John’s Review of the Titan’s Bride

It’s just a pity this is so short. 

The Titan’s Bride is an isekai anime about a guy who goes to another world and gets married to a giant. It’s gay and kind of porny and it’s definitely way better than I thought it was going to be. 

There are going to be some spoilers for it in this review, but it’s really a super short anime, so really if you’re worried about it just go watch it and come back, it will only take you an hour. 

The plot is basically just that a basketball player named Koichi gets summoned into another world by a giant named Caius, who wants him to be his bride because of a prophecy that he can’t marry anyone from their world. And then that’s pretty much what happens. They agree to wait a month to decide, but by about episode four it’s obvious that they’re in love. Then Koichi gets poisoned with a sex poison and they have to go to a country full of furries to heal him. That’s…pretty much the whole plot, to be honest. 

There are actually a lot of really refreshing things about this show. I watch a lot of isekai anime, and they’re all really heteronormative and they tend to be a bit harem-y, or at least the really popular ones do. It was really cool to see a gay one, and the fact that it was also sexy was a big plus. The gay parts are actually the most refreshing parts, though. Normally in gay anime, there’s a lot of at least one of the guys acting like he’s not into it and crying because he can’t be in a relationship with a guy. There also tends to be a lot of rape or really really dubious consent, and some misogynistic ideas about female characters who are always in the way of male relationships. 

In The Titan’s Bride, Koichi is summoned and immediately brought to a bed and his clothes taken off, but when he says no Caius stops, because he just didn’t realize Koichi wouldn’t want to have sex with him when they just met. And then Koichi has about two lines of objecting because he’s a guy, but then he realizes how great having a strong, hot giant husband would be so he stops doing that and just starts having sex with Caius all the time and falls in love with him pretty quickly. There’s also Caius’s ex-girlfriend, who shows up, but then is totally supportive of their relationship and is still friends with Caius. It’s so silly, but it’s obvious that the person writing this knew that those two tropes were really prevalent, and made an effort to subvert both of them, and I just really appreciate that. 

This anime is definitely a grade above softcore porn, but it’s not fully graphic, which means you don’t see any dicks or anything. But except for that, the sex is pretty explicit, along with voice acting and sounds, and you also see a lot of cum, which is kind of cool, even if it all comes out in one weird explosion instead of like, how cum actually comes out. There is one rape scene near the end, but it’s treated like a rape scene where Koichi says he doesn’t want Baro the wolf to give him oral sex and is very emphatic about trying to get away. When Caius comes and beats Baro up, nobody tries to tell Koichi he liked it because he was hard, and nobody treats it like it’s his fault or anything. It’s again really refreshing to see rape treated that way, even if (because it’s still porn) he and Caius then have sex like two seconds later and then the anime sort of sets it up that Baro is going to start hanging out with them and maybe be in a polyamorous relationship with them? It’s not clear, because it happens right at the end, but I looked at some chapters of the manga and I saw them having sex, so there’s that. But that’s just porn logic, and it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as some of that other stuff would have.

The obvious main kink of the anime is the size difference between Caius and Koichi, cause Caius is like eight feet tall or something and built like a Zelda villain. They don’t play it up a lot, but it’s definitely there and it’s definitely obvious, and the whole size difference thing is pretty well done, and was probably written by someone who has that kink. It’s definitely also a little bit of that thing where Koichi is being coded as being really young, even though he’s an ambiguous anime teenager, because the size difference between them makes it seem like he could be in elementary school or something. It’s a really cool premise that I wish they’d done a little more with instead of the sex scenes themselves being so vanilla. The idea of being taken to a world where your problems don’t exist and unconditionally loved by someone for whom you’re child sized and everyone treats you like you’re little and people mistake them for parent and child is really interesting, I think. Like, I’ve never really seen that done in a major way before and I think it’s really inventive and cool and I’d love to see it explored further, just to see where it would go, you know?

There’s also this really cool moment right at the end where we get told a little bit of mythology about the world and find out that its two guiding deities are these twin brothers who were lovers and broke up and now they’re fighting, which is the mythic antecedent to the conflict between the two peoples who worship them. It’s not really part of the plot or anything, but I thought it was cool that there’s a positively depicted incestuous mythological couple where like, the characters in the show say that everything would be better if they just got together. It’s the opposite of the squick factor you usually see forced into narratives like this when incest is brought up just to be fetishized or mocked, and I just thought that was really cool. And it also really drives home another quiet theme in the anime, which is that violence isn’t the only way to solve problems. Even though there are some big heroics when Caius saves Koichi and bashes a few heads to get there, reconciliation and incest really are equally valid and possibly better ways to make peace happen. That story is what convinces Baro that he wants to follow Caius and Koichi home, so even though they’re not related, that’s why I think they’re going to have sex. 

The anime is literally only nine episodes and they’re five minutes each, so it isn’t going to take you long to watch it if you want. I definitely think The Titan’s Bride is worth watching if you’re looking for something gay and refreshing, with serious critiques of the genre and also interesting themes all of its own, that’s also sexy. I wish it was longer, but the manga is ongoing so I’m going to go read that. Maybe I’ll do another review when I do.