Oh man, what a conundrum! I didn’t write any newsletters for a long time because there just wasn’t enough news coming in, and then it all started coming in! So I let the alerts build up in my inbox for about a month and tonight I sat down to write a new edition … when I discovered this draft waiting to be completed! I’m just the worst.

So here, you get to enjoy a heapin’ helpin’ of stale-ass giantess news, and then maybe a week from now I’ll dump out the rest of it, how’s that sound? Though really, I have a story due for a “sensual magic” anthology on Feb. 1, and I should be building my Old Norse Giantess presentation. I’m giving a talk on the evolution of the Scandinavian giantess from spirituality to myth, and I’ve got all the work to do. I’ve already decided I’m not going to use AI illustrations, which really hampers the aesthetics of my presentation. I’m not an artist, there are no good stock images … well, it’ll have to be text-heavy and look like crap. What else can I do?

“Commission an artist!”

Sure, I’ll find a short list of people with an appropriate style and skill level, wait three months for their books to open, compete to get on their commission list, then wait a few more months before I check in (careful: checking in is seen as an aggressive and violent gesture) and discover they’ve silently, secretly removed me from their waiting list. All that, before January 29? Sounds realistic, great idea.

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Giantess News

Stori Denali

A long, long time ago, I used to follow WWE when it was WWF. I don’t know why, I just got hooked on the emotional storylines, very simple plots that centered on loyalty and betrayal, with some frankly astonishing physical feats.

Pro wrestling has exploded and evolved into forms I can’t even imagine. I only catch whiffs of what’s going on anymore, like this story of Mia Grunze, a 6’3” volleyball player from Ohio State.

Last Sept. she debuted with Premier Athletes of Ring of Honor, under the nom de guerre of Stori Denali. Her height puts her just above titanesses Raquel Rodriguez (6’ tall) of WWE and Megan Bayne (5’11”) of AEW.

Giant Haruka Ayase

This is such old news, there’s no point in even apologizing for it. This one’s for posterity.

Back in 2010, Panasonic was promoting its new Lumix camera in Tokyo. To attract attention, they came up with the clever gimmick of having a popular model/actress, Haruka Ayase, take pictures of people on the street. But rather than trouble the celebrity with this promo, they created a giant inflatable Haruka to step in (more visuals at Tokyobling).

Comedian Discovers GTS

This one’s already made the rounds, I know. Three months ago, stand-up comedian Jordan Jensen discovered the giantess fetish in the middle of her set. With inexorable slowness—and painfully, to some viewers—Jordan brought a woman on stage and ineptly interrogated her about her side hustle as a giantess model on OnlyFans. Anyone who knows anything about macrophilia was likely contorting themselves in knots over the misunderstandings and poor explanations, and yet this is still a worthwhile document of someone entering the phenomenon from a distinct perspective. It’s still a worst-case scenario for coming out, for us.

Huggin’ Molly

Have you heard of Huggin’ Molly? Because I haven’t. Apparently, this is Alabama-localized folklore about a gigantic woman, seven feet tall, who haunts the region. When children stay out late and don’t go home on time, or when people go out walking all on their lonesome, Huggin’ Molly is likely to leap out of the bushes, squeeze you in a big hug (which I guess is meant to sound unpleasant?), and then screams in your ears.

All this does is fill my mind with scenarios and strategies to bring a pair of ear plugs and then call upon my vast canon of mixed-size relationships to turn this crisis around. As monsters go, Molly sounds doable.

Inuit, graphic novel

I’m made aware of a four-issue graphic novel horror series, Inuit. From the description on Bleeding Cool:

Haunted by ancestral spirits and hunted by a monstrous tribe, a giantess gives birth alone in the frozen wilds. With her newborn and a loyal beast by her side, survival is fleeting-until a darker force rises from beneath the ice.

I don’t know why I haven’t gone out and picked this up already. I’ll grab some Huge Detective while I’m at it.

Gaming News

Giantess Playground

Good lord, nobody can shut up about Giantess Playground. There are plenty of screenshots, and after a while it’s difficult to determine whether you’ve seen them before. Asian gaming sites are certainly freaking out about this game. In this update, an expanded city map has been released and is shown off to dramatic effect.

The Beast Is Yet to Come

A new game has hit early release (or it did when I found it a few months ago, sorry). The Best Is Yet to Come lets you play as a fearsome ogre or a sultry giantess—unfortunately, the models are heavily polygonal and they only vaguely represent the characters they claim.

I picked it up on Steam and gave it a spin. The gameplay is simple: you follow a path, fight your enemies, and acquire new skills and power-ups as the enemies get tougher. You necessarily start out as the ogre, but in time you can unlock the giantess. And you’re substantially bigger than most of your enemies (I assume some get huge, later in the game), so while you’re not stomping on them or crushing houses with your butt, it’s still something.

Scandi Giantess: Skaði

Let’s talk about a giantess I really know something about, perhaps the first one to escort me into my Old Norse studies.

The story of Skaði begins with her father, Þjazi, a real asshole. He was a shapeshifting giant, just as many giants could naturally use magic. Perhaps this was a quality to their primordial state, being so attuned to the natural world and able to embody any aspect of it they wished. Þjazi and Skaði are both jötnar, which means they’re powerful supernatural creatures that we in the modern world have likened to giants. They reside in Jötunheimr, the mountainous and icy realm of these giants (though technically there are many Jötunheimar, plural, but I won’t get into that now). Þursar are brutal, hostile giants and they’re closely related to hrímþursar, “rime-giants” or frost giants. Þursar will be found in mountainous regions, and hrímþursar are proliferate throughout Jötunheimr. That technically makes Þjazi and Skaði hrímþursar, except Skaði is a little more sophisticated than that. Did she get that from her mother? We know nothing about any such mother, only that Skaði resided in her hall with her father.

Yet in the Flateyjarbók, I’ve mentioned a tale called the “Vǫlsa þáttr,” the short story of the vǫlsa, and a vǫlsa in this case is a ritual horse penis preserved in leek and linen. In this story, there’s a farming family living on a remote promontory, and the mother teaches her family how to use the vǫlsa to petition the local giantess for a clement winter. Families tended to lose children to the weather, livestock to wolves, stored provisions to mold, &c., so winter was a serious deal. There’s every reason to believe this woman was praying to Skaði.

Why would I say that? Skaði is the patroness of winter, skiing, and hunting. Even if the “Vǫlsa þáttr” is really a crass parody written by a Christian scholar, we know that Skaði was actually worshipped throughout Scandinavia, by dint of all the Swedish towns and place-names that derive from her name. For that matter, “Scandinavia” is likely derived from her name: “skaði” means pain, making Scandinavia “the hurting place.” Later, in the Lokasenna, where Loki stages an insult-contest among the gods, Skaði makes reference to sacred halls and temples dedicated in her name. Only the most important giantesses were recorded in the Eddas, even if their memory was desecrated by Christian revisionism: the scholars took pains to cast aspersions upon the most popular and revered giantesses in the land, rather than simply erase them from memory.

Yet in the “Vǫlsa þáttr,” the mother doesn’t pray to a jötunn, a hrímþurs, or even a gýgr—she prays to a mǫrn. This is a highly uncommon word, only appearing in two other texts. In the Haustlǫng, there’s a kenning for Þjazi, calling him the “hungry father of Mǫrn.” At the end of the Skaldskaparmál, where Snorri is simply recording as many names of creatures as he can collect, Mörn is listed among the troll-kona (female giants). There’s no other context or explanation for this name. Mǫrn seems to be both a kind of giant and the name of a giant—in the section Giants II, there’s a jötunn named Giant. It’s that simple.

Back to the story, however, and I’ll try to summarize it. Þjazi, through deceit and violence, forced Loki to bring Iðunn and her golden apples to the giant’s hall, Þrymheimr. These magical apples are what keep the Æsir immortal; without them, the gods begin aging badly. But it’s also important to note the name of Þjazi and Skaði’s hall: Þrymr was another giant in his own right! He was famous for stealing Þorr’s hammer, using it as leverage to marry the Vanir goddess Freyja. His name means “thunder” and Þrymheimr means “the World of Thundering Noise.” Are we to understand that some of the most powerful jötnar are all roommates in the same hall? Well, why not.

Loki kidnaps Iðunn and brings her to Þjazi. The gods lose their shit and order Loki to get her back, which he does, using Freyja’s feathered cloak to turn into a hawk. But Þjazi turns into an eagle and flies after him, falling directly into a trap the gods have set for him, a wall of fire. As he writhes in agony, the Æsir come out to torment him and finish him off, Loki getting the last few shots in (which he brags about in the Lokasenna, prompting Skaði to curse his name in all her halls and temples).

Upon learning this, Skaði arms up for battle and storms Ásgarðr, ready to destroy everything. Remember: as powerful as they are, gods are defenseless against giantesses, and Skaði is completely in the right, here. Óðinn does his best to placate her, offering to place her father’s eyes in the sky so they’ll always shine upon her. Skaði demands her choice of husband to assuage her loneliness in Þrymheimr, but she can only select the one she wants (Bragi) by his feet and ends up with Njǫrðr. That doesn’t work out: he can’t stand the wolves howling around Þrymheimr, and she can’t take the gulls screeching over Nóatún, his domain. Their back-and-forth relationship may represent the changing of the seasons, between winter and summer, and some myths establish them as the parents of the Vanir gods Freyr and Freyja—Njǫrðr was indeed a Vanir prisoner of war living among the Æsir. Other myths suggest their mother was Nerthus, a Germanic fertility goddess and counterpart-twin to Njǫrðr. Not all the myths align with each other.

Lastly, Skaði says she hasn’t been able to laugh since her father’s death (time really means nothing in these tales, so let that go), and once again the gods look to Loki to solve this problem. He ties his own testicles to the beard of a goat, and they both tear around, shrieking in agony, galloping and hobbling around Ásgarðr until he collapses in Skaði’s lap. She cracks up over these antics.

But what you need to know is that in these myths, laughter is a signifier of sex. You may have heard of a fairy tale about a princess who will only marry the knight who can make her laugh. The adults telling this story knew that this meant a talented man who could make a woman cum to her own satisfaction, a rare thing indeed. So it is with Skaði: this isn’t the first time Loki has been a lover (see also: Sif, Þorr’s wife). In the Lokasenna, Loki taunts Skaði with the fact of their tryst.

And that’s about everything I know about Skaði. You can’t worship her, she doesn’t want prayers or gold. All you can do is sacrifice to her and hope that buys her favor, within the jurisdiction of her influence. She may not give an ice-rat’s ass what you do, either way.

I’m sorry that I keep bowing out of the flash fiction segment in these newsletters. After all this writing, it’s hard to think about a story that would be any good, and this is already a lot for anyone to want to read.

I’ll keep writing elsewhere: I’ve submitted a piece to an anthology at the beginning of this month and I mentioned the one due in February. I’m trying to get Size Fantasy printed in the mainstream world, you see, in markets that don’t normally see this kind of work but who should technically be open to it. I’ve got one story accepted by Allium, due to appear in July of this year, so it’s not impossible.

All I can say is, keep an eye on my main website. All news-worthy items and any stories will appear there.