Tumblwintr – The Show Must Go On

I never expected my Tumblr journey to last so long or assume as much importance to me as it did.  If I had known at the beginning how the following 45 months would play out, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have started down this road.  Nonetheless, I don’t regret a thing.

Like many size fantasists, I suspect, my relationship to my desires has not always been free of shame or embarrassment.  Furthermore, when I first discovered that there was a fragmented online “community” of other size fantasists, I quickly discerned that the freakish nature of our interests combined with the general stigma associated with pornography didn’t make for a very spiritually healthy environment.  Most of us had focused on very specific scenarios and had decided early in our development that this was a fetish:  a fixed object that we could neither alter nor discard.  Many of us felt that these desires would inhibit “normal” relationships, and we did our best to hide or disown them.

Almost all the voices I heard in online size forums were hetmale.  Gay male size fantasists were present from the start, but as more insecure straight dudes showed up, gay content was flagged and segregation accelerated.  Like most other online spaces, female-identifying voices were subjected to demoralizing scrutiny and solicitations, discouraging women from participating and perversely contributing to the misconception that size fantasy was a primarily male enthusiasm.  I didn’t like myself much when I looked at online size forums.  I looked for content that appealed to “my fetish,” railing against how much stuff I didn’t like that I had to skim through, then hating myself for how much time I had wasted.

Eventually, in fits and starts, I heard a few voices that were wry, lusty, and heartfelt.  At first I was drawn to that handful of stories that scratched my particular itches, but in the end it was the passion to realize an entire world where these desires made sense and were fulfilled that spoke to me.  I knew I could contribute to this, and eventually I admitted to myself that I had to.  Finally, in 2013 I wrote my first size fantasy story with the intent on posting it for other size fans to read and respond to.  I posted it to Giantess World, which was and remains the largest and most accessible online repository of size fiction, and to Giantess City, which seems to have the largest traffic of any size forum.

There was enough positive response that I wrote some more, and I also started participating in forum discussions, primarily giving feedback to contributors who appealed to “my fetish,” but eventually to discussions of where these desires might have come from and how they have impacted us.  I became keenly interested in hearing from people who came to size fantasy from different paths than that which I had taken.  I needed size fandom to be more diverse, more open, and more inclusive, and I followed and listened to voices that supported that philosophy.

I particularly needed size fantasy to include women.  I had a very negative view of male sexuality in my youth, and if I were to embrace size fantasy as part of my future self, it couldn’t be a male-only perversion.  I wanted to hear from women who felt these desires as viscerally as I did.  In fact, I needed this so badly that I was hyper-skeptical of “female-presenting” size fans.  I so enjoyed the idea that one or more women shared something in common with my size desires that I couldn’t handle the disappointment if it turned out to be false (don’t worry, I have since sought treatment for these problems).

The greatest disappointments, however, were not with female size fantasists but with intolerant male size fantasists with narrow and rigid notions of what size fantasy should be and who it was for.  There are hundreds of users on Giantess City, many of whom are kind and helpful, but there’s always a handful of loud hobgoblins who think they invented “the giantess fetish” and retain the right to deny admission to differing voices.

Still, I held my ground and carried the torch for alternative fantasies.  In early 2015, someone posted this piece by ArcticGiantess to Giantessbooru:

I knew nothing of AG at that time, but I wanted to drop her a note saying I liked her drawing.  Her only presence was on Tumblr, so I had to make an account to send a message (then called “Fan Mail”).  But something made me reluctant to just send an anonymous note of praise; I wanted there to be an identity behind the compliment, behind me.

Following reblogs and and poking through archives, I immersed myself in hundreds of size fantasy images, many of which I had seen before but some I had not.  In addition to new artists, the captions and comments and tags introduced me to new voices and new perspectives on what size fantasy meant to people.

Some of it seemed a bit foreign to me.  I was puzzled by how many creators preferred to make size art and fiction out of pre-existing fandoms, despite their lack of relation to traditional size fantasy genres. Then there were the size fans who insisted their fantasies were completely non-sexual and bitterly (if understandably) resisted any association with size smut.

I tried not to jump to too many conclusions and instead concentrated on hoovering up the stuff I liked and pondering what, if anything, of my own that I wanted to post.  I reblogged with abandon, and I never gave a thought to consistent tagging.  The Tumblr size scene seemed well-established, but there didn’t seem to be any obvious way to announce myself.  I naively thought people might take notice of my Likes and Reblogs and Follows and check my blog out themselves.  With no followers of my own, I reblogged over 800 posts in the first month.

After reading hundreds of posts, I started to wonder if I truly belonged on Tumblr.  Sure, there were all these new images and a handful of bloggers and artists who seemed to get size fantasy in much the same way I did, but a lot of the enthusiasm was expressed through such…unserious fandoms as Steven Universe, unfamiliar video games, so much anime.  I remained curious about how all these people came to enjoy size fantasy, but much of the time I didn’t sense the same need that I felt.  I even made a meme about this disconnect, although I didn’t post or share it:

Fortunately, I diagnosed the self-loathing that was provoking this reaction and I learned to accept others’ size enthusiasms on their own terms. That remains the strongest legacy of Tumblr for me:  the way that images and writing and passions can cross-connect and how we can amplify each others’ humanity through our shared obsessions.

Tumblr was also where I first began to explore how others appreciated size fantasy as a version of BDSM, petplay, and other roleplaying genres.  Always on the lookout for a simpler way to explain the attraction of size fantasy to newbies, the power dynamics of BDSM made sense to me.  I had always thought the physical and verbal accoutrements of BDSM were somewhat silly, until I reflected that I scratched the same itches by imagining growth serums and shrink rays.

Importantly, the tropes and conventions of BDSM held a very salient truth for size fantasy:  just as subs outnumber doms, tinies outnumber giants.  The emotional needs mirror each other, and when it comes to roleplaying the divisions of labor are very similar.  This ecological perspective has gone a long way towards helping me imagine a world where different-sized people live, interact, and perpetuate societies.

To abuse a widely-mocked term, Tumblr gave me a safe space to explore my M/f fantasies.  Shrunken women had been part of my size fantasies from the beginning, but I had found them even more shameful than my shrunken men scenarios and had more-or-less repressed them for years.  I had been aware of other M/f fantasists prior to joining Tumblr, but I didn’t really engage with them as I was still strongly vested in my identity as Shrunken Man Looking For A Giant Mistress.  I was particularly repelled by other male M/f enthusiasts, primarily because I suspect I projected my own poor self-image onto them.

More than anywhere else in my experience, the size fantasy scene on Tumblr is replete with female M/f fans.  Following their blogs, reading their comments, seeing what images they liked, really opened my eyes to what size fantasy could mean.  To me, to anyone.  I finally allowed myself to enjoy desires that had swum alongside me for decades.

I cannot give enough credit to Jitensha for steadfastly advocating for the right of M/f fans to be considered equal members of the size community.  I had seen her elsewhere before coming to Tumblr, but that is where I was best able to share and express how her words and work affected me and the community as a whole.  I’m pretty sure Jit wouldn’t primarily describe herself as “dignified,” but dignity has indeed been her gift to all of us.

The inspiration and organization for SizeCon started less than a year after I joined Tumblr.  My initial, gut reaction wasn’t much different than that of most of the people who hang out at Giantess City.  This is where I come to jack off to fantasies of tiny people being used as sex toys and then eaten; I don’t want to meet any of you in person, let alone show my face.  But I already knew that many people were excited by the idea, and even if it wasn’t the event for me, I was happy for the people who wanted to go.  When I saw the after-action reports from attendees, I knew something beautiful had been born.

As I accumulated followers, I became more self-conscious of what I posted on my blog beyond “this is what I get off to.”  There’s nothing wrong with that standard, and I was careful never to claim to have any other.  But the ruthless logic of counting Likes and Reblogs inevitably paints a picture of your following, however abstract.  I found myself positing various ideas of What Size Fantasy Meant To Me and how my posts and my writing could reflect that.  I began to deliberately seek out content that arguably supported these ideas, as opposed to that which merely got me off.

Not only does a diversity of voices within size fantasy make me feel more human, it also makes the fantasy more real.  New voices means new images, new ideas, new feelings.  I love size-differential applied to novel situations, slices of life that help illustrate the people and relationships that bring size fantasy closer to reality.  Humor, anxiety, mischief, greed, work; all these are fertile grounds for depicting what we want to see in size fantasy.  The most vivid illustration of vaginal spelunking is all-the-more enriched if it has been foreshadowed by an ominous workplace performance review.

Owing to the amount of M/m content I posted, I got the occasional inquiry as to whether I was gay or bi (funny how the F/f content never provoked that kind of question).  Same-sex size smut has its own themes and issues, but the overlap with straight size smut is much more pronounced than the difference.  Besides, the M/m size community is still the best place to see giant cocks.

I regret that I have been unavailable to respond to the roleplaying prompts I have received via Tumblr.   My chief reluctance is due to lack of reliable time, and I hate making promises I can’t keep.  When I first got on Tumblr I was still so wrapped up in understanding my own desires, I had no confidence in my ability to understand and satisfy others’.  I had also spent so many formative years believing I was the only size perv on the planet,  I was sort of like that guy with the huge model railroad in his basement that he had poured so much time and money into, and he wouldn’t let anyone else play with it.  I can control what happens in my stories, but roleplaying seemed a bit precarious.  I have evolved on this point, and whatever flexibility I have developed for accommodating others’ perspectives is entirely due to the persistence and encouragement of my followers.

Another great joy of Tumblr was imagining and then seeing evidence for new people being introduced to the fantasy.  If I ever tagged a post with something that might have had meaning outside the size community, I would make sure that it was in the first five tags, which are the only ones searchable Tumblr-wide (that is, until February 2018 when “explicit”-flagged blogs, such as mine, were excluded entirely from Safe Search and Google).  I spent too much time following reblogs by people I didn’t recognize, hoping that some gi-curious people were lured into size fantasy by one of my posts.  I never use any of those analytics utilities, but I’m pretty sure the post of mine with the most notes was by far the Bilquis-unbirth GIFset from American Gods.   Still proud of that.

That source of pleasure—watching my posts ripple out across Tumblr—has also been a deleterious time-suck.  I got my first smartphone a few months before I joined Tumblr, and from the beginning when every post led to a new blog to reblog from to the end when I was waiting for one of my posts to be reblogged by a major “repeater” blog, I found myself devoting way too much attention to my dashboard scroll.  Now that the initial shock of Tumblwintr has worn off and I’ve backed up the queued images and compiled everyone’s contact info, I’m noticing just how much of my daily routine had been devoted to scanning recent posts, formatting reblogs, and polishing bits of my own writing.  More than once I’ve had to stop myself from refreshing my DeviantArt notifications in my spare moments in order not to let potential posts pile up too much.  I want to increase the amount of time spent writing, in fact, but I want it to be longer-form, more well-thought-out.  Getting off the like-reblog-endorphin hamster-wheel will help a lot.

By exposing me to a wider array of size fantasists and participating in threads about different aspects of size fantasy, I’ve had to develop my voice much more thoroughly than when I thought I was just writing for readers whose main criterion was whether they nutted or not.  Through exchanges with fellow writers like Aborigen and Undersquid and contests like Size Riot, I hope we’ve begun to create a size aesthetic where detailed worlds and plausible characters can compose stories that engage both our imaginations and our perversions.  But the short-form writing has had as great an impact; I really enjoyed contributing to the size tropes tag, trying to capture in a single sentence a vision or an impression from size fantasy that stays with you.

Without a doubt, I would never have acquired as much experience or facility with making animated GIFs were it not for having an appreciative Tumblr following.  Seriously, the hours that I spent selecting exactly which sequences were most evocative and representative of each scene, then trimming and compressing so that each GIF came in under 2MB (still not over the fact that I was unaware that Tumblr raised the cap to 3MB, probably months ago) were some of the most rewarding activities of the last three years.  The Bilquis GIFs were the tops, but I’m also proud of the Yui-chan No Koibito series, Oyayubihime, Amante Menguante, Kingsajz, Once Upon A Girl, Mork in Wonderland, Lois & Clark “It’s A Small World,” “Honey, I Shrink Therefore I Am,” Land of the Giants, Großer Mann Ganz Klein!, The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, and Gulliver’s Travels (1996).  Most of these were not pornographic at all, but they all contribute to a world where size-difference is real, and I’m happy I was able to do a little to speed that along.

Fuck, I had this blog when Il Douche was elected.  I decided early on not to fret myself about who was “allowed” to follow my blog or whether to block people on political grounds.  In the first place, it seemed like a lot of work.  In the second place, I didn’t have a whole lot of confidence in my ability to discern someone’s deeply-held beliefs based on scrolling through their anonymous Tumblr blog.  In the third place, I figured that if someone with whom I disagreed politically was spending time wanking to my blog, that was less time and energy available to them for giving someone else grief, so fine.

Nevertheless, now that this blog is going away, y’all should know that I’m a big flaming feminist and socialist, I think that capitalism is immoral, that fascists should be shot, that the industrialized West should pay financial reparations for colonization, slavery, expropriation, and genocide, and that we should have at least a couple of centuries of matriarchy before calling it even.  You know I composed a poem about Trump’s victory, before the election?  I thought it might work as a jinx.  So sorry that I had the occasion to post it after all.  Given the certain calamity of climate change which the GOP has hobbled our capacity to mitigate, Trump’s election will turn out to be human civilization’s greatest own-goal since the burning of the Library of Alexandria.  Cheers!

This will almost certainly not be the last pogrom against “adult content” online.  I would love to have the financial and technical wherewithal to maintain my own personal domain as so many proponents of keeping the Internet safe for porn recommend, but even if I did, I don’t think I would get nearly the cross-pollination that I got from Tumblr.  If the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that our community is worth investing in and fighting for.  You haven’t heard the last from me.

I don’t know if this is still an option, but Bacchus mentioned that Archive Team is having a go at making sure NFSW Tumblr blogs get backed up and “eventually” added to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive.  I don’t know who these people are and I cannot say what they’re actually gonna do with all this data, but if you don’t have anything too compromising on your blog and you’d like to see it available again someday, go ahead and give ’em your URL.

I still haven’t fully processed what not having you all in front of me on a daily basis will mean.  I’ll still make the effort to check in with some of you, wherever you get off to, and I hope some of you will visit my WordPress blog and read my stuff and leave comments.  I know I’m gonna miss the memes, the snarky asks, the delicious size smut thirst.  I don’t go out anymore, so my idea of a good time is takeout Italian, red box wine, and shitposting size innuendo at whomever else is online.  That’s probably not going to stop, but hopefully something more industrious will also emerge.

In conclusion, I should like to thank all of you for bringing all the size smut, fluff, and yucks.  The first blog I followed was ArcticGiantess, and I will follow her wherever she goes, at whatever size.  I haven’t seen him on Tumblr for quite some time, but Smutty McSmutpants was my very first follower, and I shan’t forget that.  When I was still finding my way around Size Tumblr, Tiny-Taker set an instructive example for the range of smut and fluff I could expect, and they even answered my Asks.  Kisupure left Tumblr a while ago, but their voice was full of passion, creativity, and wry humor.   Chammy answered even more of my asks, and she also showed me how to beat back the doubts of being a male M/f fan.  I knew Giantess Nyx from before I came to Tumblr, and while Tumblr was never her main outlet, she kept tabs on me and watched over (/up at) me as I started expressing my taste for shrunken women.  Aborigen and Undersquid also only frequented Tumblr secondarily, but they have become my constant companions and I was pleased to reblog their stuff.  I hope Ourobogt can find us when she rotates back to the world.  Jitensha brings joy and smut wherever she goes, and I wish her and Sergio the best.  Micromacromine touched me in many ways, and I hope she finds a steady repose.  Twinpeakslittlefeet-giantess has been a source of bouncy fun, and I’ll always be waiting in the drawer on her nightstand, limber and well-hydrated.  My tongue’s gonna miss mi pequeña cocada, Tinysupervicki.  So many other artists I have to keep track of, even if it means venturing onto [shudder] Twitter:  Karasu69, Fetish3d, Spittyart, Sihagen, Ben Boston, Tibt, Awesomelittlebud.  No other voice on Tumblr has inspired me as much as that of Mightytinygiant, and I treasure all of our exchanges and reblogs.  I will be first in line to get her size smut novel.

Most of all, thanks to everyone for demonstrating—every day—that there is no end to the variations in the ways that one can enjoy size fantasy.