“Meg,” the 28-year old who runs the YouTube channel “Giantess Hug,” has assembled a truly spectacular video archive of colossal women. Every couple of days, she uploads a new clip filled with rampaging, gargantuan femmes who can pick up puny humans in the palm of their hand. Her most popular upload features a modified version of the heroine Jill Valentine from the video game Resident Evil 3. We watch as Valentine fights off zombies and pages through her inventory, all while she slowly balloons in size. (Eventually, she’s tall enough to dwarf even the mammoth bioweapon, Nemesis.)
So perhaps it was inevitable that when the game’s publisher, Capcom, unveiled the Lady Dimitrescu—the primary antagonist for the forthcoming Resident Evil VIII, a.k.a. Resident Evil Village—Meg, and the rest of the gamer internet, was immediately lovestruck. Dimitrescu memes and odes propagated everywhere, as she ticked all the boxes that the Giantess Hug brand looks for: She’s buxom, malevolent, lives in a regal gothic castle, and most importantly of all, is unnaturally, uncannily large, standing at nine feet, six inches.
“[She’s] so tall that she has to hunch down to fit through a seven foot doorway. The reveal of her height was what made the whole internet simultaneously go crazy and fall in love, and I found that interesting,” says Meg, who requested to go by a pseudonym, in an email with Slate. “The giantess fetish is one of the most popular kinks out there, but maybe more people are into it than previously thought? That. or a lot of people had their awakenings!”
Meg has had a thing for giantesses since she was a kid, and she believes that the broader cultural inception point is the 1958 camp-horror classic, The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. As the title implies, the film follows a woman who has a brief encounter with extraterrestrials, before slowly mutating into Godzilla proportions and wreaking havoc on Southern California. Meg has never seen the movie, but she did witness some of its many parodies and homages throughout her childhood. “You had Attack of the 50-Foot Veronica from Archie’s Weird Mysteries, Attack of the 50-Foot Mandy from Totally Spies, Ginormica from the animated film Monsters Vs. Aliens,” she says, naming several memorable, cartoon examples of impactful large-lady icons. “The list goes on.” Those giantesses seeped into her brain, and Meg found within herself a desire to be helpless to the whims of a goliath femme. It’s a crucial component of the kink; clearly, nothing could be more orgastic than to be crushed, trampled, smushed, flattened, or otherwise overpowered by a huge lady.
She’s far from the only one with this predilection. The giantess fetish community, and its corresponding trove of smut, has been around for decades. (Giantess Katelyn, a model who posts Photoshopped images of her stomping through cities a la King Kong, has maintained her website since 2006.) But there is something about Lady Dimitrescu, dressed in her big floppy bonnet and cursive white gown, that has firmly entrenched the kink into mainstream sexual curiosity. Capcom first revealed Dimitrescu in early February, and we still don’t know much about her backstory, motivations, or disposition outside of her incredible height. But there has scarcely ever been more amateur pornography produced for a video game character in such a short amount of time.
The very NSFW LadyDimitrescu subreddit has already accumulated over 22,000 subscribers, as intrigued souls from all around the world exchange drawings, 3D renderings, and cosplay photoshoots of their latest obsession. (“What you see,” reads the caption in one of the posts, under a model dressed in her Dimitrescu best. “What she sees,” reads the other half, attached to an image of a mouse being squeezed tight around the neck.) Pornhub has billowed up with adult actors and actresses rushing to film their own Dimitrescu-themed scenes while the iron is hot. (Most are shot from the ground up, to make the star of the show appear as tall as possible.) The video game website Kotaku analyzed the seismic impact on the human skull if, as many fans were begging, Lady Dimitrescu stepped on your face. Wattpad, one of the epicenters for smoky, fan-fic erotica, has become a total free-for-all. The Dimitrescu tab gets crowded by more stories every day, as the creatively horny daydream through every possible permutation of intimacy with a three-meter-tall vampire.
The diagnosis is clear. Everyone, from longtime giantess aficionados to complete newcomers, wants to hook up with the humongous lady from the new Resident Evil. Meg has the numbers to prove it. Ever since Dimitrescu breached into public consciousness, and innocent bystanders discovered an urge to be crushed like a bug between dainty fingertips, she’s seen a sudden uptick in the number of people tuning into her transformation videos. “Hell, any Lady Dimitrescu video you see on YouTube nowadays is garnering at least 500,000 views,” she tells me. “It’s insane!”
The sexual monoculture is dead. The sweaty men’s magazines of the ‘90s and 2000s, which exclusively emphasized an endless cycle of Hefner-bred body types and blasé hetero intimacy, have long lost their authority. In 2021, you can log online and witness the full, glorious profanity of what is currently getting everyone off. There are no gatekeepers to be found, and thus, the giantesses can thrive.
“Openly discussing or expressing sexual desire is far more publicly acceptable than it was 30 or 40 years ago. The internet brings some distance to socializing, so it’s easier to say something horny on Twitter or Tumblr without feeling as embarrassed,” says Ana Valens, a reporter who covers digital kink communities for The Daily Dot. “It’s treated as a user’s own page with their own thoughts, and followers are welcome to drop in and out anytime. So it’s less of a faux pas to shout ‘I’m horny!’ on your 200-follower Twitter account then shout ‘I’m horny!’ in the middle of a bar hangout with your friends.”
Nobody knows for sure if Capcom intended to spark a worldwide huge-lady revolution. In an interview with IGN, game director Tomonori Takano said that he didn’t think anyone on the team predicted “how wonderfully fans have reacted to Lady Dimitrescu,” stopping just short of commenting on how so many of those same fans have begged her to choke them to death. But regardless of the giantess’s conceptual origin, the developer has embraced the thirst in the run-up to Resident Evil Village’s release. I mean, just last month, Takano confirmed the exact size of Dimitrescu’s feet. (17.3 inches each if you’re, erm, wondering.)
Valens tells me that as more people experience a brush with Dimitrescu once the game is actually available, more and more people might open their eyes “to new fantasies, new desires, and new sexual power dynamics.” There’s a precedent for this: Think of how taboo using the word “daddy” to describe a crush was just a few short years ago, and now go scroll through the replies to the average Harry Styles tweet. But Valens stops short of predicting an out-an-out giantess renaissance. After all, the most invested of giantess kinksters fantasize about women the size of Mount Everest, not just a mere nine-foot vampire. The kink remains too niche to totally overwhelm the society. “It’s just a little too much [for newcomers] to wrap their head around,” says Valens. “I think Lady Dimitrescu sits comfortably on this boundary of being sexy but not over-the-top, kinky but not overwhelmingly so.”
Still, you get the sense that a lot of people in this community have waited a long time for any small affirmation for their passions. Kinksters of all walks of life have grown accustomed to be shamed, othered, or condemned to the closet. But here is Resident Evil Village, and its gigantic hot vampire lady, leaning into the lustiness with beaming pride. I brought that up with a fan artist on DeviantArt who goes by SolouchArt, who’s painted some outstandingly lascivious Lady Dimitrescu comics since first laying eyes on the character. They told me how surprised they were to see Capcom throw a bone to the long-neglected giantess holdouts. If others who catch the fever make it to SolouchArt’s niche, they’ll be waiting to embrace them.
“I think some people will understand that they are not alone in enjoying that kind of stuff. I discovered [my kink] myself thanks to some fan art, and that’s a positive thing, in my opinion,” says SoluchArt. “The best thing is to accept that part of us.”
