A History of the Community
People have been drawn to the idea for as long as there have been stories about giants. What is new is the community: a few tens of thousands of people who found each other online, named the thing, and have spent thirty years making art about it. This is that story, told through the places where it happened. Dates come from archived copies of the sites themselves wherever possible; where they come from somewhere else, it says so.
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Before the internet
├┐- 1957 and 1958. The Incredible Shrinking Man and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman come out a year apart. Neither was made with anyone like us in mind, and between them they fixed the two founding images of the fetish: the man dwindling in his own house, and the woman loose in the town. The poster for the second has done more recruiting than any film since.
- The decades after. Cartoons, a Gulliver here and there, the odd episode of a sitcom with a shrinking plot. Everyone who grew up before the web has one of these as an origin story, and most of them spent years assuming they were the only person who had reacted to it.
- 1993. A Washington Post piece by David Mills is the earliest newspaper article on the fetish that the reference works cite. The community it describes was already there, trading photocopies, videotapes and pen-pal letters.
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Usenet and the first sites, 1995 to 2000
├┐- The newsgroup. The community first gathered on Usenet, in the alt.sex.fetish hierarchy - alt.sex.fetish.size is the group the references name, and a 1997 post to it listing the giantess and tall-woman sites of the day is the earliest surviving directory. Writers who are still posting now, D.X. Machina among them, date their arrival to 1995.
- Collages. Before anyone could render a giantess, people cut one out. The collage - a photograph of a woman pasted at the wrong scale into a photograph of a street - was the community's main medium for a decade, and "collager" was a job title on every board. Most of that work is gone with the sites that hosted it.
- 1998. The first archived copy of giantess.com dates from December. By 2001 the front page called it "the center of the Giantess Universe on and off the web": forums, a submitted-URL database of other sites, product reviews, and a boast that it ran "fast, free and banner-free".
- 1999. Salon runs a long feature on giantess fans, the first time most of the community saw itself described from outside. It would be another decade before the next one.
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The boards, 2000 to 2007
├┐- Giantess.com and the point system. Under Ozmodium - "King Oz" to the members - the site became a community you had to contribute to. Posting, uploading collages and stories, and running contests all earned points, and points bought access to the file library. A council of Knights moderated it. The front page in 2005 carried testimonials from members, over eight thousand of them by then, saying the system had turned lifelong lurkers into contributors. By 2007 it listed a structured library of images, video, sound and stories, live stories, contests and blogs.
- 2003. World of the Giantess, the German-language community, opens at the end of the year and is still running.
- 2005. Three things start within months of each other. Giantess City, a phpBB board, opens and will grow into the largest size forum by headcount. Eka's Portal, the vore community's home, is first archived in November, and size writing has lived there under vore tags ever since. And in October Karbo opens a second DeviantArt account for his fetish work - the beginning of DeviantArt as the community's gallery, which it stayed for fifteen years.
- 2006. Giantess Katelyn launches her site, one of the first run by a performer rather than a fan. In a 2016 interview she described the community of the time as a handful of sites, a handful of contributors and a great many lurkers.
- Late 2007. Giantess.com goes dark. The last archived copy is from October 2007; the next, in 2013, is a parked page. The domain stayed blank for fourteen years.
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Archives and galleries, 2008 to 2015
├┐- 2008. Giantess World opens as a dedicated story archive - tags, chapters, reviews - and becomes the place size fiction is published for the next fifteen years.
- The DeviantArt decade. With a free gallery, a watch button and an audience already there, drawn and rendered work overtook collages. The 3D era began here too: Poser and DAZ renders, then Blender, let one person produce a convincing giantess at a scale no collage could manage.
- 2010 and 2016. Vice covers the fetish twice, with the academic line both times being that almost no research exists. There still is not much.
- 2015. Pornhub's year-in-review names "giantess" the fastest-rising search term on the site, up more than a thousand percent on the year before, and a Guardian analysis of the Clips4Sale catalogue ranks it among the most populated categories. The fetish was no longer small; it had just been quiet.
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Games, cons and subscriptions, 2016 to 2021
├┐- 2016. Sizebox appears: a free sandbox where you load models, set their scale and stage whatever you want. More size footage has come out of it than out of most studios. The same year, SizeCon holds the first in-person convention for the community - panels, art and a room full of people who had never met another one.
- 2017 to 2020. Aborigen's Size Riot runs sixteen quarterly flash-fiction contests, Cruel every January and Gentle every April. The archive is still the best single sampler of how differently the same fantasy can be written.
- Patreon and SubscribeStar. The subscription platforms turned the hobby into a living for a few dozen artists and made the monthly comic, the commission queue and the early-access render the standard shape of the work.
- 2021. Resident Evil Village ships with Lady Dimitrescu, and for a few weeks the entire internet is a giantess fan. Giantess.com comes back online the same year, as the site you are reading.
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Headsets and models, 2022 onward
├┐- VRChat. Never built for size play, it became the community's main platform because avatar scale is a setting. By 2023 the size community was petitioning VRChat to support custom scalers past the built-in five-metre cap, and by 2025 purpose-built size worlds were among the more favourited on the platform. The VR area lists them.
- 2022 to 2023. Stable Diffusion is released in August 2022 and the first giantess LoRAs - small add-on models that teach it the scale relation - appear on CivitAI the following year. Generated stills arrive on DeviantArt in volume.
- 2025. Video models follow. Kling, then Sora 2 and Veo, start producing ten-second growth and crush clips from a still image, and accounts dedicated to generated work pass the watcher counts of drawn ones. The same year SizeFiction opens and most of Giantess World's writers move to it. The AI area keeps track.
- 2026. SizeCon runs online in October. Giantess City reports a quarter of a million registered members. The community is larger than it has ever been, and most of it has never heard of a newsgroup.
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Sources
Archived copies of giantess.com (1998 to 2007) and of giantesscity.com, aryion.com and giantessworld.net in the Wayback Machine; the sites' own pages where they are still up; the Wikipedia article on macrophilia for the press references (Washington Post 1993, Salon 1999, Vice 2010 and 2016, Guardian and Pornhub 2015) and for alt.sex.fetish.size; D.X. Machina's GTS-o-Rama; Aborigen's Size Riot archive; VRChat's feedback board. Corrections are welcome and expected: send them.
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