petty obeast coworker ruining a costume party for kids. trigger warning for office politics and harry potter fandom! so our local library has a big presence at my facility (medical facility attached to a hospital), bringing kids books, reading to the younger kids, free tutoring kids who have to be out of school, etc. and they organize a bookfair at our facility twice a year where they bring kids books, book and reading related toys, amazon gift cards, educational magazine subscriptions, etc. the tradition is that there's also a costume contest where the staff dresses up like characters from books. sounds super fun, right? it makes the staff, mostly doctors, seem less intimidating, it gets kids excited about reading, it's a good icebreaker. this year my team decided to do harry potter costumes since there's a lot of fans on staff and the program we're doing right now is kids 9-13. i'm going to be cho chang because i'm asian, one of the research assistants will be hagrid because he's 6'4", everyone with red hair has been assigned a weasley, etc. we have one obeast on our team, and she's insisting on being hermione. if you haven't read the books, hermione isn't fat. also, this woman is in her 40s, and most of the people dressing up as hogwarts students are mostly grad students or vertically challenged people like myself. we've tried to reason with her as politely as possible. these kids grew up with the movies and probably associate the actors' appearances with the characters. either way, hermione is not 250lbs OR a middle aged woman with (STRAIGHT!) graying hair and wrinkles. the kids won't know who she's supposed to be, she'll look ridiculous, and she's sucking the fun out of what was going to be a cute/fun thing for our kids. i suggested that she be dolores umbridge, and you'd think i suggested she dress like adolf hitler. i can't think of any other fat female character in the books (maybe madame maxime, but she's just tall, not necessarily fat), but no one wants to see a 40 year old morbidly obese woman dressed in a school girl outfit. it's getting to a point where we're thinking about dressing as characters from something else or all doing our own costumes. this woman is our office pariah for many reasons (she's a classic fat thoughtless slob, she talks about herself constantly, she's always commenting on peoples' food choices, she eats at the mcdonalds near the hospital every day, sometimes twice a day, sometimes in the BATHROOM so the bathroom smells like mcdonalds) and now she's ruining something for us AND for our kids. on a personal note, does she think i want to be cho chang??? i'm 100% hermione, but there's no way kids would look at an asian woman with straight hair and think 'oh, she's hermione' so I'M taking one for the team. one of the doctors is the nicest man who ever lived and he's dressing as voldemort because he's bald.