mentions a "recent" discovery of Anatole France.

Anatole France, in "La Vie Littéraire", pointed out that one of the French fairytales collected by Bladé in his "Contes populaires de la Gascogne" (published in 1886) is... a "Hamlet" variation. Now, Schwob agrees with other people on the fact that this French tale from the Gascon-speaking region cannot be placed in the "genealogy of Hamlet"... But he also says the parallels, especially the variation on the Ophelia character, forces one to consider it. He also adds how Bladé's collection has "another Shakespeare variation" in the shape of "La Gardeuse de Dindons", which begins like "King Lear" before ending like a mix of "Cinderella and Donkey Skin". [Schwob just discovered here the "Love like Salt" motif that later fairytale-scholars would identify and classify]. And Schwob concludes that it proves that both Shakespeare's "Lear" and "Hamlet" "once belonged to the Anglo-Saxon folklore", and that these fairytales are remain of a common folktale-source, probably spread by the constant cultural interactions and political conquests between France and England. And thus, for him, this French fairytale, while not truly an "ancestor" is a clue that might explain where the character of Ophelia came from, based on the "lost folktale" that disappeared before the literary works.

I'll place the story's recap under the cut: