Quote Originally Posted by pendell View Post
While it would delight me if it would, I doubt diplomacy will work here. That sexist society she's from provides two powerful aggravating factors:

1) Success ensures a better standing not just for her but for all other women of her tribe. This is her first, best chance to get sole credit for something going right.

2) Failure means she'll be scapegoated by the tribal elders. They'll be looking for someone to blame for the failure, and as a successful woman -- already a target in the eyes of the men running things -- they will leap at the chance to save the reputation of the males by loading her with all the blame for the failure. Remember the USS Chesapeake -- somehow a third lieutenant got cashiered for the lost battle, not the dead captain or the surviving higher-ranking officer.

They'll also use her "failure" as an excuse to say "women can't be fighters" and set back the entire gender as well.

That's the way the world works. People with political clout use it to vacuum up all the credit for themselves and load the blame onto other people, especially those who are already unpopular. If you're a minority, the only real way out of this is to just be so much better than everyone else that they grudgingly accept you as a peer -- which they will until you make one final mistake. Then they will hastily restore the narrative on your corpse, fanning a trivial error into blame not only for you but for everyone else like you.

I think the giantess is smart enough to know this. Which means she cannot return to her tribe unless in total victory.

At this point I don't think even the world ending would change her mind. Assuming they could convince her they weren't simply lying for tactical advantage in the first place -- no mean feat -- then she's still fighting for a place in the afterlife and the world to come. The certainty of afterlife and a place in it may be a better "bet" in her eyes than the potential destruction of everything, gods included, at the hands of the Snarl.

Respectfully,

Brian P.
I think you failed to consider other options, like "success means she'll be scapegoated for the death of her comrades, and her victory will be dismissed as too costly, probably cowardly. If they died and she lived, she was probably not honorable. Maybe she hid back? Maybe she backstabbed him? The imagination of oppressors is fertile to discredit opponents.

Because if you are "so much better than everyone else", accepting you as a peer is no more probable than accepting you as a threat to the established order.

You also seem to assume she will return to her tribe. And seem to assume she knows what is at stakes. But it was suggested to us that she does not, in fact, know the world is threatened with destruction. Maybe she's not ready to let go of this world, yet? Maybe, if she knew, she would rather be an outcast than to participate?

This giantess doesn't have a name yet, but she does have a personality and a limited background. All should know that the probability of a character dying decreases with the more we learn on them. Tack on top of that that the character is a vehicle for a progressive message valued by the author (anti-patriarchism, female assertiveness), to have a (likely male) character kill the most blatant anti-patriarchal female character, over what is quite possibly a misunderstanding (or, at the very least, due to manipulation), does not strike me as particularly likely.

I'm not saying I *want* them to talk it out, but that I *expect* them to. Killing her off at this point would seem contrary to the author's ethics, on top of making the whole sub-plot of frost giants being an oppressive patriarchy a distraction at best, a waste of time at worst.

The giantess rebelling against the patriarchy to aid the crew of the mechane to escape would seem the logical conclusion to the elements presented to us so far.

The only loose ends I'm not accounting for are the stranded heroes, I do not have any strong ideas about how their reunion will occur.