come with me to the other side .

i’ve been seeing a lot of discourse about mike flanagan’s upcoming carrie adaptation and whether or not carrie white 'needs' to be fat, and i’ve been sitting with it because i have a lot of complicated feelings about it-- as someone who is fat and as someone who enjoys carrie as a character.

first, i want to say that i completely understand why people want a fat carrie. genuinely. hollywood has a very long history of treating fat bodies as either the joke, the villain, the before picture, or something that needs to be fixed before a character can be lovable. fat women especially are rarely allowed to just exist as the center of a story without their bodies being part of the conversation. and as a fat person myself, i understand why seeing someone like carrie represented matters. but i also don’t think carrie’s entire character hinges on her being fat.

and i don’t mean that as 'her being fat doesn’t matter' or 'who cares about representation' because that's not !!! what i'm saying !!! i just think there’s something more complicated happening with carrie than 'she is ugly because she is fat.'

because carrie is not actually portrayed as this universally ugly person throughout the novel. at the beginning of the book, yes, king describes her as ugly, a toad, a cow. but we have to ask: ugly according to who?

carrie has spent her entire life being told she is disgusting. her classmates see her as disgusting. her mother tells her she is sinful and wrong. she is neglected, isolated, dressed differently, socially awkward, and completely unaware of how to navigate any normal teenage interactions because she has never been given the chance to have anything resembling a normal life.

of course she believes she’s ugly!

then we get to the prom scene and suddenly, carrie is beautiful. king is very, very direct in saying that. (yeah he's whacked out of his mind on co.ca.ine when he wrote it, so who is to say he's the best for continuity).

but king doesn’t just change her face. she doesn’t become a different person. what changes is the way she is seen. she has a dress that fits. her hair is done. she feels confident. she has, for one brief moment, allowed herself to believe that maybe she is worthy of being loved and admired.

ALSO. the story is told from SO many point's of view. every single chapter or piece is going to have a different opinion and perception of her.

but the bottom line: carrie’s tragedy isn’t that she is inherently ugly and i think that’s an important thing to mention.

because bullying has always existed for more reasons than just someone’s body. especially in a modern context, someone can become the target of cruelty because of their clothes, their personality, their home life, their awkwardness, their social skills, their interests, their religion, their perceived 'weirdness,' or any number of things.

carrie is not just bullied because she is fat; she is bullied because she is carrie.

and another thing i think gets lost in this conversation is that carrie is not simply a victim (though, i want to be VERY clear she is one). she is also the antagonist of her own story.

and i don’t mean that in a 'she deserved it' way. she absolutely did not. carrie was abused. she was neglected. she was tormented. she was pushed into an unimaginable breaking point.

but she still kills people.

that is what makes carrie such an interesting and tragic character to me. she is simultaneously someone we feel deeply sorry for and someone we are incredibly horrified by. she is not just a revenge fantasy where the bullied girl gets to 'win'. she is a tragedy about what happens when someone is hurt so badly that the only thing they have left is rage.

. . . and i wonder if part of the hesitation around a fat carrie comes from a very real fear of fat characters being coded as monstrous. as they often have been in the past. because media has spent decades using fat bodies as shorthand for evil, grotesque, lazy, disgusting, or villainous. so there is absolutely a reason people are protective of how fat characters are portrayed.

but i also think fat people deserve to be allowed to be complicated.

fat women deserve to be heroes. they deserve to be loved. they deserve to be beautiful. but they also deserve to be angry. they deserve to be flawed. they deserve to be terrifying. they deserve to be characters who are not reduced to being the humor, the jolly one or a motherly figure.

because carrie is not dangerous because she is fat.

she is dangerous because she is a deeply traumatized person who has been given incredible power and has finally reached her breaking point.

i think a fat actress could make an incredible carrie. i would love to see more fat women leading horror stories, actually!!!!! but i also don’t think casting a non-fat actress automatically means the adaptation has misunderstood the character????

the question, to me, isn’t “does carrie look ugly enough?”

the question is: can i believe this is a girl who has spent her whole life being told she is worthless?

because that is carrie white. reducing her down to 'the ugly girl who gets revenge' cliche really simplifies her story and the horrors that eventually overcome her. she is a lonely, abused girl who has been failed by every single person around her, until the only thing that was left inside her was the rage filled monster who decimates an entire fucking town.