Fee-fi-fo-fum...
Mundus Nostrum Catillum Est *
— Family motto of the Ogre Gods
The Ogre Gods (Les Ogres-Dieux) is a French Fantasy/Horror graphic novel series written by Hubert Boulard (author of Beauty) and illustrated in black-and-white by Bertrand Gatignol, with the tone and aesthetic of a dark and gruesome Fairy Tale, telling the saga of an aristocratic dynasty of giants ruling tyrannically over a kingdom of humans.
From a titanic castle situated on a mountain overlooking a great valley reign the Ogre Gods, a monstrous clan of giants served by armies of humans whom they kill and devour with impunity. The giant's rule is weakening however, as centuries of inbreeding has resulted in a physical and moral decline, with each generation becoming smaller than the last, increasingly brutal and depraved, and obsessed with restoring their former glory. When the Ogre King's youngest son is born scarcely larger than a human his father wants him killed as an embarrassment, but his mother sees in him the possible regeneration of the family, as he alone can mate with humans to breed new, healthy giants and break the destructive cycle of inbreeding.
The story is told across multiple time periods, with the present-day being interspersed with passages from in-universe history books detailing the history of the giants and their kingdom. Four volumes have been released, although the series is seemingly concluded due to Hubert Boulard's death in February 2020.
- Petit (2014)
- Half-Blood (2016)
- The Great Man (2018)
- First Born (2020)
The Ogre Gods provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Petit's father, King Gabaal, is so disgusted by his human-like size he demands his death seconds after his birth. Their relationship only deteriorates from there.
- Book 4 reveals that the Founder was this as well - he kept them his children locked in the castle (confining the girls to a single building) and was extremely strict with gender roles, training his sons to be an army of destructive killing machines and relegating his daughters to being baby factories to give him more giant soldiers. When his cruel son Orobaal murders his only decent brother Aristobull, the Founder simply says that Aristobull was too weak to become king before naming Orobaal his heir. It's also revealed that it was the Founder's idea to pair his children with each other in order to make the next generation of giants even bigger, and those who were naturally disgusted at the idea were forced into it.
- Animal Theme Naming: Bear, the brigand and former soldier that leads the resistance against the Ogre-gods. When he runs into a bear trapped by the forest, he asks Petit if he believes in omens before Mercy Killing the bear. Sure enough, Bear gets his throat slashed by the end of the book.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: It's consistent throughout the story that the nobility are selfish, callous elitists who find the idea of using their position to exercise some responsibility to the common good rather than indulge themselves abhorrent.
- The royal giants are almost exclusively brutal tyrants with zero regard for the lives of their human subjects, and since the days of the god-king they dine on feasts of human flesh on a daily basis.
- Book 2 reveals that the corrupt and backstabbing human nobility are barely any better, for while they don't eat people themselves they're quite content to administrate the giant's empire and treat the peasants like slaves and livestock to feed to their masters.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: To be expected from an extensive, massively inbred aristocracy of cannibals.
- Brother–Sister Incest: The first generation of giants consisted entirely of the Founder's children, who only bred with each other. Book 4 reveals that Petit's parents Emione and Gabaal are half-siblings who share the same father.
- Bungled Suicide: On hearing all four of her sons are dead, Emione hangs herself... or tries to and fails, being too heavy for the masonry.
- The Caligula: King Gabaal is cruel, depraved and selfish, with more interest in indulging his various appetites and literally feasting on his subjects than doing any actual ruling. For that matter, most of the ogre kings (with one exception) were similarly oppressive and with no regard for humans as anything other than labour and food.
- Can't Have Sex, Ever: When Petit meets and falls in love with a human woman, he refuses to have sex with her out of fear that, if his mother's right in her belief that he'll breed another generation of giants, she won't survive the pregnancy.
- Damsel in Distress: In the penultimate book Petit gets separated from his love interest, Sala, who is held hostage by the remaining antagonists.
- Dancing Bear: In-Universe. In her youth, Desdée ran off with a circus to become a dancer. Unfortunately, what she wanted was the admiration of the crowd at her skill, not yokels staring open-jawed at a dancing giant.
- Death by Childbirth: The earliest generations of giants, always born bigger than their mothers could survive. The firstborn daughter of the Founder, especially, gets a disturbing recounting of how her gestation exceeded the usual nine months as she kept growing, wasting her mother away to sustain her growth and driving her mad through the entire harrowing process as she was rendered bedridden and forcefed while the Founder maintained cold satisfaction at the whole thing. After the Founder's era the only one big enough to kill his mother was the God-King, being "a giant among giants". In the present era, Petit refuses to have sex with his human partner, justifiably fearing that their children would be big enough to tear her apart from the inside.
- Defector from Decadence: Petit's Aunt Desdeé ran away from the family in her youth, in an attempt to both get away from their awful cruelty and to try a make a name for herself as a dancer. Unfortunately, she ended up becoming a curiosity in a circus, but still enjoyed dancing freely at night.
- Don't Go Into the Woods: The penultimate entry in the series introduces a deep, black forest inhabited by a barbarian tribe. They not only managed to repel the Founder and his army, they formed a pact of blood sacrifice with something to ensure neither he or his giants could ever invade. Whatever's behind it, there's an uncanny sense of danger felt by anyone who goes in there, and something attacks at night, leaving victims covered in bite marks that apparently leeched blood.
- Facial Horror: One of Yori's eyes is burst and the skin pushed off to the side after the queen grabs him and threatens to pull him apart. Note that she wasn't pulling a You Have Failed Me, she was demonstrating what she'd do to him if he did fail her.
- Failure Hero: Bear sees himself as this, his life having been one long series of setbacks, betrayals and failures. At least he dies with his father's ghost forgiving him.
- Fan Disservice: Most scenes involving nudity or sex are not played for tittilation, such as the queen undressing (her thighs still drenched in blood from giving birth), Yori sleeping with his old and ugly Meal Ticket, or Petit going down on his deformed and inbred cousin.
- Fanservice: Desdée's servants, who are made up entirely of buxom young women bursting out of their corsets.
- Founder of the Kingdom: Literally only ever recorded as "The Founder", he sired the family of giants and used them as soldiers in an unstoppable army to conquer all the land in the area. His history past this is Shrouded in Myth, only alluding to a desire to return with his new family back to his old family of giants and kill them all for rejecting him. He died without ever actually following up on this goal, without even informing anyone where he came from.
- A God Am I: The God King believed himself to be a perfect, divine, immortal entity, and while he was far longer lived than the rest of his family to the point of outlasting his own grandchildren, he ultimately died of old age. Despite this, his successors copied his example and started calling the entire royal bloodline gods.
- God-Eating:
- A more symbolic example than most but the climax of book one has the king and the, by then, former queen being eaten by the peasants, thinking it's an intentional gift, once they tumble out of the mountain to their deaths after their fight.
- During the climax of book three, Petit undergoes a Mushroom Samba and sees himself devouring his God-Emperor father.
- God-Emperor: While his predecessors didn't have any delusions about what they were, the God-King believed himself to have shedded all human "impurity" and become a divine entity. He was wrong, but his successors continued calling themselves gods.
- God Save Us from the Queen!: Downplayed only slightly with Queen Emione. While her genuine love for her son makes her somewhat sympathetic, she's still as cruel and callous towards humans as any other giant (thinking nothing of eating them or grabbing a bunch for her son to rape and impregnate), and her ultimate goal is to restore her family's dynasty to its former glory and ensure their tyrannical rule lasts forever.
- Grotesque Gallery: The impact of the massive amount of inbreeding is shown in the deformed appearance of many of the giants, which really underscores how monstrous they are in character.
- Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: Thoroughly deconstructed; the first generation of giants in the family didn't even humor the idea of mating with humans, instead choosing to pair with each other due to a lack of viable alternatives. At one point Petit starts having sex with his much larger cousin, who complains of not being able to feel anything and prefers him performing cunnilingus.
- Hormone-Addled Teenager: Played for drama; at one point Petit gets hot under the collar over one of the servant women attending him and almost rapes her on the spot before getting smacked back to his senses. After that he maintains control over himself, but still seeks sexual gratification once he resolves never to have sex with his human partner Sala out of fear of a pregnancy killing her.
- Hyper-Competent Sidekick: Malkus Elissen, the first "true" chamberlain, who elevated the office from little more than gatekeepers to being the most powerful human position in the kingdom. As the God-King was too lazy and arrogant to concern himself with minor things like actually running his own kingdom, Elissen became responsible for making his king's borderline-impossible requests a reality. Since then, being a Hyper-Competent Sidekick responsible for managing the entire kingdom essentially became the chamberlain's purview, although a number of them proved to be incompetent and/or corrupt.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Although they consider themselves a separate species, and later as divine entities, all known giants (except possibly the Founder) are descended from human-giant couplings and have some amount of human ancestry, making their flesh-eating cannibalism to boot.
- Inbred and Evil: The giants are all related to various degrees and keep reproducing with each other since there are no other giants to marry.
- Infodump: Happens between chapters to explain backstories, histories and various myths (usually the last line of the chapter refers to the historical character now being described).
- I Have No Son!: King Gabaal disowns Petit the instant he's born, dismissing him as an "aberration" to be killed at once.
- Ironic Name: Petit's name is this to humans, because he's still notably larger than all of them, even if he is very small by giant standards.
- I Want Grandkids: Petit's mother is obsessed with him having kids so as to stop the giant line from continuously shrinking, to the point of locking him up with female servants and telling him to get on with it already.
- Kissing Cousins: The entire royal family engages in incest but Petit in particular eventually seeks sexual gratification from one of his cousins after abstaining from sex with his human partner out of fear of giving her an eventually fatal pregnancy.
- Large and in Charge: Par for the course in a kingdom of humans ruled by giants. Most of the ogre kings appear to be the largest of their respective generations, with the God-King being the single biggest giant on record.
- Large Runt: Petit and his ancestor the Founder: at a glance, they could pass for enormous human men, but are actually very small giants.
- A Lighter Shade of Black: Emion is objectively better than her husband, but not by much: she has just as little regard for the feelings of others (including her son in spite (because?) of her love for him, and sees humans as slaves and food.
- Longest Pregnancy Ever / Mystical Pregnancy: This is Played for Horror: the Founder's first daughter gestated for sixteen months, growing abnormally huge due to her father's true nature, causing her mother incredible suffering as her body was twisted and drained by the fetus, and eventually killing her via traumatic c-section as the baby was too large to be born naturally. The Founder then proceeded to impose the same fate on dozens of other women, caring nothing for their lives as long as they gave him more giant children.
- The Man Behind the Man: After the giants are killed, Yori becomes obsessed with putting Petit on the throne since he can't (and doesn't want to) seize power himself.
- Meaningful Name: Petit means "small" in French, and by giant standards, he is.
- Mistaken for Cheating: Sort of: Sala walks in on Petit and his cousin Nibie and thinks he loves her. Petit is having sex with Nibie and not Sala, because he needs to stay on the former's good side and he's afraid of Death by Childbirth for the latter.
- Myopic Conqueror: The eponymous beings only conquer because they believe their giant size makes it their divine right to do so. Their founder wanted them to become powerful enough to take vengeance on the family he claims rejected him, but died without actually informing anyone where he came from. Actually running their territories quickly fell to their human subordinates, and then most of the furthest ones were soon annexed back as they horribly punished any bad news, so the only things maintained were things they would directly see.
- Orifice Invasion: On hearing Nibie saying she plans to be queen (once Petit marries her), king Gabaal forces his finger down her throat (note that Nibie is about as tall as his forearm) before saying he'll keep his current queen.
- Our Giants Are Bigger: The comics are essentially a treatise on man-eating fairytale giants and how they might operate, and their declining size is the main focus of the story. The Founder was a giant of mysterious origin who was only slightly larger than most humans, but the children he had with human women all grew huge, with each subsequent generation growing larger than the last until they peaked in size with the God-King, after which each generation grew smaller until the birth of Petit, likewise human-sized. The queen hopes for Petit to breed with humans to produce a new generation of healthy giants and break the cycle of inbreeding causing their decline.
- Our Ogres Are Hungrier: While the species is mostly referred to as "giants", "ogre" is used interchangeably (or perhaps as more of a descriptor of their brutality) rather than denoting a separate race. Although the youngest generations of smaller, increasingly deformed giants more closely resemble stereotypical ogres compared to their ancestors, who looked indistinguishable from humans apart from their great size.
- Pen-Pushing President: The giant king pretty much only signs off on legislation the chancellor has drawn up, carefully avoiding giving them any actual details of the state of decay their kingdom is in.
- People Farms: A massive human farm is built into the side of Castle Mountain to provide the giants with a food supply.
- Persecuted Intellectuals: Commonly. The Philanthropist King let in philosophers and scientists to improve his reign and ease the life of his subjects but this just led to his kin rebelling against them. Change is being forced too quickly. So many of them ended up being stomped and smashed and eaten. As well as being used as scapegoats for the kingdom's various problems.
- Pit Trap: Petit runs to an abandoned part of the palace when pursued by his brothers that can barely take his weight. When they keep coming, the floor collapses and they end up iumpaled on the debris.
- Pretentious Latin Motto: For the royal family of giants: Mundus Nostrum Catillum Est ("The World is our Plate"), reflecting their view of their own superiority and inherent right to use the world as they see fit, and to treat humans as nothing more than food. For the office of the chamberlains: Manus Deorum ("Hands of the Gods"), reflecting their role as the ones who manage the kingdom and keep everything running smoothly.
- A Pupil of Mine Until He Turned to Evil: One of Bear's biggest regrets is that Sol turned the skills he'd learned from him (in theory to become an officer) to instead become Yori's Number Two.
- Psychopathic Manchild: An apt description of most of the giants, but Petit's brothers in particular see no problem in swatting random humans or raping them (back when they were small enough for this to be feasible).
- The Right of a Superior Species: The God-King's rationale for a diet of humans is that humans eat animals because they're above animals, so naturally as the superior to humans he shouldn't be relegated to human food but rather feast on the humans themselves.
- Royal Inbreeding: After the Founder's children proved too large to feasibly breed with humans, and due to an apparent lack of other giant families anywhere in the known world, the only way the giants saw to preserve the family was through extensive inbreeding, which eventually led to...
- Royally Screwed Up: The royal family's constant inbreeding resulted in a physical and moral decline, growing gradually smaller, more deformed, and with shorter lifespans, even as they became increasingly cruel, brutal and depraved.
- Running Gag: Not really a gag, but Petit keeps running into Sala as she's being harassed/about to be raped by soldiers.
- Screaming Birth: Subverted for Petit's birth, which Emione barely notices. Played horrifyingly straight the Founder's sons, which lasted more than a year and ended with the mother's death.
- Shout-Out: Petit's father dresses like Henry VIII on the cover of book 1.
- The Good King: King Eliabaal, known as the Philanthropist King, was the only giant king to actually try to improve the lives of his subjects and work towards a common good and create a fair society rather than have his subjects toil endlessly to feed the royal family, instituting just reforms and banning the consumption of human flesh. Naturally, the other giants think he's insane and overthrow him, reverse all his reforms and leave him to starve in a dungeon.
- Teeny Weenie: It's not known whether Petit's is particularly small, just that the much larger woman he used it on didn't feel a thing.
- To Serve Man: The giant's diet consists almost exclusively of humans, to the point of having a huge farm installed beneath their castle. This practice is actually relatively recent, as the generations prior to the God-King didn't eat humans, but as he considered himself divine he believed that mundane food wasn't good enough, and all other giants followed his example until it became their main diet.
- Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Queen Emione is noted to have escaped her inbred family's deformities, simply appearing as a gigantic attractive woman, while her husband King Gabaal is just... a big, fat, ugly ogre.
- Unskilled, but Strong: The giants have nothing but their colossal size going for them, and are relatively easy to outwit.
- Vestigial Empire: The Ogre Gods originally carved out a vast empire, but since the days of the god-king they stopped embarking on military expeditions and rarely bother to leave their mountain, causing the loss of the conquered territories as the people no longer fear them, and reducing their kingdom to the lands around the mountain. They remain unaware of this due to generations of chamberlains misleading them about the lost territories and assuring them that all is well, as the last chamberlain to deliver bad news was squished.
- Villainous Incest: Every generation of the family since the Founder wed brothers to sisters as well as cousins, more due to the impossible mechanics of mating with humans and lack of outsider giants than anything else.
