Recently read a thread on minors in stories of a non erotic role. I was refreshing myself on the rules and saw they were (and I quite understand why) exclusionary. One phrase is “a body height which is very unusual for an 18-year-old” and now thankfully it doesn’t say “a body height which is very unusual for an 18-year-old human, (lest we lose all that delicious orc muscle-mama territory ), but what I am curious about here, is the community standard, of what are the safely comfortable lows (and honestly comfortable highs) of character height. Does body shape matter to you? A plump farm wife hobbit, a muscled dwarf, a short-stack goblin, a twink cyclops, a milfy elf, a pigmy xenomorph, a femboy yautja, and the various rearrangements possible of these? I’m not looking for the where the ultimate line is in the grey, where on side you’ll get pass and on the other it is call the mods territory. Personally, I’m looking for where most of us stop being perfectly comfortable, and on the other side of this line we start to think “wait, is this okay?… Yeah, sure, that is fine.”
Anything below 150cm is short, but not anything to note unless height-based insecurity is relavent to the story. At about 135cm is where I start to get scrutinous. Now, for a race known for being short (dwarfs, goblins) I'd be fine until about 120cm, and at the point the average person would have to literally lift the lil' guy or prop em' on a table/bed to have comfortable sex. On the tall side of the spectrum, I'd say 210cm is about the reasonable limit for tall human/normal human relations. For something like a hot muscly orc, I'd be welcoming up to 230cm. Keep in mind that the average person is about 170cm, so unless stater otherwise, readers will assume somewhere between 160-175cm as your character's height. Hence, at least for me, anything past these limits just starts to feel like size-based fetish, and if that's what you're going for, you go all the way.
Of all the minor-related rules, the height one strikes me as the least practical/useful/impactful. As you say, species have different average heights, and while you can certainly abuse that by inventing a brand new species that looks and acts suspiciously like a pre-teen ("but actually she's 10,000 years old!!!"), when using well-established species like dwarves, gnomes, goblins, fae, you should be totally safe portraying someone with a species-appropriate height of 120 cm in your story, as long as you actually show they're an adult, both in your descriptions and their behaviour. Those are your safety rails: one, write adults as adults, two, make all your characters 18 solar years old. You shouldn't conflate the sexes, though. The average species-wide male human height is currently about 177cm (~5'10) and female human height 165 cm (~5'5), with a standard deviation of about 5-6cm. But those numbers vary further by geography, class, and ethnicity. In some European countries, a man with a height of 180 cm is below average, whereas in many (but not all) African countries he would tower head and shoulders above the crowd.
A quick internet search reveals that the average height of a female dwarf (as in, someone with actual dwarfism, not a fantasy creature) is about four foot one. That, then, I think makes sense as being something I'd be perfectly comfortable with. I do wonder, however, with regards to the actual rule, how it would impact giant/giantess fetish stories, and ones with fairies. There seem to be plenty of them on the site.
That's way too low. For an American girl that is already close to unusual. That character is considered underage. That's fine as long as they are described accordingly. Doesn't matter as they are taller. (Though a character who is physically described like a 17-year-old who is scaled equally in all dimensions to be 20 feet tall is still considered underage.) If they are like human adults who are scaled equally in all dimensions, that's fine.
