Nice! And deservedly!

Growing up playing Sims 2 and realizing as an adult that my body type is the 'fat' adult female and how ridiculous 2000s beauty standards were. For context, I'm a size M, tall and often called slim or athletic, but I look exactly like the 'fat' adult when I'm relaxed after lunch. As a kid I though it was genuinely fat and the thumbnail showed an obese person. I'm happy that I wasn't a teen in the 2000s cause that kind of mentality would've destroyed me.

Edit: teen female 'fat' is even chubby, it's literally a size small/medium and the majority of my teen girl sims are 'fat' while only the skinny model sims are 'nomal'. I also use new meshes for both ages with wider hips and thicker legs which are closer to the fat shape.

I don't think I ever thought the TS2 "fat" sims were fat, but I agree that the 2000s body standards were absolutely insane! It all seemed to get worse and worse and reach a peak and then someone was like no, no more of this.

I think this was more to do with the restrictions of the game- Maxis couldn't afford the extra animations that would have been neccessitated by adding larger bodies, so chose to keep the 'fat' model quite slim. You can see the problems they would have had if you play with some of the custom large bodyshapes. For a similar reason they just have one height for each age stage. Even in 2004 I thought the 'fat' body wasn't fat (and that seemed to be the consensus amongst players on the forums I frequented) - so I don't think beauty standards then were any more ridiculous than they are now.

Yeah 'fat shaming' is unfortunately still just as much of a thing. DX

I wonder how TS3 onwards managed animations with their greater body varieties.

I'm fully aware of that and I actually have "fat suits" for every age except toddlers. GTA San Adreas did a good job for CJ but there are less animations in that game. Sims 3 sims move a bit unnaturally and stand way too far from stuff which is probably the price of making it obese and body builder friendly. As for Sims 2, it was unnecessary to have an obese thumbnail and more appropriate to name it chubby or thin and average. Although you had common sense not to consider it fat, it does perfectly intertwine with the mentality in early 2000s pop culture of calling everyone who is above size small fat.

That's not a 2000s thing lol. Look at 'plus size' models nowadays, who aren't plus size at all; they just aren't anorexic.

The male fat morph is definitely fat. Beer belly lol.

I wouldn't assign it to malice, in this case. I think it's worth considering that at the time agendas/ideals weren't the primary focus of games. The goal was to make a good and fun game that people would buy. It is a modern thing to look at everything as "Oh look, they're doing this on purpose to exclude XYZ", where as back then that wasn't the thought process of the developers. They just wanted to make a good, fun and fictional game.

It's one of the many reasons I prefer older games: It's not about pushing politics/agendas/ideals, it's about making a fun game to play.

Nobody thinks they were deliberately excluding or vilifying anyone, dear.

The problem is that we live in a world of systematized 'isms and when we don't stop to consciously examine our assumptions, look at the real world (instead of at our presumptions about it), and act to include what is excluded by the systems we live in, we exclude almost everybody when we only intend to make a fun game to play. It's not being nitpicky, mean, or judgemental to say: "I am not reflected by this game, which makes it less fun for me, so how do we get my reflection in there?"

People don't choose their prejudices; but they can choose to overcome them. And corporations, by and large, won't choose to overcome them without a financial incentive.