Ugly Giants
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The one thing that uniquely belongs to the M/f side of the fetish. What are your thoughts on it? Not just, ‘this is an unattractive human being’, but like actual giant inhuman humanoids as well? Like it? Hate it? Neutral?
I have mixed feelings on it; I’m not opposed to it in theory, but I’m not a big fan of looking at pictures of it, but I’ve noticed it’s always negative; if it’s pictures, it’s a rapist giant or cyclops or whatever grabbing a helpless woman. If it’s in literature, the ugly giant is almost certainly an asshole who shrunk the cheerleader, and she’s righteously disgusted at the whole thing, and he’s probably going to lose at the end to boot. I’m kind of considering flipping the script on it; like Shrek, only the ogre is actually scary and there’s not a defacto GTS in it.
Like… 'Why yes, I am three times your height. My limbs are wider than your entire body, too; I can beat a bear to death with its own arms and everything. Doesn’t mean I rape every woman I see. Wouldn’t you rather cuddle on the couch with some tea?"
Also kinda want of look at sort of de facto-disability of being giant, rather than tiny, at the same time but that’s besides the point.
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@i-am-insane The power dynamics of being a giant when it comes to a M/f interaction usually depicts men/male as violent, insensitive, irrational and overall aggressive creatures. It’s an overused and unfun stereotype, like I totally love scenarios involving giants aware of their superior strenght but instead of being mean, they are gentle, caring and most importantly, OVERWHELMING.
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@i-am-insane I am completely in favor of breaking the stereotype of ugly giants always being mean. An ugly giant who only seems mean because everyone’s afraid of him but who will be gentle when given a chance is basically Beauty and the Beast (or King Kong).
There’s a lot to be said, however, for giants who are ugly or at least unrefined and don’t care that they’re perceived that way. To me, one of the perks of being giant is not having to please anyone. Yeah, that’s my big hairy gut; you got a problem with it, tiny?
Living with a giant can result in something of a Stockholm Syndrome, where you get used to the big ugly guy and accommodating his needs becomes a responsibility you make your own. You might even come to rely on him.
Finally, this concept is not unique to M/f. The unattractive giantess is very much a thing.
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Story where a unattractive giant happens to save a maiden from some bandits mostly because he was bored only to have his lair overrun with women desperate for him to help them out and willing to offer anything in return. The giant being like ok we can work out a repayment plan based on your yearly wage or lifestyle and the women are like what do you mean.
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This is super interesting to hear people’s thoughts about. I’ll be completely honest (and I’m not judging anyone who feels differently, these are just my personal preferences!), I’m reeeally not into the ugly giant thing. It’s actually something that has bothered me over the years, particularly in traditional media, is that I feel like male giants tend to be these ugly monsters, and yet giant women tend to be these beautiful goddesses. I just want my hot giant dude too!! lol
But again, zero judgement for those who like the idea of being dominated by a monster. I get the appeal of not having a choice in that matter. And I totally agree that it would be nice to have more stories where the giant can be both ugly and kind.
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@littlest-lily
I mean, I’m in a similar boat: I don’t like guys, so I never try to focus on that end in pictures anyways, but when they’re ugly it feels like it takes away from the whole thing somehow, because I see the Ugly Giant Face and just kinda wince.But I’ve been thinking about it, and the thing is it’s always a monster. Either an actual, literal monster, and probably stupid to boot, or if someone’s writing it the ugly guy is a creep. And it just hit me, when I thought about it for a second, that I’ve never seen a good ugly guy in an SW/GT story. Never. And it feels… limiting?
It’s why I ended up thinking about Shriek; the later ones lose their grip on this, but the first Shrek is about someone who is (supposed to be) scary. He’s an ogre, who usually measure more like nine feet tall and stomp groups of knights, rather than six-ish and with a big gut. Honestly, in making it such a comedy I feel like they turned a lot of it into tell-not-show on that end, but the whole dynamic of the movie was set up as a sort of, ‘find out the monster isn’t that bad’ love story thing, with a twist at the end, but they never really let Shrek even have the appearance of a monster, or anything that made him seem threatening, rather than just being gross, and so it always felt off when people said ‘ogre’, looked at this green guy, and had a freak out.
Done a bit more seriously, I think, has some real GT energy to it.
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@i-am-insane Okay, now that Shrek has been invoked twice, I have to link to my first male giant story, Accomodations, where one reader compared my protagonist to Shrek. It’s a first-person narrative from the giant’s perspective, so I don’t actually physically describe him anywhere, so I suppose the likeness must be in his personality.
As a long-time sifter of mainstream size content, I suppose a large part of the frustration with ugly/mean giants is that they immediately signal to the audience that they should in no way expect the giant(s) to be involved in any sexytimes or even romantic attraction. In fact, they seem to deliberately mock the idea that the audience might have such an expectation.
Traditionally, ogres eat people, and I don’t recall that ever coming up in the Shrek movies (I suppose you can see my personal frustration here).
Finally, Fiona was way hotter as an ogress. They didn’t even try to make her scary.
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@Olo but in that one scene Shrek goes “they’ll shave your liver, squeeze the jelly from your eyes!! actually it’s quite good on toast”
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@Olo
It’s what frustrates me about that movie when I think about it; hell, it bugged me when I first watched it, though I didn’t understand why: they set up the narrative of ‘an ogre is a scary monster’ for the entire movie run off of, and then do nothing to make that make sense, even though they acted like it was a thing. If they had gone for a different take, and made it so ogres were misunderstood or something, it would have worked with the Shriek we got, but it seems to be saying ogres are scary monsters, but Shriek is a lazy bum so it doesn’t matter?It’s sort of doing both at once and neither, so the point kind of gets lost beyond ‘Shriek isn’t bad’.