The Fall 2022 Manga Guide

Embrace Your Size

What's It About? 

A love letter to those who dream of being fashionable but consider their weight as an obstacle, this uplifting comic essay by a plus-sized author chronicles her own journey with body positivity and learning to love herself as she is.

Embrace Your Size has story and art by hara, and Yen Press will release its first volume both digitally and physically on November 22.

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Is It Worth Reading?

MrAJCosplay

Rating:

Body positivity and body shaming are always difficult topics to discuss. Either because of our own personal preconceptions about how others or ourselves should look or based on what society tells us, there are those out there that have difficulty feeling comfortable in how they physically are. These can be hard and heavy topics to explain to those who haven't actually gone through those experiences but I think Embrace Your Size does a solid enough job of communicating the various different pratfalls that such a topic is riddled with. The panel layout is structured a bit differently compared to most manga and the constant assortment of texts in speech bubbles can make things feel a bit overwhelming. I don't think this is the type of manga that is supposed to be read all in one sitting. Rather it's the kind of thing that you slowly pick apart and think about over a stretch of time. Despite all the material, the writing pros are very simple and easy to digest, to the point where I feel like I would recommend this to most people of a variety of different skill levels. You don't read this for entertainment value, you read it because you recognize that people are going through something that you couldn't potentially understand and want to take a second to at least get a sense for what those experiences are like. I can't force anyone to read things like this but I genuinely think it's better that more people know about some of the things that are discussed in this book compared to the alternative.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

There is no such thing as being “the right size.” As teenagers, my sisters and I all had different body types, and all three of us got different derogatory comments about them, with the result that one developed an eating disorder. All of that is to say that hara's book Embrace Your Size is an important one, because even if she doesn't offer anything new on the subject (at least if you live in a place where Lisa Fipps' excellent middle grade novel Starfish is available), she does normalize the discussion around bodies. And that's a discussion that we really need to have.

Told in a series of short autobiographical essays, hara details her experiences from middle school onward, starting with the fact that although she was able to get a sailor-style school uniform in her size, the ribbon wasn't big enough to be worn “properly.” This led hara to engage with food in some very unhealthy ways, and while she did stop crash dieting, she still developed an eating disorder (bulimia) that became a major hurdle in her life. All of the media she consumed told her that fat people didn't have the right to exist, and that's not only harmful, it's just plain wrong.

There is a lot of repetition in the volume, but some of that has the affect of making it sink in more easily, because sometimes you have to be told the same thing over and over again for it to really stick. hara learning about the term “plus size” rather than “fat,” seeing movies with larger protagonists, and finding celebrities like Lizzo who explicitly say that it's okay to love your body no matter what size it is are heartening experiences to read about. She doesn't spend quite as much time as I'd have liked on the subject of “you can't diagnose someone's health from just looking at their weight” (a major pet peeve of mine), but it does get mentioned, and that's definitely a positive.

Beauty, hara realizes, is purely subjective. There's no one-right-size-fits-all body. More people need to keep saying this until everyone hears it.