How big were giants anyway? How do half-giants even make sense?

Despite the general obscurity of giants in general, half-giants are a thing in fantasy role-playing, fiction and, to a lesser degree, myth and fairytale. What is often ignored are the physical barriers to their conception, namely the massive size disparity between giants and humans, nymphs or whoever the partner is. By analogy to the mermaid problem, I label this the "giant problem."

As anyone who has read Harry Potter can attest, Rowling sidesteps this problem by making the half-giant Hagrid the child of a human father and a giant mother. If you can imagine it (yuck!), there does not seem to be that much difficulty aside from his parents maybe needing a step ladder.

A giant father, on the other hand... how the heck can he even do the deed, much less without killing his girlfriend? In myths and fairytales this is completely ignored. A giant is able to couple with a woman a fraction of his size and have children with no difficulty at all. (For reference, myths and fairytales emphatically do not distinguish true giants, giant-kin, giant animals, giant monsters, etc as being different species like fantasy gaming does. I consider the gaming taxonomy anal-retentive obsessive-compulsive garbage and thus I ignore it in my posts and world building. If someone is bigger than he has all rights to be, whether he is a six-headed man or an eight-legged horse or has snake for fingers, he is a freaking giant and your fantasy taxonomy is stupid.)

Of course, in myths and fairytales giants do not seem to have a fixed size. Whenever they need to interact with smaller people, their size typically does not impair them. A giant can walk into buildings sized for humans, use objects sized for humans, disguise himself as a human, marry and have children with nymphs a fraction of his size, be restrained by a hero that can fit in his palm... all without any apparent change in size. Indeed, the concept of a "half-giant" is rarely mentioned in fantasy. A human character may have giants for an aunt and cousins, or a giantess may have a human sister and nephew, but the idea of half-giants as an ethnic background is entirely absent. You are either giant or you are not.

Some readers may assume that the giants do change their size, but this does not actually fit how the tales are told. Firstly, changes in size are never mentioned as far as I could find. Changes in shape are mentioned, but never size. Secondly, a single passage may describe a giant performing or subjected to multiple simultaneous actions that, logically speaking, would each require drastically different sizes. Thirdly, non-giants in these tales are described doing many tasks impossible for their size such as splitting a mountain in twain or swallowing the sea or running from pursuers across multiple geographies in one scene.

This paradox may be resolved if you presume that the appellation "giant" describes their stature beyond the mere physical. In the 1952 movie Jack and the Beanstalk, starring Abbott and Costello, the giant is played by the very much human Buddy Baer. Rather than using special effects, the giant appears as the same size in relation to the other characters as his imposing actor. Although clearly shorter than the nine-foot Goliath, the giant displays all the capabilities of a vastly larger being. When he kidnaps the prince and princess, we the audience perceive only thunder and darkness. As seen in a few gags, the giant leaves comically over-sized footprints and casts an impossibly long shadow.

In short, being a giant does not simply mean being bigger than a human. A giant may be well within the biologically possible size range of humans, but capable of performing feats that require a much larger size and strength. Conversely, they may be huge but easily capable of interacting with much smaller things in clear defiance of spatial geometry and the square-cube law. Being "giant" refers as much to the metaphysical stature as it does to the purely physical.

(For reference, giants in myths and fairy tales are not limited to the stereotypical humanoid giant. While "usually humanlike in form," they can have pretty much any appearance and may even be shape changers or possess other mystical abilities. The monster in the Netflix movie The Ritual is a great example of this, as it is explicitly labeled a "jotunn" or Norse giant.)

This is not easy to depict in role-playing, especially as rules become more complex and simulation-focused in nature. In fact, many of us are so literal-minded that we actually have difficulty comprehending the idea that fairy tale giants were not limited by their size in the way we imagine they should be in real life. It certainly is not easy to depict in a visual medium, as the 1952 Beanstalk example shows. That giant was weird enough, so I hesitate to imagine how the inverse would have been depicted.

Where was I? Oh yes, the giant problem.

Dungeons & Dragons and its derivatives (like the deplorable Pathfinder) generally only focus on the half-giant children of ogres or trolls (the D&D stereotype races, not the ill-defined mythological versions). These guys are limited to under sixteen feet in height by the rules, which presumably lead the authors concerned with arbitrary realism in a fantasy world to assume that makes physical coupling possible. That is a mistaken assumption... In fact this pisses me off so much that I have to rant about it, so feel free to skip past it since I struck the text out for your convenience.

*sigh* Okay, this is going to become explicit for a bit.

D&D ogres and trolls should have penises comparable to those of horses. Even if they can make it fit, their victim will definitely die in the process because I seriously doubt the monster will use buckets of lubricant and go nice and slowly. Because, you know... these races are born evil and thus only reproduce by violent rape. Not to mention that her pelvis would be crushed to powder. That poor girl is not going to survive and become pregnant with a half-giant baby. 

Of course the writers ignore all that! The girl survives, gets pregnant and gives birth even though the fetus should tear her apart. She does not perform an abortion or infanticide even though that was perfectly acceptable in the real dark ages. She actually raises the abomination and it becomes a PC hero or NPC villain with a tragic backstory about being an angst-ridden outcast. We totally have not seen that a million times before and it totally is not offensive to real people of interracial background; that was sarcasm by the way. 

To add insult to injury, Pathfinder writes all sorts of disgusting language about how giant blood pollutes bloodlines forever like something out of a KKK pamphlet. Like typical hormonal teenagers, Paizo thinks that being "grimdark" is the peak of depth and maturity when it is actually the nadir of shallowness and immaturity. This stinking pile of shit is the end result of what I like to call "D&D logic." This is supposed to be a children's game! God damn those misogynistic racist fantasy writers. The worst part is that these guys are typically so sheltered they do not realize their writing is offensive and may even think it progressive.

*screams to the heavens*

Now that that is out of my system, where was I? Oh yes!

Dark Sun and Ultimate Psionics just waived away half-giants (called "goliaths" starting in 4e and beyond) as experiments by a corrupt magically-inclined society, intended as slaves or something of that nature, and now they are a self-sustaining race with their own culture and everything. Now that is something I can accept at face value with no further complaint. That origin should be used by more races, like the half-humans in Eberron. Dear god, I miss Eberron. It was and still is ahead of its time.