The dominant tiny/submissive giant trope
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Tiny professor, giant grad student.
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Because this is stuck in my brain (and because a more complicated dynamic is something my mind craves in stories and so hyper-focuses on for ideas, which means I’ve thought about this a lot), let me point out a more mild example than most presented: the hyper competent assistant.
It’s something you see all the time in normal media, where the (usually male) executive is really, really good at something, but is correspondingly bad at everything else. He’s a genius at building, or investing, or whatnot… but that genius that flung him into leadership didn’t equip him to actually lead, at least in the day to day minutia of a company.
And that’s where the assistant comes in: usually female, she is good at what she does, and from the chaos her boss creates, she imposes order. She gets everyone payed, she sets the scheduled, she communicates with… at times, literally everyone.
(The ur-example of this being Tony Stark and Pepper Potts’s dynamic, for the record)
All of this is to say, while this topic was originally about size/power not not meaning your in charge, this post about how being in charge doesn’t mean you’re in charge. Because, sure, The Big Boss may direct the whole organization, and be the only reason it’s around, but the assistant is the one actually runs it. Depending on the boss, she may be the one arranging his schedule, setting up his meetings, determining what papers or proposals he looks at or does not, and in doing so is controlling what he does and how he acts.
And this isn’t just a modern, ‘leader of a company’ thing. Let’s say a knight is promoted to a lord for some great deed, for example, killing a dragon (which could help bring size back into this scenario, since I drifted away for awhile). Well… he’s a knight. He knows how to fight, to kill; the fuck does he know about how to run a territory? Problem is, ignorant or not, he is in charge of it now, and all the people who live there, and if anything goes wrong it will be his fault.
Cue the assistant: a competent maid, a low ranking noble trained for management, or a fallen high ranking noble, perhaps someone who was meant to rule the very land he now ‘runs’. She knows how to do things, what needs to happen; she knows the people, and they know her. The knight? He’s a big guy who can kill a really big lizard. Scary, and they respect his ability to fight things, sure, but not him a leader. And so he’s forced to turn to her for guidance, and through that, she gains control… with suggestions at first. But over time? Her suggestions could easily become commands:
‘You do it like this’, and, ‘May I suggest you wear this’ becomes ‘Do this’, and ‘Wear this’, and a dynamic where she constantly belittles him for being helpless (or, ‘helpless’, depending), and how he should just leave everything to her; she’ll take care of it. Just listen to her, trust her, and everything will turn out fine.
Power is choice.
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@i-am-insane Me spotting a 4-inch-tall Scarlett Johansson.
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Tiny female detective and her partner who is a regular sized person, she deciphers all the clues and sees the details a normal sized being can’t, the partner just drives her to the scenes and arrests the criminals.
