Long before we had a word for the sublime, we had giants. Every culture that ever looked up at a mountain or a thundercloud eventually told a story about a being shaped like us but vast beyond reason: the Titans the Greeks said ruled before the gods, the frost giants the Norse feared at the edge of the world, the lumbering ogre at the top of the beanstalk. The giant is the oldest special effect. It exists to make us feel small, and to make the act of standing up to it mean something.
This is a guide to the humanoid colossus, not the kaiju. The distinction matters. A giant monster is a force of nature, a hurricane with teeth. A giant in the older sense has a face, a will, sometimes a grief. It can be a god you have to climb, a man who became too large for the world, a wall of muscle that used to be a person. The works gathered here, across film, television, games, books and music, all share that one charge: the awe and the dread of a figure your own size, scaled up until it blots out the sky.
Essential giants and titans
The colossi everyone should meet first, across every medium
Shadow of the Colossus made the boss fight an elegy
Most games give you a hundred enemies and call the biggest one a boss. Fumito Ueda's Shadow of the Colossus gives you sixteen enemies and nothing else. There are no towns, no merchants, no smaller monsters to grind. There is a barren land, a horse, a sword, and sixteen colossi to find and kill, each one a moving mountain of stone and fur and ancient sadness.
What makes it the defining work of this whole subject is that climbing a colossus feels less like combat and more like trespass. You scale a creature that was minding its own business, find the glowing weak point, and drive your blade in while it shudders and tries to shake you loose. Every kill is followed by a black tendril of regret that visibly enters your hero. The 2018 remake rebuilt every texture without touching that ache. No game has ever made bringing down a giant feel so much like a loss.
Titans of myth on screen
Greek gods, Olympian wars and the heroes who fought uphill
The titans came first
In Greek myth the Titans are not the gods. They are what the gods overthrew. Cronus and his siblings, children of earth and sky, ruled in a golden age until Zeus and the Olympians rose up and cast them down into Tartarus. Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire for humanity and was chained to a rock to have his liver eaten daily, is the one who has haunted writers ever since: the giant who suffered on our behalf.
That older, sadder layer of the myth is why "titanic" means more than just big. A titan is something primordial, something that was here before the order we know, something that the new order had to defeat to exist. The films above tend to flatten that into spectacle, with Perseus and Hercules swinging swords at digital monsters. The books, as ever, keep the deeper memory: that the war between gods and titans was a war about who gets to define the world.
Attack on Titan, in every form
Hajime Isayama's nightmare across anime, manga, film and game
Attack on Titan turned the giant into pure existential horror
The genius of Attack on Titan is that its giants are not majestic. The Titans are naked, grinning, vacant-eyed things that exist only to eat people, and they do it with the blank indifference of weather. Humanity survives behind enormous walls, and the show opens by tearing one of those walls down. The image of a colossal face peering over a city rampart is one of the most indelible in modern television.
What keeps it from being mere splatter is the slow revelation of what the Titans actually are, a secret the manga spends its entire run earning. The anime adapts Hajime Isayama's pages with escalating ambition, and the live-action films take a swing at the same material with practical and digital giants. Start with the series. Few stories have used the giant as a metaphor for so many things at once: walls, history, the appetite of the state, the cost of freedom.
Colossal boss fights to play
The gaming sublime: climb it, dodge it, or die learning its pattern
God of War is the best argument that gods are just big bullies
Kratos spent an entire trilogy climbing, stabbing and outright murdering the Greek pantheon, and the original God of War games understood the appeal perfectly: there is a primal thrill in dragging a being the size of a building down to your level. The Titans literally serve as terrain in God of War II and III, vast bodies you scramble across while they march on Olympus.
The 2018 reboot and Ragnarök did something smarter. They moved Kratos to the Norse world, where the giants, the Jotnar, are not just obstacles but a wronged people with a prophecy of their own. The giant stops being a wall to climb and becomes a character to mourn. That tonal shift, from gleeful destruction to weary fatherhood, is one of the great reinventions in games, and it kept the colossal scale while finally giving the giants an inner life.
Gods and titans of the controller
Olympian wars, divine power fantasies and the climb to godhood
The gentle giant
Not every giant wants to eat you. The other great tradition is the giant as misunderstood friend, the enormous thing with a small heart, and it is mostly aimed at children precisely because children spend their whole lives looking up at people much larger than themselves. Roald Dahl understood this better than anyone. His Big Friendly Giant is a vegetarian dream-catcher in a land of child-eating brutes, and Steven Spielberg's film of it leans fully into the loneliness of being the only kind giant in the world.
The pattern runs deep: a giant robot in 1950s America who decides he would rather be Superman than a gun, a child carried inside a giant peach across the ocean, an oaf at the top of a beanstalk guarding treasure. The lesson is always the same. The thing we were taught to fear turns out to be the thing that protects us, if we are brave enough to climb up and say hello.
Friendly giants and tall tales
Beanstalks, dream-catchers and a robot who chose to be good
There was a Boy whose name was Jim; and that is why the Giant came, and squashed the village into jam.The shape of the giant story since the beginning: something enormous arrives, and a small person has to answer for it
The BFG is the kindest giant in fiction, and the saddest
Roald Dahl's Big Friendly Giant is twenty-four feet tall and the runt of his world. The other giants, with names like Fleshlumpeater and Bloodbottler, are twice his height and eat "human beans" by the dozen. The BFG refuses, surviving on the disgusting snozzcumber and spending his nights blowing good dreams into the windows of sleeping children. He is a giant defined entirely by his gentleness in a place that punishes it.
The story works because Dahl never pretends gentleness is easy. The BFG is mocked, isolated and powerless to stop the other giants on his own; it takes a small orphan named Sophie and, improbably, the Queen of England to set things right. Spielberg's 2016 film, with Mark Rylance giving a motion-capture performance of extraordinary tenderness, captures the ache under the whimsy: the largest character on screen is also the loneliest.
The giants on the page
Literature is where giants began and where they keep their oldest powers. Homer's Iliad sets demigod-scaled heroes against each other under the eyes of meddling gods. Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and Heroes of Olympus books dragged the Titans of myth into a modern teenager's world and made an entire generation fluent in Cronus and the curse of Atlas. Beowulf wrestles the monstrous Grendel and his mother. Tolkien sent his giant eagles and a dragon to the Battle of the Five Armies. And Roald Dahl wrote not one giant but a whole nightmare of them.
The written giant has an advantage no screen can match: it can be exactly as large as your imagination allows, with no rendering budget. When a book tells you a Titan's voice shook the foundations of the earth, you build the sound yourself, and it is always bigger than anything a camera could hold.
Giants and titans on the page
Homer, Riordan, Dahl and the myths that started it all
Scores for a giant's stride
The music of myth, dread and the long climb up a colossus
A short history of the colossus
- 1939The Hobbit's Battle of the Five Armies puts Tolkien's giants and eagles to war
- 1981Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion Kraken roars in the original Clash of the Titans Clash of the Titans
- 1999The Iron Giant chooses to be Superman, not a gun The Iron Giant
- 2005Shadow of the Colossus reframes the boss fight as elegy on the PS2 Shadow of the Colossus
- 2013Attack on Titan's anime makes the wall-peering Titan a global image Attack on Titan
- 2018God of War moves Kratos to the Norse Jotnar and gives the giant a soul God of War
Praey for the Gods is the heir Shadow of the Colossus deserved
For over a decade, every conversation about climbing-the-giant games ended with someone wishing for a true successor to Shadow of the Colossus. Praey for the Gods is the closest anyone has come. You play a lone survivor in a frozen wasteland, scaling enormous gods that double as moving puzzle-platforms, hunting for the grip points and weak spots that will bring them down.
It adds a survival layer the original never had: cold that drains you, stamina that limits your climb, gear you scavenge between fights. Some of that friction works against the pure awe of the source it loves, and it never quite reaches the haunting restraint of Ueda's masterpiece. But the central feeling, that vertiginous moment when you are clinging to a hand bigger than your whole body as it tries to fling you into the sky, is intact. For anyone who finished the colossi and wanted more, this is the answer.