The Spring 2025 Manga Guide

Stay, Good Boy (18+)

What's It About? 

Kaoru is a pro baseball player who's dating Seijiro, a police officer. Seijiro gets caught up with work and leaves Kaoru hanging for two months, causing him to suspect Seijiro of cheating!

Stay, Good Boy has a story and art by dotsuco, with English translation by Itsuki. This volume is lettered by Louie. Published by Irodori (March 25, 2025). Rated M.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

One's a cop, the other's a professional baseball player. Together they're an adorable couple who aren't great at communicating, and those two sentences really didn't work as I planned. But the fact of the matter is that Stay, Good Boy is a short and sweet little bit of BL smut, one built on the idea that Seijiro is much less forthcoming in general than excitable Kaoru. It's not a new formula, but it works.

The basic plot is quite simple: after a sexy encounter in Seijiro's apartment, he kicks Kaoru out and then doesn't contact him for months. When Kaoru sees his boyfriend coming out of a brothel, he panics, completely forgetting that a police officer might have legitimate, non-sex related reasons to be there. The two have messy make up sex and all is set right between them once more. It's a great example of how a story doesn't need to be complex in order to be satisfying. While it would be nice to know more about how these two met and started dating (and creator dotsuco says that's their next project about them), their opposites-attract dynamic works even without that. It's clear that they love each other, even if Seijiro isn't good at showing it.

The art, for the most part, has a pleasing look of the 1990s to it, especially around the eyes. It's also uncensored (this is an Irodori release, after all), although it's also at its best when the guys aren't getting it on. Mostly this comes down to a few odd choices; it's not unusual for explicit stories to make parts of bodies disappear to better show off the salient bits, but there are a few scenes where it looks like Kaoru's arm has been carefully amputated so we just see his forearm and fingers, which turns out to be unintentionally hilarious. The intent is well-meaning, but the execution isn't great.

Stay, Good Boy still is a nice little treat for fans of explicit BL. It's light on plot, but sweet and silly anyway, and I'd certainly read more about this couple.

MrAJCosplay
Rating:

What happens when you have a popular and lovable goofball in a relationship with a stoic, masochistic cop? That is a question that I thought this story would do a more thorough job of answering. Unfortunately, like a lot of the adult stories on this preview guide, there isn't a lot of real estate that truly goes into the relationship between these two. It starts strongly with us getting introduced to an already established couple, and one of them is a popular athlete, so there needs to be some awareness about how they can go about their relationship. However, we get one teasing scene, and then the story just sort of separates them in a supposedly two-month time span.

This is used to generate a sense of longing between them so that the sex scene at the end of the book feels that much more impactful, but a better job of actually building up to that sense of separation rather than just cutting to it could be done. It is nice to look at, especially if you like more buff men. It feels like they were building up this idea of living in different worlds, or how these two need to be self-conscious about certain things because of their jobs. Then that just sort of gets brushed under the rug so that we can quickly get to the ending. This isn't terrible, and I feel the love they have for each other. A big contributing factor would be the art, which mixes goofy expressions with tough-looking bodies. It just feels like it could've been more if it had been given the time to cook

Christopher Farris
Rating:

Sometimes a saucy doujin doesn't need some high concept to make it specially stand out; sometimes just having a couple hot people in a cute relationship havin' fun with each other is all it needs to get by. Stay, Good Boy tells the story of Kaoru, an adorable puppy of a baseball player, spending two months apart from his partner Seijiro due to work before they both release everything they've pent up. That's in an emotional sense as much as a physical one, as Kaoru has a healthily adorable level of attachment to his beau, even if he must also be reconciling with the fact that he's dating a police officer. It speaks to Sei's appealing personality, anyway, so I'll let the fantasy slide here. Plus I'm pretty sure that fucking a cop in the ass counts a praxis.

Much of what makes Stay, Good Boy work is how lived-in the relationship between Kaoru and Sei feels. I'll always be a sucker for earnest romantic domesticity, and seeing the pair playfully chat with each other in a way that codifies their interactions and how they wear their personalities for each others' appeal is fun. It helps that there's a lot of natural appeal in a sensitive checking-in service to attending to his brusque masochist boyfriend, who likes it rough. We could all be so lucky. They feel like they're as comfortable in their relationship as they are in the fetish roles they've figured out for themselves. I love Sei's pride as he confidently declares, "Don't underestimate masochists." He makes me want to bully him too, I get it, Kaoru.

Getting by on personality means there's only the barest whiff of plot here, and not even in the normal "filled out with sex" way. Kaoru's momentary worry that Sei is cheating on him in a brothel is mostly a device to get the top baseball star to overreact in adorable ways, then herd the two into a room where the magic can happen. It works, and amongst all their internal appeal, it's fun to clock author dotsuco's own appreciations, particularly for the Essential Male Nipple. Seriously, the attention to detail on the man-mammaries in this manga is magnanimous. But it's equally loving in presenting funny, characterful facial expressions to make the people feel more personal. Sometimes on the very same page as those lusciously rendered dude-boobs. It makes Stay, Good Boy for an easy rec if you're looking for an adorable little yaoi appetizer.