As I’m planning a story about an elderly giantess. In knocking ideas around with my wife, she asked me a simple question that had absolutely never occurred to me before:

“How long do giantesses live for?”

Knock me over with a feather.

I’ve spent so much time trying to wrap my head around ratios and proportions, joules and Richter magnitudes; I’ve been wrestling with giantess-as-cannibal (how are they immune to kuru?), resource depletion (after a giantess destroys all global civilizations, then what?), and social isolation (“The story of the giantess is a story of loneliness,” as my Goddess sagely observed). I never thought about such a basic question as lifespan.

So I’m going to rewind and try to address some basic logistics.

What happens to a giantess’s clothes?

If she’s born normal and grows to tremendous height, then her family usually attempts to tailor new outfits for her as best they can, until it’s financially or technologically impossible. If some outside agent abruptly grows her (potions, spells, alien tech, science experiment gone wrong, etc.), it really can go either way. Her clothes can magically grow with her, or she can burst out of them very dramatically and erotically.

If she was always a giantess, that would imply that she comes from a community of giants, and they must have their own tailors and clothiers. This presents another potential problem. If the giants are actually the standard race, and the smaller folk are a subrace or alternate species, then all the plants and animals are the giants’s size, so there is no impediment to textile production and leather manufacture. But if the giants are the aberrant species, and if they have enough modesty to cover their genitalia (or vanity to bedeck themselves in finery), then their consumption of resources will be astronomical. Think of a 100′-tall giant who wants a leather belt with a gold buckle. A 6′-tall human will appear to be 4″ tall to the giant, and horses and cows won’t be much larger than that, so a very great many horses and cows will be stripped of their flesh to fashion a belt sufficient to encircle him (more, if the giant is obese or muscular), and then multiply that total of livestock by several times, to achieve a belt of sufficient thickness to not simply fall apart on the first wear. Now the humans have lost all their livestock for miles and miles around as the diligent giant has meticulously ravaged the countryside for materials. To say nothing of the gold!

Say that a giantess wants a glorious white gown, and has somehow persuaded a human community to provide one for her. Now we have to think about the sheer tonnage of wool necessary to reach from the ground to her shoulders and wind around her sufficiently. The sheep won’t die, but collecting the wool requires a supreme, coordinated effort from the kingdom, the like of which has never been dreamed of before. And that’s just for one giantess: say another giantess sees this and wants something even grander.

Now, to the first giantess, no matter how dense the humans make this fabric, it’s still going to feel very fine and silky to the giantess herself (and it’ll probably tear into shreds if she even looks at it too hard). And yet we see images of giantesses stomping around in elaborate outfits, sometimes full weapons and armor, trodding through forests that come up mid-shin, facing down armies of men no bigger than her bare toes. Where in the world could that have come from? It implies, among many other theories, that there’s a matriarchal, martial society on another continent and we are just now witnessing the first moment of their world exploration and conquest.

How much does a giantess need to eat or drink?

Well, if you want to get into giantess-physics, the strictest laws will render the giantess unrecognizable by human standards, and then I guess you could look at whales and elephants for sustainable consumption…

It depends on the size of the giantess, obviously. Some folk on Eka’s Portal calculated how many tiny people a 160′-tall giantess would need to eat for sustenance. Again with the cannibalism, but maybe giantesses don’t need vegetables and can eat humans, like how cats shouldn’t drink milk and dogs mustn’t eat chocolate. Different species have different metabolic needs.

How long does a giantess live?

Now the answers are even more variable. There may be biological rules that can estimate the lifespan of a creature based on its size and species, I don’t know.

We have to look at the kinds of giantesses to begin to answer, and there will not be one satisfying answer to cover all cases.

If a woman has been enlarged through artificial means (and physical laws have bent to allow her to exist and function normally), we can assume she’s just going to live as long as she would have in her previous condition. There’s no reason to think differently. If she can find enough to eat, get enough exercise and rest, why wouldn’t she last as long as any other human?

Same as if gigantism is a genetic fluke, that is, a woman is born to normal parents but begins to grow abnormally large (but proportionally stable and constant). Same conditions apply: if she takes care of her health needs, I can’t imagine any genetic marker that would extend or shorten her expected life span.

If a giantess comes from a community of giantesses living in a normal-sized world, who can tell? Maybe they live longer, maybe they live the same. The Nephilim (human/angel hybrids) were supposedly destroyed during the Book of Genesis, but they actually appear in four books of the Bible, so maybe they continue to exist by dint of their sacred heritage. The chronicles are sketchy on this point. How long did Gaia’s titans live? Well, many of them were slain in the gigantomachy when they attempted to wage war upon Olympus, so their lives were cut short… I think the rest of them retreated under the earth and turned to stone. So either that was the end of their lives, or their petrifaction preserves them in torpor until something can wake them up. So… indefinitely?

If a giantess lives in a world where everything is her size and normal-sized people are tiny to her… no, she’s normal-sized. She’s not a giantess, the tiny people are actually tiny. They’re just making up stories about her from a microcentric narrative, and she’ll live as long as any human does in her era.

Now, there are giantesses who are practically goddesses, because along with their height comes supernatural powers that flout and defy known laws of physics. They can control their own size, growing and shrinking at will; they’re indestructible, they’re irresistibly strong, they don’t require sustenance (though they’ll eat populations or planets for fun, which is awful), and… yeah, there are no rules. They may as well be immortal. Doesn’t matter. They could be lonely one-offs that will live forever, or will extinguish after completing a certain task, or they could come from a parallel dimension of fellow gods and goddesses who are taking their sweet time about destroying all life and matter in the known multiverse. At that point, pfft, don’t even trouble your pretty head about it.

And of course, there have been some real-life giantesses. Ella Ewing stood 8′ 4½” tall; Madame Abomah was around 6′ 10″ tall, taller in heels; Jane Bunford drew to 7′ 11″ after injuring her pituitary gland in a fall during childhood. In the real world, these remarkable women don’t live to grand old ages, so let’s find something else to talk about.

In your fiction, in your size-fetish erotica, giantesses can live as long as you need them to. Put that in your notebook: make up your own physical laws, record them for consistency, and live by that. If your giantesses live to three centuries, you might want to chart out their equivalencies for human development: is it precisely correlative to a human? A 56-year-old giantess would have the physical and emotional development of a 17-year-old girl… though ideally she’d have learned more in those five decades. Is it scalable like a dog or a cat? You know, really short childhood and adolescence, protracted adult period.

And do they suffer heart disease? Can they starve to death? Do they grow old and fall prey to the Tinies at last? Do they retreat into the wilderness, meld with the earth, or sail off in an enormous freakin’ boat to a distant realm?

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Feature image: “Unworthy“, by SorenZer0