YMMV / Golden Kamuy

• Adorkable: Yasaku is awkward, but really endearing in his own way. His morbid quirks don't make him violent, so he's infinitely more sympathetic than the average weirdo in the series.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Wilk is subjected to different interpretations both in and out of universe ever since The Reveal that he had been secretly grooming his daughter, Asirpa, into becoming a freedom fighter waging war against the Japanese government for the Ainu and that he attracted more women than Asirpa has ever known he did. In universe, Sugimoto calls him out as soon as he finds out that he raised her as a Tyke-Bomb, saying that even though his desire to protect the Ainu is noble and just, he should not turn his own daughter into a murderer when she should enjoy cooking and eating. Afterwards, Rear Admiral Koito gives Sugimoto another interpretation that Wilk taught Asirpa how to fight because having his own daughter lead the army would be reasonable to urge the Ainu to fight in his revolution. Out of universe, EidolonLathi argues in their two posts that he deliberately charmed Sofia and Inkarmat into doing what he wants them to and that he saw Asirpa as only a useful soldier to lead his own revolution for the Ainu. Golden Kamuy Hunting argues in their two posts that he just shared his beliefs with Sofia without knowing he charmed her and that he taught Asirpa how to fight so she could decide her own future.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Toni's human echolocation skills are a real thing.
• Angst? What Angst?: Many of the characters have troubled pasts that would warrant great quantities of angst in series' that aren't Rated M for Manly, Sugimoto first and foremost. It could be argued how much Sugimoto is a Stepford Smiler.
• Arc Fatigue: The main characters' journey to Abashiri Prison. Three years of real-time publishing, over 150 chapters, for a journey that was supposed to take only a few months in-universe. And all it did was confirm The Unreveal that yes, the criminal Noppera-bo is Asirpa's father. But even this doesn't get the main characters any closer to the treasure; Noppera-bo is shot and killed, with Sugimoto seemingly dead as well, and Kiroranke has kidnapped Asirpa. There are still more than five tattooed criminals to be found, and the main characters will have to go all the way into Russian territory to find them...
• Awesome Music:
  • The show's first ear worm OP "Winding Road" by Man With a Mission.
  • The Season Two OP "Dawn" by Sayuri and My FIRST STORY was another great banger for the series.
  • The Season Four OP "NEVER SAY GOODBYE" by ALI.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Anehata Shiton and the "love" he feels for animals.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: One YouTuber diagnosed Ogata as a very accurate depiction of a psychopath.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Shiton Anehata dies quickly with no characterization beyond being a knowledgeable scholar who rapes the local wildlife in Hokkaido before killing everything he's raped out of guilt. Nonetheless, he becomes a popular character as the craziest of the Abashiri convicts because his actions are so ridiculous that they're impressive.
• Estrogen Brigade: Tsurumi, Tsukishima and Ogata have a LOT of devoted female fans.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Despite canonically Tsukishima being hung up on a girl he met as a kid and believed to be dead while Koito has an Ambiguously Gay crush for Tsurumi, Tsukishima/Koito is one of the most popular pairings in the fandom due to their Straight Man and Wise Guy antics.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: Yasaku Edogai creates and wears really fancy (but really weird) clothes made of human skins, and one can still see the shapes of faces or limbs on them.
• Foe Yay Shipping: The Sugimoto/Ogata ship is likely the most popular ship in the fandom, despite Sugimoto's open hatred for Ogata, and that they tried to kill each other more than once.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Delicious in Dungeon. A tumblr user even joked that the venn diagram of Dungeon fans and Kamuy fans was "practically a circle".
  • Also with JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, since fans feel both series feature a mix of high-octane action, hijinks, and bizarre antics by eccentric characters, combined with a good balance between suspenseful drama and hilarious comedy. Some even consider Golden Kamuy a Spiritual Sequel to Steel Ball Run, with both being Western-inspired series aimed at the same demographic where a cast of morally grey characters battle each other in a cross-country treasure hunt.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Or Harsher in Hindsight, depending on your sense of humor: Inkarmat claims to be partial to men with scars on their faces. At this point, it has yet to be revealed that in the past she was infatuated with Asirpa's father, Wilk, who the reader already knows has a horribly scarred face in the present (to the point people describe him as not having a face at all). Granted, he had a smaller scar coupled with a nice face when she first met him, but it's still ironic.
• Ho Yay: Plenty, but Ushiyama and Kiroranke complimenting each other on the size of their punishment rods is a particular highlight.
• LGBT Fanbase: A lot of gay men like this manga due to brawny men of the main cast serving as its primary source of fanservice.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Saichi "The Immortal" Sugimoto is a measured former soldier of the Russo-Japanese War. Stranded in Hokkaido with no honors for assaulting an officer, Sugimoto proves a quick-thinking, ruthless and clever diplomat who merges hot-blooded violence and sheer determination with cunning strategy as he pursues the hidden Ainu gold and "Noppera-Bou." Tracking the gold ferociously, Sugimoto is able to use small details to deduce pathways and make allies on the spot, even beginning an audacious plan to infiltrate the Abashiri Prison. Using unorthodox strategies like hiding himself in carts, setting up enemies for ambushes, and using tactics to let him defeat his enemies in public such as stabbing himself to set up a circus act, Sugimoto ultimately proves smart enough to track down the gold and to evade his pursuers, ending the story by retiring alongside his child companion Asirpa to live a happy life.
  • Wilk is an Ainu man responsible for the assassination of a Russian czar. Using utterly vicious tactics such as killing one of his own comrades to help the others escape, Wilk hides away and decides to raise his daughter Asirpa as a Child Soldier that will someday carry on his cause. After being caught in a tight situation while escorting a convoy of gold, Wilk wins a narrow fight and carves off his own face, faking his death and using his time in the Abashiri Prison to tattoo a map to the gold on the convicts' backs, his work eventually letting others find it in the hopes that they can carry on his revolution.
  • Toshizou Hijikata is the former Vice-Commander of the Shinsengumi and a strategic veteran. Aiming to create his Republic of Ezo, a separate state for Japan's undesirables to live in peace away from their oppressors. To this end, Hijikata spends years pretending to be a model prisoner in the Abashiri Prison before killing his guards, escaping, reforming a group of strong fighters, and beginning a hunt for the gold. Willing to work with anyone, Hijikata proves to be both a tactical genius and a keen judge of character when he arranges a break-in to Abashiri Prison while also deducing Kiroranke's dubious loyalties. Determined to the end, Hijikata ultimately aids Sugimoto in finding the gold before giving his life to defend Sugimoto, even passing the younger man his own blade for the final battle.
  • Kiroranke is Wilk's former comrade and a master analyst. Joining Sugimoto's group under the guise of aiding him, Kiroranke in reality works to find the Ainu gold in the hopes of starting a war to liberate the Ainu people from the oppression of the Japanese government. Having used improvised explosives to turn the tide of a battle in the war, Kiroranke is a master of traps and ambushes who uses his analytical knowledge to separate the party during the Abashiri break-in so that he can successfully aid his ally in killing Wilk and silencing him, stating it's what the Wilk he knew would've wanted, before abducting Asirpa, laying out an ambush for Sugimoto's party when they pursue him, and dying quietly after praising Asirpa and telling her to live a happy life and leave him to die.
  • Boutarou the Pirate, born Fusatarou Oosawa, is a wickedly smart Serial Killer and robber who killed many people for their goods after his family died of disease, swearing never to be ostracized again. Vowing to create a paradise where he will rule as king, have children, and carry on a legacy, Boutarou joins Sugimoto's group after seeing his friend Shiraishi and uses his knowledge and skills to guide Sugimoto's party in their journey to find the Ainu gold so he can purchase land to build his nation. Using his awareness of improbable details like logging techniques, Boutarou manages to be a valued member of the group before rushing in to rescue Sugimoto and Asirpa, then bringing a car to pursue Asirpa's kidnappers with, taking his injuries in stride and dying while earnestly asking Shiraishi to remember him and tell his own children of him.
• Memetic Molester: Shiton Anehata rapes animals and trees before killing everything he's raped.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Golden Kamuy is a cooking manga" ^ExplanationThere's lots of Food Porn and the characters often cook, making it a pretty decent cooking manga when it's not a gory Action-Adventure. That the group scanlating it is also scanlating actual cooking mangas doesn't exactly help, too. Comes from a snowclone of "Food Wars! is a cooking manga".
  • Golden Kamuy is full of crazy people (変態 hentai). ^ExplanationThe series features an Ax-Crazy lieutenant (Tsurumi), a soldier talking to his cut-off left ear (Nikaido Kohei), an Ax-Crazy Serial Killer who gets a boner every time he sees a gruesome death (Henmi Kazuo), a judoka with an insatiable lust (Ushiyama Tatsuma), a cannibalist obsessed with beauty (Kano Ienaga), a man wearing clothes made of human skins (Yasaku Edogai), a lieutenant obsessed with the aforementioned Tsurumi (Koito), and a scholar who rapes the wildlife in Hokkaido (Shiton Anehata).
  • Is this Bara? ^ExplanationDespite being a seinen series, a lot of the fanservice comes from the very macho and muscular male cast, even for more comedic scenes, and the tone of each scene contrasts the tone of the entire rest of the manga. Even those who aren't into the beefcake have been seeing a trend in the story to focus on it. The Hot Springs Episode comes with a two-page spread of all the male characters, nude and positioned suggestively, which became popular to parody in Japanese fanart.
  • Anime viewers will often complain about the bad CG work used for bears, even though the production team tried to justify it.
  • "The lone mecha fan, pictured here fighting against the tide of CG mechs, colorized 2018"
  • The fact that Shiton Anehata's name is a pun of Ernest Thomson Seton, a founding member of the Boy Scouts of America.^ExplanationIn popular culture, the Scouts are too often portrayed as full of sexual predators.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The entire Bear Man Arc. The entire story where Sugimoto's group seems blissfully unaware of a dangerous bear killing people all around them while Matsuda Heita, their new ally gold panner, shows deeply disturbing expressions all through the arc and his family members get taken out one by one plays out more like a horror movie and a psychological thriller than the rest of the manga, losing action in favor of suspense building to The Reveal that all of the characters the party has encountered so far are his split personalities, where it shows every character with Heita's blank stare and creepy grin. Including a bear.
  • At the climax of his lengthy speech to Asirpa and Sofia, Tsurumi, with no warning, puts on Wilk's cut-off face like a mask and mockingly acts like Wilk to Asirpa.
• Out of the Ghetto: Golden Kamuy is a seinen manga series featuring the native Ainu of Hokkaido. One of the main leads is Asirpa, a Little Miss Badass Native whose importance equals that of her male counterpart, Saichi "Immortal" Sugimoto. The series has gained mainstream popularity in Japan due to various reasons (action, cast full of crazy people, Food Porn, Unconventional Learning Experience, and so on), breaking out of both the Girl-Show Ghetto and the Minority Show Ghetto.
• Periphery Demographic: Golden Kamuy has managed to have a fair number of female fans, despite being an often-violent action series aimed at adult men.
• Shocking Moments:
  • Sugimoto punching a bear in the face in the very first chapter.
  • Tsurumi calmly stabbing Sugimoto through the cheeks with a skewer.
  • Both Sugimoto and Noppera-bo getting shot in the head in the span of a few seconds.
• Signature Scene:
  • A two-page spread of Anehata Shiton having sex with a bear is frequently used as shorthand for how crazy Golden Kamuy can get.
  • The Hot Springs Episode scene showing the male cast in the springs and the Sea Otter Stew scene are also pretty well recognized for showing how the male cast is openly used for fanservice.
• Unconventional Learning Experience: Satoru Noda did a lot of historical research while writing the story, and both the manga and anime are full of educational asides detailing various aspects of life in early 20th-century northern Japan, particularly those pertaining to the Ainu.
• Values Dissonance: The depiction of bears as man-eaters who seem to take pleasure in hunting and killing humans may raise a few eyebrows among readers from other countries. Bears Are Bad News has been a Discredited Trope in the West for a few decades thanks to the efforts of wildlife conservation organizations and advocates; while they are definitely animals that are considered to be very fearsome and dangerous, the common perception of bears in the West is that of animals who will be happy to leave you alone if you do the same to them. Many sports teams, schools, and even governments in America consider their local species of bear to be their mascot, and they're frequently seen promoting national parks. In contrast, the main Japanese exposure to bears comes from the Sankebetsu incident of 1915, where a bear attacked and killed seven people before finally being shot. This incident along with a couple of others led to the Japanese perception of bears as man-eaters and considering that in Hokkaido today the native brown bear population numbers less than 2,000 in remote areas, it's hard to see this stereotype changing anytime soon. After all, the public's opinion of an animal species can't really be changed if there are hardly any of those animals around anymore, and it doesn't help that the males of the last subspecies of bear native to the Japanese islands, the Shiretoko brown bear are so aggressive that females with cubs deliberately seek out hunters and fishermen for protection.

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