[Pride 2022] An Ode to Lilly Fortenberry: The Queer Fat Femme Monster Killer Who Saved My World

When I was younger, I wanted nothing more than to be just like Buffy Summers. She was cool, she was funny, she had a great group of friends, she had romantic autonomy, and she spent every week saving the world from monsters. A lot of queer people gravitated toward Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the 1990s and early 2000s, and when Willow and Tara kissed for the first time, it became one of the first times a lesbian kiss was shown on Primetime television. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was as much about saving the world from monsters as it was about learning how to save yourself from the very real monsters we deal with everyday–both externally and internally. Buffy gave us the chance to see characters who loved the way we do live complex and interesting lives, which at the time, was not a guarantee for a lot of us. Even today, it still isn’t. 

As a young queer kid trying to figure herself out, Buffy spoke to me in a language I wasn’t entirely sure I realized I could speak yet, but I knew I understood the message. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten much better at being able to “see” myself in entertainment that doesn’t look precisely like me, but as a pre-teen, I wasn’t quite there yet, and there was always a barrier to “Buffy” that kept me from relating as deeply as I wanted. I loved Willow and I loved Tara, but they were both characters that represented something that I wasn’t and would likely never be – thin.

Growing up queer in the 1990s and 2000s was difficult, but compounding that experience with fatness felt impossible. I spent most of my adolescence desperately trying to convince myself that I was straight or at the very least, bi or pansexual, in the hopes that it meant that someday I wouldn’t be alone. I barely knew any openly queer women growing up, let alone openly queer fat women. To compound it even more, I especially didn’t know any openly queer fat femme women. If I’m being honest, there were many years that I was convinced I couldn’t be gay because I didn’t fit into the typical “stone butch” stereotypes I had been fed.

25 years after the premiere of Buffy, the Syfy channel debuted the show I had been craving my entire life. Astrid and Lilly Save The World was marketed as “Buffy without the male gaze,” and stars Jana Morrison and Samantha Aucoin as Astrid & Lilly, respectively. Like Buffy,  it’s a show about unlikely teenage girl heroes tasked with saving the world from monsters, demons, and otherworldly baddies, but unlike Buffy, our heroes are fat girls that don’t have to abide by the wack ass social norms of the aughts. 

Astrid is a bit edgy, has a bombastic personality, and is very, very vocal about how horny she is all the time. Personality wise, I’m a lot like Astrid, and I love that for me. However, it was the soft-spoken and pastel coated Lilly that knocked me on my 32-year-old ass and said, “Listen, bitch, it’s time to unpack some baggage from your teen years you’ve chosen to ignore.” In the first episode, we learn that not only does Lilly have two moms, but that she herself is queer,  unapologetically, “posters of Olivia Benson and Sydney Bristow on her wall” queer. She’s fat. She’s high femme. She likes girls. And she’s gotta kick some monster ass to save the world. 

When we talk about healing our inner child, that also includes ourselves as teenagers. Lilly Fortenberry is the queer fat femme monster killer who saved my world, and sincerely helped me learn to love and appreciate my teenage, fat, femme, queer, self after a lifetime of feeling like I had failed her. As Needy Lesnicki so expertly said in Jennifer’s Body, “Hell is a teenage girl,” and Astrid & Lilly Save The World is unafraid to prove the statement correct. As anyone who has watched more than two teen girl movies in their life could tell you, a character like Lilly Fortenberry didn’t exist until now. She’s not incredibly confident while knowing exactly who she is, she has wants and needs while not falling into “strong female character” stereotypes, she’s not the designated “sassy fat friend” typically assigned by writers who only know how to write fat women like Tracy Turnblad of Hairspray and nothing else, and you can’t help but fall in love with her.

The hunky horned guide Brutus (Olivier Renaud, who describes himself as, "[Their] 'Giles,' in terms you humans might understand) tells the girls, "You have the unique perspective of unfairly being labeled as losers, so you got really good at looking at people from the outside," which feels a lot like the central conceit of the entire show, but especially in how Lilly and those like her are forced to navigate the world. 

Queer people have spend years unfairly maligned by the mainstream media, and as the tides slowly (oh god, so fucking slowly) turn, it’s worth remembering that things are improving in ways that we couldn’t have imagined 40, 30, even 20 years ago. As it stands, Astrid & Lilly Save The World has yet to be renewed by USA Network or Syfy, which is a crying shame. Fat femmes deserve to see themselves too, and Lilly Fortenberry’s story is just getting started.

#RenewAstridAndLilly

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