Huge Guy, Tiny Girl/Literature

Examples of Huge Guy, Tiny Girl pairings in Literature include:

• In Black House, the biker named Mouse tells of his late girlfriend, Little Nancy. Jack asks how big Little Nancy was, since Mouse is 6'2" and 290 pounds. Mouse remarks that he could have lifted her one-handed.
• What about Grignr and his Damsel in Distress in The Eye of Argon?^[context?]
• Susan and the unnamed protagonist of Neil Gaiman's short story "Goliath".
• In The Sharing Knife series: Fawn "I'm not a child, I'm just short" Bluefield and Dag Redwing, who's so tall and lanky that Fawn can't reach up to touch his face unless he stoops.
• Non-romantic (at the moment, anyway) example: Harry Dresden and Karrin Murphy from The Dresden Files. (He's canonically 6'9"; she's five feet tall.)
  • Another non-romantic example from the same series: Kincaid and the Archive, who have an implied 'father'/super-intelligent daughter relationship.
  • Possible example, Thomas and Justine. Thomas has been mentioned as tall (though, not nearly as tall as Harry), and Justine has been described as tiny, frail, and waif-ish.
• Moiraine and Lan from The Wheel of Time (and later, of course, Nynaeve and Lan).
  • Also Rand and Min, Perrin and Faile, Mat and Tuon. In Rand and Lan's case this would likely always be true, as they are both around 6'6; Perrin is also fairly gigantic, 6'2" and 240 pounds of solid muscle. On the other hand, Moiraine and Tuon are both legitimately fairly small women.
• From Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar, Talia and Dirk, who's been referred to as "that man-mountain of hers". Also a case of Ugly Guy, Hot Wife.
• Captain Carrot and Angua von Uberwald of Discworld. Angua has never been described as particularly small, granted, but it probably wouldn't matter, seeing as Carrot is 6'5" (196 cm) and nearly as broad across the shoulder.
• David Eddings' Belgariad and Malloreon series: Garion is at least six and a half feet (about 2 m) tall, possibly seven feet (about 2.1 m). His wife Ce'Nedra, being part-Dryad, is 5' (152 cm) at most—and repeatedly described as tiny.
  • Also Cyradis and her guide Toth.
  • Arguably, Barak and Merel. While Merel is never described as being small, Barak is large enough to make up for it.
• From Honor Harrington:
  • The titular character's father is 192 cm (6'3" and a half), and her mother is third-grader size at "barely over" 125 cm (4'1" and a half).
  • Benjamin Mayhew's wife is also quite short at about 140 cm (4'7").
  • Kevin Usher is described as being rather large, quite unlike his rather petite wife Virginia.
• Egyptologists and detectives Amelia Peabody and Radcliffe Emerson. Amelia frequently describes her husband as "Herculean".
• In Shade's Children by Garth Nix, Ella isn't described as being particularly small, but she certainly would seem so next to her teammate Drum, who was dosed with steroids as a child. One scene implied that her armpits were about level with his waist. Interestingly, Ella is almost certainly the elder.
• F'lar and Lessa in Dragonriders of Pern — Lessa has been referred to as "diminutive", "child-sized", etc. And she is a force of nature, personality-wise.
• Not a romance, but the partnership of Tuskanini and Super Gnat in the Phule's Company novels. He's the biggest member of the Omega Mob, she's the smallest, and they are a solid team, to the point that very pacifistic Tusk slugs a sergeant for picking on his partner.
• Twilight anyone? Not so much Bella and Edward or Rosalie and Emmett—but Alice and Jasper. Jasper is super tall, lanky, but WAY above average, and Alice is repeatedly described as tiny and pixie-like. Because of the focus on all the male characters having huge hands, as well as the ending to Stephenie Meyer's Host describing in detail how absolutely tiny the protagonist's new human body is, contrasted with how enormous her love interest, we can safely assume that Stephenie Meyer has quite a thing for this dynamic.
  • Averted in the film series, where Ashley Greene and Jackson Rathbone are only 2-3 inches apart in height.
  • Also any girl with any of the male werewolves.
• Karsa Orlong and Samar Dev from Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen.
• Raven and YT in Snow Crash.
• Jean, who is larger than average, and Ezri, who is petite (but the tallest of all her sisters) in Red Seas Under Red Skies.
• Skua September and Isili Hasboga from The End of the Matter. Skua is described by many characters as the biggest man they've ever seen, while his employer Isili's description pegs her as half a head shorter than teenage Flinx (who'd not yet grown tall).
• Waldo "Saucerhead" Tharpe, from the Garrett P.I. novels, is a humungous bodyguard/bruiser with a long track-record of dating women who can barely reach his elbows.
  • Probably justified, as Saucerhead is frequently hired by small women, who are bound to need bodyguarding more often than females his own size. Those who take a shine to him can then become his girlfriends, once the danger is past.
  • Garrett himself is no shrimp, yet is usually paired with Tinnie Tate, whose whole family is short.
• The Dursleys in the Harry Potter books.
• Non-romantic example: Sapphira (a fairly smallish woman) and Yereq (literally a giant, some nine-plus feet tall), from Oracles of Fire.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, Daenerys Targaryen and Khal Drogo have an arranged marriage. He's a hardened tribal leader who towers over most men, while she's thirteen years old and slight even for her age.
• Tamora Pierce's Protector of the Small series features Buri and Raoul. When introduced in the first book series Buri is described as being reasonably short. Raoul is well over six foot, and apparently a massively built warrior, whereas Buri is a waif like rider. It gets pointed out directly once, when the two stand next to each other Buri doesn't even reach Raoul's shoulder.
  • There's also Daine and Numair; Daine is probably about 5 feet tall (although the numbers aren't given), and Numair is 6'5" (which is specified).
    • Actually, in Wolf Speaker, it said that Daine was 5 feet 5 inches (at the age of fourteen). She probably grew a couple more inches since then, but she still would be short compared to Numair.
  • And Alanna and Jon or George from Song of the Lioness, this because the girl is short rather than the boy tall.
    • Wouldn't this therefore be a case of One Head Taller?
    • It's actually strongly implied, by Wild Magic if nothing else, that Alanna is about average/not far below average in height for a woman, but was always considered short, because she was disguised as a boy for eight years. Between most of her friends already thinking of her as short and people Expecting Someone Taller, she's just thought of as short.
• Red and Sorcha from Juliet Marillier's Daughter of the Forest Sorcha is very petite and compared to Red who's a pretty big guy, she's like a small child.
• A "Post-Modern Fairy Tale" book^[context?] features a very butch princess (she likes wrestling and fixing helicopters) whose parents force her to preside over an engagement gauntlet of princes who must be taller, stronger, and maybe even smarter then her in order to marry her. They are especially intersted in the only guy who's taller then the princess; unfortunately he's also a Noodle Person who has to wrestle her (she lets him win to avoid injuring him). Meanwhile, she falls for the same prince's pilot/chauffer, who's much shorter and chubbier but very much her equal. Naturally, he's the real prince and the tall guy is his pilot/chauffer. They switched because the prince knew his height would've instantly eliminated him, and he thought the whole thing was silly anyway.
• Brother/Sister version in The Millennium Trilogy books, with the Zalachenko half-siblings. Super-hacker Lisbeth is frequently described as looking like a skinny teenager, and then we're introduced to her well-nigh invulnerable, over 6-feet-tall dimwitted hulk of a brother...
• Mary Gentle's recurring characters Baltazar Casaubon and Valentine, although that's probably mostly attributable to Balthazar being absolutely massive.
  • And in Grunts! we have the pairing of Ashnak (six feet of muscular orc) and Magda Brandiman, a halfling (probably around 3' to 4' at the most).
• Derek and Chloe from the Darkest Powers series. Derek is built like a linebacker, with shoulders nearly as broad as the average doorway, and stands at around 6'3" or so. He also weighs about 220 lbs. Chloe is five-foot-nothing and probably weighs 100 lbs soaking wet.
• In the Spellsinger universe, native residents of the fantasy world are significantly shorter than those in the nonmagical twenty-first century world. Talea is in fact quite tall by her native world's standards, but she's much shorter than her love interest, the six-foot Fish Out of Water Jon-Tom.
• Ken Follet's " The Pillars of the Earth" Tom Builder is described to be unusually tall and muscular and His second wife Ellen is described to be leaner and smaller
• In any P. G. Wodehouse story where Stinker Pinker and Stiffy Bing make an appearance, Bertie will introduce them in the narration by remarking how they embody this trope.
• Played for Body Horror rather than humor in Ramsey Campbell's Cthulhu Mythos story "The Faces At Pine Dunes", in which Michael's tall father has grown enormously fat and his mother is petite. His father's body eventually absorbs his mother's, and it's implied Michael and his girlfriend will do the same in the future.
• In John C. Wright's War of the Dreaming, half-titan Raven is married to the very, very petite Wendy. She's not kidding when she says he can pick her up with one hand.
• Brandon Vanderkool (6'8") and Madeline Rousseau (5' ish) in Border Songs.
• In Death: This trope is played straight a few times, and Mavis and Leonardo happen to be the recurring couple to fit this trope.
• The first love of 4'11", skinny Cherijo Grey Veil's life is a seven-foot Jorenian. She eventually ends up marrying Duncan Reever; while he's nowhere near that big, he's still quite tall.
• To some extent, George and Jessie Challenger from Conan Doyle's The Lost World. Notably, Challenger is short (well, at least when compared to Edward Malone), but only because he has short, stocky legs. His chest, arms and head are huge, and his wife is a tiny, thin woman whom he is able to lift absolutely without any effort. To Malone, they together resemble a gorilla and a gazelle.
• Possibly^{[please verify]} Nessa and Tulkas in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion — she's described as petite and graceful, like a deer, and he's massive and muscular.