Having grown up studying Seventeen diet tips and Slimfast ads as though they might contain the secret to everlasting life (or eternal admiration, which was all I really wanted as an anxious, body-insecure tween), I genuinely didn’t think diet culture could get more toxic than it was when I was in middle school in the aughts. Unfortunately, however, a recent trend on TikTok has proven me wrong: Just recently, an AI-generated “chubby filter” that allowed users to see what they would look like if they were—gasp—fat was removed from the video-sharing app after causing an uproar.
While I wholeheartedly believe that everyone’s body is their own business—from users of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy to influencers like Remi Bader—as someone who is fat 100% of the time, I’m sickened at the idea of other, younger fat people seeing something like the “chubby filter” trend and internalizing the message that their bodies are good for nothing but cheap laughs. Perhaps that’s why the latest season of Michelle Buteau’s Survival of the Thickest, which landed on Netflix this week, hit home so hard for me.
As much as I’d like to resist responding to a fat person’s art through the lens of compulsory thinness, there’s something deeply liberating about just how little interest Survival of the Thickest—and its protagonist, Mavis Beaumont—has in self-hatred. Season 2 of the series is no more focused on weight (or weight loss) than the show’s first season was: It begins with Mavis showing up at the doorstep of the wildly hot Roman do-gooder Luca (Marouane Zotti) that she quickly fell for and majorly screwed over last season by secretly accepting her cheating ex’s proposal. Hot as their initial passion is, it soon becomes clear that Luca has trouble trusting her, and Mavis returns home to New York.
Where some shows might use a fat protagonist’s breakup as an excuse for a diet montage, Survival of the Thickest instead sees Mavis revel in her singledom, throwing herself into the affirming work of building out her styling business. Eventually, at the opening of a pop-up storefront, Mavis tells the crowd that the space’s existence is “a dream come true for me and for anyone else who has cried in a dressing room because we have felt like the fashion industry has forgotten us.”
I’ve literally and figuratively been there, and the part of me that worries “SkinnyTok” will put fat people right back in the dressing room of our nightmares was greatly soothed by watching a whole season of Mavis chasing her dream, loving her friends, making mistakes, and generally living her life—without wondering what said life might look like if she were thinner.
It would be great if the success of Survival of the Thickest inspired the industry powers that be to greenlight, produce, and actually promote more shows starring fat and non-straight-size people who aren’t defined by their quest to shrink their bodies. But for now, at least we have one Netflix show that actually focuses around the survival—and, what’s more, the exuberance—of an unapologetically fat character whose body is far from the most interesting thing about her.
