Like a lady

She said

Let’s talk about Alex Day’s new video “Big Girls in Costumes”.

Anyone who has been subscribed to Alex for a time is familiar with his preferred style of humor, his tendency to talk about things honestly without an apparent fear of backlash, and, well, he gets a kick out of messing with people. Obviously just in titling the video “Big Girls in Costumes” and releasing it to a fan base that is majority female, he knew it would create controversy. Fair enough, not my channel, not my choices in marketing.

At a glance, part way through the video, it sounds like Alex holds an unsavory opinion about cosplayers at conventions and the idea that fat girls should only dress up as characters that correspond to their body type. I will be the first to admit that I slapped my hand over my mouth and paused the video and thought about how I was subscribed to an asshole. I unpaused the video.

“Dress up like characters like the size you are. You can be the Hulk, you can be Jabba the Hutt, uh, Merida!…From Brave.”

Oh. I laughed. He literally suggests “chubby girls” dress up as Jabba the Hutt. He called Merida, the only Disney Princess with anything close to possible human proportions, fat. I’m starting to sense some sharp wit and social commentary going on here. A good satire often has the writer/speaker/actor acting as though the very thing they are denouncing is in fact normal or acceptable, to later expose it through irony. He is taking on the role of the asshole con-goer, the ridiculous person who actually viewed Merida as fat and thinks their sight should only be graced by attractive people.

He finishes off the video by confirming my belief that he’s just delivered an intelligent piece of satire about body-policing and jerks at conventions by offering the juxtaposed example of a blind man he a saw at a convention who “wasn’t even dressed as Daredevil” and called the man lazy. (Alex himself didn’t dress up at all either and he’s not even freaking blind. ~Irony.~)

The point of the anecdote about the blind man was to reveal the absolute absurdity of the social convention of shaming people for having fun and dressing up as characters they don’t necessarily look like. You’ll hear grumbles of agreement at conventions that fat girls should only dress as fat people, but that same logic applied to the blind man? Just because he’s blind he should have to dress up as Daredevil?? No…that’s the point…it’s all absurd.

I am not telling you that you don’t have the right to think the video isn’t funny or to be offended (there is literally nothing on this planet that doesn’t offend SOMEONE). I will even accept the idea that you dislike that the commentary perhaps too subtle and will send the opposite of the intended message to the unwitting. But there are hoards and hoards of people who have taken what Alex Day said literally and did not see that the entire video was satirical at all. I see people both disagreeing and agreeing with the words about cosplaying without actually understanding that he’s actually shaming the people who fat-shame for being ridiculous and offensive, not the people who are fat.

I’ve been making videos for seven years - that’s the length of Voldemort’s entire rise and fall, my god - so I thought people would be familiar with my approach by now. I appear to have misjudged it. Nevertheless, however obvious it might seem to you that this wasn’t the right approach, I feel the need to clarify that I put the video online with the knowledge that this isn’t really my actual point of view, and feeling confident that I’d said so many absurd things in the video, everyone would be clear on that. (My best example: I ended this video by suggesting we should dress up a blind man as a superhero against his will and parade him around a comic book convention. That’s obviously not something I actually think.)

In the script for this video (which I considered very carefully), I tried to be as absurd as I could with the jokes I made to make it very clear that the joke was at MY expense. I said that the best thing about conventions is that “it’s not about who you are, it’s about who you could be” - immediately following up by suggesting an overweight girl dressed as Misty should instead go as her Togepi for the sake of appropriateness! That’s SUCH an offensive thing to say! So much so that I didn’t think anyone would actually take me seriously, because it’s SO OFFENSIVE. It makes me very sad and disappointed that people actually think I feel that way. I said that a chubby person’s only options for cosplaying were The Hulk, Jabba The Hutt and Merida from Brave - again, I think that’s an obvious sign that I’m not taking myself seriously, because nobody with a brain would look at Jabba the Hutt and Merida and say they are the same size (except maybe whoever redrew her at Disney, which was the reason I chose Merida specifically) - I thought that made it clear that I was joking, and was sad to see comments from people I’ve been friends with for years trying to gently explain to me that I shouldn’t view Merida as chubby. I didn’t say she was chubby; I said she was equal in size to an evil alien slug gangster. To me, that made it clear I didn’t mean it, or else you just really think I want to restrict how people express themselves based on their body size, which means you think I’m a brainless cunt - and that’s very saddening.

So: I obviously had a lot of misjudged faith in the use of my absurdity to get the point across. The message to take away from this video, as I intended it, is: “in this video I am portraying a dickhead. If you know someone like this, don’t listen to them. They’re clearly talking bullshit nonsense”. I felt that any disclaimer of ’this is a satire’ would have been incredibly insulting to my audience, suggesting they’re not smart or capable enough to get my jokes without me explaining it to them. Really, there WAS a disclaimer: the seven years of videos with the same sense of humour was the disclaimer not to take me seriously. I don’t know how many of the viewers to that video are regular subscribers vs people coming in blind after seeing a storm brew - but regardless, that shouldn’t excuse it.

To clarify; people can (and should!) wear whatever they want. My favourite cosplays at MCM in fact were the people who went as characters of their opposite gender - a female Matt Smith, for example - but it doesn’t matter what I think anyway, a girl who wants to dress as Misty is doing it because she feels a connection to Misty and wants to express it - and that’s wonderful! She’s not doing it to look attractive to some asshole who thinks she should hide away somewhere, she doesn’t care about pleasing some jackoff who goes to a convention and says “dress like someone more your size”. That’s what’s so wonderful about conventions. You leave those jerky opinions at the door and let yourself be free. People have said of this video ‘I don’t get it - what’s the joke?’ … the joke is ‘this is a comedic exaggeration of people who actually think like this’. The underlying point is serious but I tried to deal with it satirically and therefore humorously (I’d hoped). I plan all my videos very carefully and I knew exactly the point I was trying to make and how to use the jokes, which get increasingly more and more absurd, to make that point.

If that point was lost on a lot of people … well, that’s my fault for not making the jokes clear enough. I can’t blame anyone but myself, cos I’m the one that executed them in the way that I thought was best. I used my best judgment and it obviously wasn’t good enough. I repeatedly tell people not to view me as a role model - but if they do, I still need to be mindful of that, not just blunder on forwards saying “not my problem, I told them not to listen!” - so that’s what I’ve learned from this, as well as being aware that the reason my ‘absurdity’ fell flat is because, in reality, these are just things people say - so my knowledge and awareness of fat shaming is greatly increased as a result of knowing that and going through this. I appreciate you taking the time to read this, anyway, and I hope my intentions are now a little more clearly understood.