This is essentially a 3-volume love pentagon soap opera rife with lying, cheating, confusing drama, sex, and…no romance. You perhaps would assume from the title that this is a romantic BL. I did, at least, and I was very wrong – there is about as much romance in here as the Saw movies. But there is…boys and men having slutty sex with each other, arguably something that could vastly improve a bad horror franchise on life support…not that I have one in mind or anything…
I’m not really sure how to segway from that so I guess, uh…let’s talk about Prince Charming!
The story follows English high school teacher Asahina and three of his students (Yuasa, Kagami, and Nagabe) and the relationships and melodrama between the four of them – I’m not normally a fan of the high school student x teacher pairing because I don’t buy it in the form it’s most often presented in, i.e., a really confident and well-adjusted high school student topping a submissive, lovestruck teacher. However, it is completely convincing in this manga because the teacher is as reckless and immature as his students. Asahina acts like a teenager himself – he’s brooding, careless, combative, and shows up for work drunk or hungover, and the three students whose radar he gets on – particularly Yuasa, who digs his claws into him hard – are equally careless gay delinquents. All the characters are maladapted and dysfunctional, so the fact that they’re in odd or experimental relationships or making bad decisions seems more normal for them than not. Asahina does get some character development by the end, but the others really don’t.
Asahina is a promiscuous letch who hooks up with women every chance he gets, but unbeknownst to him one of the love hotels he goes to is secretly filming their clients and selling the tapes of them. Yuasa sees Asahina’s tape and finds out that his teacher can’t get off without stimulating his asshole, and falls hard for him while watching his porno. He shamelessly comes onto him and “Prince Charming”, curious but never really admitting he might be gay, doesn’t exactly reject his advances. Already, this isn’t the sort of story I expected from a BL with this title.
Yuasa basically moves in with Asahina and starts living with him, much to Asahina’s chagrin, but never kicks him out and their fuck-buddy-roommate relationship somehow stays hidden at school. In most stories this would be pretty ridiculous, but Prince Charming somehow convinces you it works.
Yuasa is openly gay as well as two of his friends Nagai and Kagami, and they often hang out a gay bar together. Both chase after either Asahina or Yuasa and both of them sort of give in, which definitely feels like cheating despite the nebulous nature of their relationship with each other and the fact that neither try to hide it – I mean, they live together but I guess aren’t dating? – and involves some dubcon as well. The love triangle thing is really more of a sex triangle here, honestly, and the sex is devoid of romance or love.
I’m not really sure what any of the three students see in Asahina and why they’re all so intent on fucking him, except maybe for the fact that he’s just as dumb and immature as they are. Yuasa likes him the most but it’s easy to imagine that all three are just messing with him or want the excitement or sleeping with a teacher. The story has some dry humor and probably the best thing about it is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously or pretend that the characters are amazing people or that their sex means something other than physical experimentation.
The art is unexaggerated and has an odd sort of appeal to it, qualities that both match the story – on the other hand it’s this same clean and simple quality that also makes it lacks emotion. It works for this particular manga, however.
Overall this is a decent three-volume BL that never outstays its welcome or gets boring, although the drama does get a bit convoluted. Things work in this manga that would seem unlikely to, and somehow when all those elements come together they manage to create something that doesn’t suck. It’s no Ayano Yamane title, but it’s not terrible or unreadable. However, if you like wholesome relationships in BL this is unlikely to be a story you’ll enjoy – don’t be fooled by the title.
TL:DR A high school student(s) x teacher love sex triangle story with unglamorous characters, who create convoluted drama for themselves that is usually ridiculous and sometimes dryly humorous. The characters are all immature idiots, but the story never pretends they aren’t – it doesn’t take itself too seriously, is completely non-romantic, and surprisingly never gets boring given Takeido’s clean and static art style. The sex is not explicit but there is definitely a sort of understated eroticism to a few scenes. This manga makes a lot of stuff work for it that I think definitely would not work in other BL series, and if you like more realistic stories and student x teacher pairings it’s worth checking out.