I fail to see the part where there's fatphobia tbqh. If anything it was a real human response and growth. Even the ableism is a stretch in my opinion.

portraying unhealthy coping mechanism to deal with depression in a bad light is not fatphobia. I really hope you're not out there encouraging people to indulge in ED or ignore sighs of depression which sometime can be engaging in unhealthy diet.

@vincento nothing wrong with portraying that. im recovering from an ED + i like to see media that can truly represent the nuance of that experience. but there's a difference between respectfully portraying a depressed/traumatized person eating their feelings + representing that trauma as a disgusting greedy fat homunculus that attacks you with food. it plays into stereotypes about fat people + shifts the focus from binge eating disorders to weight gain/fatness. there are so many other ways to represent that that aren't harmful, reductive, or embarrassingly on the nose

@NutHut i addressed the fatphobia in a reply to a different commenter, so check that out.

the ableism is not a stretch. the kidnappers main punishment is explicitly his disablement - that he's now in a wheelchair. he sees his life as worthless because of it, calling himself a "puddle on wheels". he begs to be killed. its not particularly challenged by the text, with gloria saying "no one deserves this" upon seeing him. all of this sees the lives of disabled people as inherently worthless or inherently awful. that's part of what makes disability so prevalent in horror - the fear of having to live our supposedly horrible +/or disgusting lives.

giving the player the choice to kill him is harder to quantify. he is a kidnapper and a torturer who would definitely deserve it if she decided to kill him. at the same time the image of a person in a wheelchair being pushed into the river is abhorrrent to me, because that's exactly the type of thing caretakers and/or family members do to their disabled charges because they find them to be too much work or too much of a burden. they kill them + tell themselves its best for them because they're lives were worthless/suffering anyway. but again like. that's not the context here. i'd probably feel differently if not for the earlier ableism/fatphobia because it would give me confidence that the writers are coming from an informed + reflective place.

if he needed to be permanently injured from the attack - it does make sense, for him to escape jail time - the fact that he uses a wheelchair did not to be used as part of the horror. he's scary enough on his own

Noooooo you can't have horrifying concepts in your video game nooooo you can't make me uncomfortable you can't heckin do that, nevermind the fact that there's a million trigger warnings at the start nooooooo you have to grow up
I will #DoBetter

@NutHut literally did not say any of that, but if making up a strawman to squack at is what makes you feel intellectually superior then have at it i guess. g d forbid the game review website contain any actual critique of a game, right

@bikenesmith the reason she was represented as disgusting homunculus is because the CHARACTER saw herself like this which is relatable to many women going through depression and ED or just daily life. It sounds like what you want isn't an 'accurate' representation of ED, but instead a representation that perfectly reflects YOUR experience, which is why you never found the one that you were happy with. But you're never going to, because every person is going to have a unique journey through a trauma and their own way towards recovery. Sure, there's going to be some overlap with other experiences but to say that portraying a way someone feels going through an ED is wrong is telling someone 'you're experiencing trauma wrong if you don't experience it the way I did'. Nothing gives person a right to gatekeep ED and that's what you unknowingly are doing