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For a few weeks an unusual anime called The Titan’s Bride has been streamed on AnimeFesta, a website dedicated to sexually explicit anime aimed at female audiences with all-telling titles like Horny for Priest, Horny for Firefighter, or Horny for Daddy (the last one being BL). All of them are served in bite-sized 5-minute long episodes ideal for a short break, and upon completion rereleased as a single short film (up to a hour long). What’s unusual about The Titan’s Bride is that it’s an adaptation of a geikomi.

Geikomi is a relatively recent genre. While manga magazines with female audiences have been inviting to LGBT storylines for nearly fifty years, magazines for male readers have been and still are very conservative in this regard, with only a few titles featuring major queer male characters* and inclusion of queer female characters being a 21st century phenomenon. At the same time, while it is not unusual for a girl or a woman to read a magazine for male audience, in Japan there exists a taboo against boys and men reading womanly stuff. That’s the origin of the stereotype that gay men don’t read BL (gay romance genre originating from manga for female audiences), which is not even true – some magazines have nearly 50% male readership, with especially young gay men being attracted to softer romantic stories with pretty characters.
Now, gay magazines have existed in Japan since the 60s, but for decades you wouldn’t be able to buy them in kiosks – they had relatively low circulation numbers and were shipped straight to buyers’ homes to ensure secrecy. Japanese gay men developed a beauty ideal going contrary to the mainstream ideal of an elegant and a bit androgynous man. For many decades, when the magazines contained photos and art, it was of muscular, chubby and hairy man, with Tom of Finland’s art being particularly popular. There wasn’t really any place for comics, and while since 1986 a popular magazine Barazoku published an annual all-fiction special, due to a shortage of space the stories had to be to the point, meaning portraying sex without even a thin layer of excuse plot typical to hentai genre. (That’s not bad!)
In mid-90s gayness became more mainstream, at least accepted enough for gay comics to be obtainable in general kiosks and bookstores. The magazines were thicker and better funded, allowing for introduction of serialized stories, both novels and manga. This allowed for stories to have an actual plot – and also kinkier and longer sex scenes! They tended to be usually more explicit, with the barest minimum of censorship, and focus on sex acts more than BL. A very common fantasy is a cross-class sex between a white collar employee (often chubby and with glasses) and a blue collar worker (muscular, hairy and often bearded). Still, those manga rarely run for long enough to get more material than for one collected volume.
Unfortunately, due to collapse of manga magazines in Japan in recent years, there are currently no magazines containing geikomi. The above mentioned Titan’s Bride originally ran in an online BL magazine, and the content is somewhat between BL and geikomi: the characters are muscular and there’s an enormous size difference (because, you know, titans), but at the same time they are young and cute; what’s more, while the “plot” is a typical kidnapping fantasy, the story has no physical violence typical of geikomi. There are some questionable plot points: a kidnapped straight teen immediately becomes the most blushing of all nekos upon handsome stranger proposing to him, and while these may seem as particularly offensive BL fangirl nonsense, they are actually common geikomi tropes!
*That said, I observed an annoying trend among Neon Genesis Evangelion spin-offs: when the spin-off is aimed at female audiences, Kaworu Nagisa, the local gay character, is at least present, and often a major character with romantic subtext with Shinji Ikari, the protagonist. When the spin-off is made for male audiences, the character is gone or recharacterized as a villain, with Shinji’s own bisexuality being ignored. Tellingly, Rebuilt of Evangelion 3, a movie focusing to a large degree on Shinji and Kaworu with explicit romantic coding, was loved by female audience and actually brought more female fans to the franchise and at the same time hated by male audience members in Japan.