I picked it out of my collection to read because my friend Shinami read it and announced that “of all the 150+ BL I’ve read so far, this one is the worst.” Holy hole in donut Batman, talk about music to my ears. Of course I had to read it right away!
I was not disappointed. Golden Cain is potentially the most aggressively and grotesquely awful BL story I’ve ever read. It’s almost so bad it’s good, but while trying to turn that corner it instead flies off the cliff in flames, collides with a plane, and then crashes into a burning pit of toxic waste.
My reviews don’t usually contain spoilers, but this one will, because I have to break down the plot for you so you can seethe level of ‘bad’ we’re dealing with here. If ‘bad’ could be quantified in height, this is beyond even skyscraper-level bad, this is like pile-of-Godzillas-on-Denali bad. I need to talk about almost every plot point in this review, if for no other reason than as a form of therapy to process the trauma that’s been inflicted on me from reading this, so I’ll avoid redacting the spoilers for simplicity’s sake. Just know that there’s spoilers after the jump!
The manga starts with a…character profile page for some reason. Why does bad one-shot BL always start with character profiles?
Shun is a ‘college student’ (more on that in a sec) who goes to a ‘ceremony’ somewhere at a random basement club with some friends, which turns out to be a satanic ritual. They need a ‘virginal sacrifice’ to…get Lucifer to appear?…and Shun is chosen. He immediately gets his pants torn off on the ‘altar’ and his asshole fingered. The devil only wants to hang out when there’s butt stuff going on, I guess. No really, this is the first scene.
He is ‘saved’ by a guy in who roundhouse kicks the ceremony master in the face and flees with Shun. This turns out to be none other than Shun’s idol, a foreign model named Cain! Wow what an incredible coincidence! Shun feels drugged due to something he drank at the club, and Cain wastes no pages giving a Shun a blowjob and then fucking him against the wall of a random building on the street, huzzah!
Shortly after his wild night of nearly being a Satanic sex sacrifice and then getting fucked by a stranger on the street (I’m sure we can all relate), Shun goes to school as usual, where the mysterious Cain shows up as a new student. The book pretends these characters are in college when they are clearly in high school, probably because this was a pretty early English BL and this publisher (the little-known BeBeautiful) was afraid of having high-school-aged characters in such raunchy scenarios. At one point Shun asks Cain’s age and he says 19 which would clearly put him past high school, who knows what it was in the original version but it’s a little ridiculous how they go around in their school uniforms talking about college classes.
Anyway…Cain is from Vietnam but now he’s in Japan modeling (they make sure you know that he donates all his profits to charity, which I guess is supposed to make the reader view him positively despite all the rape he’s up to in this book?) Shun easily falls for his charms again and they waste no time fucking, again, wherever the mood strikes.
Oh yeah there’s also a scene where Shun accidentally gets in another compromising situation with the Satanic cult again. Turns out they took photos of Shun’s asshole at the earlier ritual along with he and Cain getting jiggy outside and when Shun tries to settle it to save Cain’s reputation, they try to make porn with him or something. ‘Oh no! Surely you won’t do that!’ Shun says as he just fucking lays there and lets it happen. Bruh just put your pants back on and leave!
Cain saves him again of course. And then they fuck! Hmm, I’m noticing a pattern here…
Around this point Shun learns that Cain was friends with his older brother, Keiichi. Actually they were more than friends but not really, like “platonically dating” or something. This is the first time we really here about Keiichi, who was in a tragic car accident trying to save Shun. Through exchanging letters with Keiichi, Cain finds out about Shun, and for some reason decides ‘wow this guy’s younger brother is really hot, I want to have fuck him!’ and was actually in Japan seeking him out in the first place. Shun drops a bombshell on Cain though..Keiichi didn’t die, he’s still alive! I frowned and flipped back to the character profile at the beginning where I definitely remembered it indicating that Keiichi wasn’t dead, so I’m not sure why this was supposed to be a big reveal. So they go to confront Keiichi.
This climactic scene was very confusing because Shun and Keiichi are both wearing plaid and have really similar hair and I had trouble telling who was who sometimes. Keiichi apparently has amnesia from the accident and Cain’s verbatim response to that is: “what a waste of money to have a hospital care for an amnesiac, you’re just spoiling him, I’ll go bring him to his senses!” So they both go to confront Keiichi and the first thing he says is “Cain I knew you wouldn’t fall for my act.” Turns out Keiichi was just chilling in a hospital rehab running up a huge medical bill FAKING HIS AMNESIA.
But wait, there’s more!!! Call now and we’ll send you a second bombshell for the low low price of $19.99!! Keiichi and Cain could never be real lovers because Cain wasn’t the one Keiichi was in love with. Keiichi was in love with his younger brother SHUN all along!!
So I guess from this we can infer that…Keiichi was writing letters to Cain about how much he loved his brother and Cain thought ‘ha, I’m gonna go fuck this guy’s younger brother who he is also in love with!’ Was it a contest to see who would fuck him first?
In the end, Cain and Shun reaffirm their love for each other and fuck again because really how else do you end this?
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that You Asagiri’s BL story brainstorming sessions involve watching bad telenovelas while popping amphetamine because just..how? Why? It was like a matryoshka doll of shit, and every time you cracked open a new shit there was a smaller shit inside, until you’re down to opening little tiny shit capsules with tweezers wondering how there can be so many layers of shit inside a single 7.5 x 5 x .5 inches paper enclosure.
You Asagiri is not a name anyone would probably know and she has one other extremely obscure series licensed in English, Midnight Panther which is like an action ecchi or something – CPM released it as floppies and it never got a paperback compilation. Curiously she mostly did shojo and not too much BL, which is amusing considering the amount of ass fucking in here. Maybe she just had to get it out of her system.
My friend thought the art in this book was awful, but I didn’t find it terrible technique-wise. it was however not always great at actually telling the story. If you’re fine with the 90s art style though I mean there is a ton of really smutty porny sex, so like…how bad can it REALLY be you ask? The worst a BL book can actually and possibly be while still having decent art and a lot of sex, I think.
TL;DR: Potentially the most aggressively and grotesquely awful BL story I’ve ever read. It’s almost so bad it’s good, but while trying to turn that corner it instead flies off the cliff in flames, collides with a plane, and then crashes into a burning pit of toxic waste. I think it’s literally the worst a BL book can actually and possibly be while still having decent art and a load of smutty sex – which accounts for *something* in my book because my BL standards lay next to the Titanic – but it’s a genuinely fun hate-read and a lot of fun to laugh at.