Does size really matter?

So, to continue from my comment on Amelia's post...

I think it is interesting to note how there is a strong distinction made between mental strengths and weaknesses and physical strengths and weaknesses in the latest episodes we have watched. The children in Gingerbread have more power over the masses, but like Cordelia says, she likes "the two little ones better than the one big one," because Buffy's strength lies in overpowering her opponents physically. In Fear Itself, Buffy is Red Riding hood (going along with the parallels Annelise already made), weak and in need of the huntsman Giles to save her, because her mental strength is no match for her fears and paranoia of trying to protect her friends. However, she is able to defeat Gachnar because her physical strength and size make him no match for her...or her tennis shoe.

Both of these episodes collide in "Normal Again" where in the one reality, Buffy's parents urge her to summon mental strength to defeat her insanity and to find her way home, meanwhile, in the more familiar realm, Buffy the Vampire Slayer uses strength and force to gather and conquer her friends. In both Fear Itself and Gingerbread, we see Buffy triumph with physical strength, but things get more confusing in Normal Again. She attacks her friends with strength in our realm, but they backfire with talking, emotional soothing, and mental strength. Because her mentality is not as strong here, her friends triumph. We see that this weakness is carried over into the asylum realm, as her mental strength is not great enough to save her. However, we also see that the writers of Buffy value mental strengths and weaknesses over physical ones. In our realm, she fights with force (which usually brings her to victory) but even with her force, her weakness of mind helps her friends overcome her attack, therefore making her mental weakness too great to be saved by her physical strength.

This is parallel to the demon in Gingerbread, who could have defeated Buffy by controlling the minds of the masses, and even Buffy's slayer strength was no match for the thrall the demon put the town under. However, once the demon loses his strength of the mind, even though he gains physical strength and size, he is defeated.

This all goes back to what Kim was saying about the significance of size in Castle of Otranto. It makes us wonder how much size actually matters when things like emotion, love, prophecy, anger and hate, etc. etc, are brought into a battle. Though there was a great giant in Otranto, the leading cause of conflict in the novel, or so it seemed to me, was the mental torture on the lovesick characters, not the "demon" that seemed to befall the castle.