: Re: How do I express that a culture has a different standard of beauty? I am aware that there are lots of different ways to do this. I'm being subtle about it thus far. Our standards of beauty

@Hamaas631

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So if you want to create a culture in which overweight bodies are perceived as beautiful, you really don't have to be too subtle, because no matter how subtle or unsubtle you are, only the readers that share that ideal will be attracted by that book, while all others will find it uninteresting or irritating.

While the post I quote has many valid points I am not sure that the passage above works for each and every scenario. The subtlety of your depiction of the said cultural standard depends largely on how important it is for your story.

If your world being full of fat beautiful women is one of the many aspects of the culture you are building, you can just brush upon that here and there, describing different characters--through the narrator's or other character's perception--and using positive wording to convey the person's reaction to the certain features, like 'smooth curves of her ample body', 'magnificent breasts', etc., and let the reader's imagination fill in the blanks without much risk of irritating or distancing them.

However, if your main character struggles with the fact that she is way too thin and considers herself ugly because of that and her internal conflict is what drives your story, then, by all means, go full throttle. You still may consider employing a targeted mixture of positive and negative epithets when she enviously measures herself up against her peers, who are beautiful, and 'my elbows are bony', 'oh, I have a gap between my thighs--it is repulsive', etc.

What I am trying to say is that for as long as you are not trying to blantly expose your reader to the rather alien to our culture idea that 'flapping folds of fat' are a pinnacle of physical attractiveness, you might have a better chance to reliably suspend disbelief.

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