It’s pretty obvious that movie and television characters don’t look the way most of us do, and that it's a problem. But rarely do we actually talk about why that poses a major issue, or the repercussions: When you only see yourself depicted on the screen as a sidekick, a villain, a predator, or a joke, how does that affect the way you view yourself in real life? Fattitude , an upcoming documentary, tackles that very question. Specifically looking at issues of size (because, of course, media fails us on other diversity issues, too), filmmakers Lindsey Averill and Viri Lieberman explore the massive impact of media bias and its effects on viewers.“Media, in so many ways, is our greatest educator,” says Lieberman. We’re inundated with it from birth. “Unless your parents are engaging with you in really deep conversations, analyzing what you're reading from the moment you can read, you're going to absorb these ideas. ‘Oh, that’s the hero, so that’s what a hero looks like. Oh, that’s the love interest, so that’s what a love interest looks like. Well, I want to be a love interest, so I need to look like that.’”And that’s just the individual impact. On the societal level, media bias is the fuel behind a largely invisible prejudice machine. “It's a bias that the culture doesn’t really acknowledge as existing. And so it's unchecked by the culture,” says Averill. “It’s not rude to laugh at a fat joke.”In their years spent researching and interviewing subjects (full disclosure: myself included), Averill and Lieberman noted many common tropes — evil witch, funny best friend, sexless loser, or sexually voracious predator — most of which haven’t evolved at all over time. “At the end of the day, fat is portrayed mostly just as a joke,” says Lieberman. “Or a monster,” adds Averill. “That’s the two-sided coin.”