-- ReginaldGusto - 08 Nov 2015

“Many miles away,
There’s a shadow on the door
Of a cottage on the shore
Of a dark
Scottish Lake…”

—The Police

“Do you ever wonder what happens to a person when fear takes them over? Behold, ye mighty, and despair.”

—Nibiru Yog Sothoth

The Giant

The most basic and most well known form of Kaiju, the Giant is your classic rampage-and-destroy-Tokyo kind of guy. A giant is always at least the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and despite appearances, his primary driver is fear. He always erupts when the slow-burn stress of real life gets too much to handle, and he just needs some space. He makes his own space, then, by tearing down the buildings around him until he has room to breathe. The Giant is a primitive, infantile/animalistic creature whose actions are governed by nothing but the primal instincts. Most of your Kaiju are going to fall into this subgenre, and all the other subgenres have elements of the Giant.
If you're playing a Giant Kaiju, your most common touchstone characters are going to be people with longstanding chronic "slow burn" stress or deep unresolved trauma or fear: teens in abusive households or going through hard puberty, businessmen with tumultuous love lives (Citizen Kane, for instance), lost or frightened children, an artist trapped in a life of pleasing other people at the expense of their art, a priest who has taken a vow of non-violence living in an unstable third world dictatorship, and so on. The trigger need not be monumental, either. Someone who gets tired of having their name pronounced wrong by everybody they meet can explode just as hard as a man who's been practically enslaved paying protection to the mafia for 25 years. The touchstone for a Giant frequently feels that they are alone with no one who understands their problem. They probably believe that their emotional needs are insignificant compared to the world around them, or may think no one will listen, or believe them, or take them seriously. They haven't told anyone about their feelings because they have given up on the idea that anyone will help them.

Eruption:

When a Giant erupts, they erupt spectacularly, publicly, and with no concern for their own safety or life. The Giant in the eruption has enough energy to take out everything and everyone around it, make the evening national news, and, in most cases, burn out before the military can deploy enough hardware to put it down.
The Kaiju is single-minded in its tantrum. Upon eruption, the Giant destroys. When Godzilla, the Cloverfield Monster, Gamera, or King Kong arrived on the scene, the first thing they started doing was tearing the place up. But why? That's the important part. The answer is they hurt. Godzilla was in pain from all the nuclear blasts. King Kong was scared and humiliated. Gamera was in a strange place trying to get home. The Cloverfield Monster, according to the directors, just wanted its mommy. they were panicking, and all they could think of to do was lash out, instinctively, to clear themselves some space to think, or just to be, and that required destroying anything that continued to try to hurt them. Their goal was to stop hurting, and the only response available to them at the time was destruction.
Giants are, by their nature, claustrophobic, in metaphor if not in fact. To a Giant Kaiju, all their problems are close, looming, insistent, and yet oddly petty and small but still needling and irritating to the point of pain, as given by the metaphor of the buildings of a city crowding around them, and all the little soldier-people shooting at them. A Giant Kaiju is glad to be confronted by one big problem, be it another Kaiju, or a battle mech, because it gives them one definite thing to focus on.
What a Giant needs is space. Give them space, and they will stop and take a breather. In the metaphor of proximity, giving them space is giving them distance from the problems that plague them, allowing them time to sort things out one issue at a time. Usually a change in perspective will do that, but sometimes just giving them permission to take a quick break to collect themselves will be all it takes.

Details:

Domain: “Stomping Grounds.”
Celestial Counterpart: “The Spirit.” (as in “spirit of the _______” insert apropriate locale or domain there.)
Title: None, though naming schemes vary. Usually a name denoting his primary form, adapted to also indicate massive size or Kaiju status. (eg: “Mega-Rat,” “Squid-Zilla,” etc). The name or title might also be a noun personalized into a proper name (eg: “Mothra,” or “Ginormica”). Other Kaiju might refer to him or her by a sarcastic diminuitive (eg: “The Puppy,” or “The Little Guy”).
Human Support Structure: “Friends.”
Trigger: Fear, anger
Manifestation: Summoning or Transformation

Subgenre features:

The Giant must take Giant Size, and must also take anemic throat chakra (cannot speak in Kaiju form).

Artistic examples:
Gamera
Cloverfield
King Kong
The Incredible Hulk
Gojira