Throwback Thursday 10/14 - Adverts of the Hear Attack Grill

I'm sure all of you are familiar with the Heart Attack Grill, the gimmick restaurant with the bariatric patient + gratuitous gluttony theme. Well your boy here absolutely LIVED for the commercials and ad material this restaurant put out. 

Now I know what you're thinking. "Biggerisbest that place promotes dangerous fatphobic ideas and plays on fatphobic stereotypes to denigrate fat people! How could you enjoy all that stuff?" And guess what? You'd be absolutely correct. This place does do all of those things and it's pretty gross but nevertheless a young 12-year old Biggerisbest loved these commercials but not for it's fat=death depictions and other such 'yikes' aspects. Quite the opposite, I have no interest in "death-feedism" and medical kink in gaining isn't my speed either. Instead, these adverts from the Heart Attack Grill went a long way in defining my love for fat men who are confident in the shamelessness of their gluttony and size. 

I had always been inexplicably drawn to fat men in a way that a child can't fully process but as an adult one can recognize as some form of attraction. Hell I knew and accepted that I liked fat men before I accepted being gay. Uh don't ask how that makes sense, it doesn't but repressed gay sexuality never makes any sense now does it? Anyway, more to the point, I remember coming across their commercial on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjSe8T0kC34) and the world suddenly made sense? It hadn't been the first time I had encountered anything online that could be viewed as gainer-esq. At this point I had read all the Warren Davis stories, I had seen the documentary Hardfat(like 20 times) and searching for new fat art/images became a daily occurrence for me. But with this short commercial it felt as if the stars and heavens were aligning.

I had always been drawn to this deeply masculine "I'm the largest in any room, take up the most space and you're gonna have to deal with it" energy. I had loved the unabashed gluttony and smug self-assured swagger that being 'large and in charge' had. But all the depictions I had seen of this trope were mainly relegated to kink spaces online or in my dreams. Growing up in the South, Texas of all places, I had seen iterations of this trope before   but never so explicit, so visceral or anything of the sort to be as impactful as this commercial. The fact that it was a commercial for a gimmick restaurant was of little importance. The fact that the joke and purpose was to mock fat people as the butt of the joke had no bearing either. What I saw before me was an absolutely massive man who was not only confident about his size but shameless about his love for stuffing his face on food that he fully knows has made him so fat and only growing fatter. The commercial clearly frames these things as negatives: his weight, his appetite, his diet, the negative effects associated with them. Bur does he look the slightest bit concerned? No instead he's basically just like "hand me another burger, extra bacon with that please". The commercial starts with him talking about outgrowing pants but he's unbothered and moves on without blinking. Just a totally normal thing no cause for concern, after all he's more focused on the food. In our fatphobic society where fat people often shrink away and fastidiously avoid any attention on their weight, and those that enjoy eating most certainly are not signaling that.  So again, just seeing him convey all these things that are so contradictory to the way fat people are usually acting in media and the like it just rocked me to my core. Which is nothing to be said of the conventionally attractive woman who is all over him. Lovingly patting his belly and handing him food and fawning over his sheer size. Again, I was completely aware its for a commercial and clearly fake but the message it conveyed was still doing it for me and then some.

This takes us to the present with this drawing. I wanted to commemorate the profound effect that these commercials and ads had on me. Featuring Bubba who himself exists in large part because of the cues I took from the adverts the restaurant put out. There's nothing particularly visually that stands out with these pieces but its important that you understand each scene carries considerable nostalgia that helped make me the person and artist I am today. It was so much fun to relive the old memories of discovering these and the copious amounts of time I spent looking at them longingly, studying them, and  appreciating them. The Heart Attack Grill is certainly not without its criticisms.  But it has a special place in my heart and mind for the substantial role it has had in helping me define my love for those confident gluttonous bubba's out there.