So, you hear this term ‘thicc woman’ getting tossed around, yeah? Sounds pretty straightforward, just another way to describe a body type. But let me tell you, from my little corner of trying to actually make things, it ain’t always that simple. I had this one experience, a real hands-on deal, that showed me just how complicated folks can make things.
We were working on this project, a pretty small-time thing actually. Just needed to design a character for some local awareness campaign. Simple, friendly, approachable – that was the brief. Someone in a planning meeting pipes up, “Hey, why don’t we make her a bit thicc? You know, make her relatable, more modern.” And everyone kinda nodded along. Seemed like a fine idea at the time. I figured, okay, I can do that. Adjust some proportions, make sure she looks grounded and solid. Easy peasy, or so I thought.
Wrong. Dead wrong.
My first step, as always, was to sketch out some basic concepts. I drew a few variations, keeping the ‘friendly and approachable’ vibe in mind, just with a fuller figure. I sent them over for the initial look-see. And that’s when the floodgates opened. Not with a ‘yes, this is great!’ but with a whole bunch of questions and ‘concerns’.
“Is this the right kind of thicc?” one email asked. Another one worried if it was “empowering thicc or objectifying thicc.” Seriously. My job was to draw, and suddenly I felt like I was in a sociology seminar. The word itself became this massive roadblock. My usual creative process, the one I’ve honed over years, just got completely bogged down.
Normally, I’d sketch, get feedback on the art, refine, ink, color. Pretty standard stuff. But this time? It was sketch, then a meeting to discuss the definition of ‘thicc’. Then another meeting to debate the implications of ‘thicc’. I’d revise based on what I thought they meant, send it back, and then get a fresh wave of conflicting opinions. “Her waist needs to be smaller for that kind of thicc.” “No, a smaller waist defeats the purpose of this thicc!” It was nuts.
I remember spending an entire afternoon just adjusting the curve of a hip by tiny increments because three different people had three different ideas of what ‘thicc’ looked like in that specific spot. Talk about frustrating. I had printouts with so many red-pen circles and comments on them, my desk looked like a strategy map for a war I didn’t even want to fight.
We even had one manager pull up a slideshow of different images, trying to get everyone to agree on a ‘thiccness level.’ It was surreal. All this energy, all these hours, sunk into debating a single adjective someone thought would be trendy for a simple campaign character. My actual drawing time got squeezed into little frantic bursts between all the back-and-forth.
In the end, after weeks of this nonsense, you know what we got? A character design that was so watered down by committee, so afraid of offending any possible interpretation of ‘thicc’, that she barely had any distinct shape at all. Just sort of… vaguely rounded. All that effort, all that “practice” in trying to nail this supposedly simple concept, and we ended up with something totally bland. The relatability we were aiming for? Gone. Poof.
So yeah, when I hear ‘thicc woman’ now, my mind doesn’t jump to fashion or internet trends. It jumps straight back to those endless meetings, the confusing feedback, and the feeling of my creative gears grinding to a halt. That was my practical experience, my record of trying to work with that term in a real-world scenario. It taught me to be super careful with buzzwords. Sometimes, just focusing on making something good, clear, and well-executed is a whole lot better than chasing a label everyone has a different idea about. That’s my two cents, from someone who’s been in the trenches trying to get stuff done.
