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The other times we see them kiss, Kusakabe either asks permission or kisses him in a really inconspicuous area where no one will see him, because that’s what Sajou disliked about the kisses. Sajou didn’t like being kissed right by his cram school because there were people that could’ve been around. This is a major part of his character.

The scene where Kusakabe asks to kiss Sajou, Sajou says no, and Kusakabe kisses him anyway while they’re in a rainy alleyway with no people around directly mirrors the scene in the end where Kusakabe asks to kiss Sajou, Sajou says no because there’s too many people, Kusakabe doesn’t kiss him, and Sajou kisses Kusakabe in a bright sunny area with people around. It’s supposed to show the characters’ growth and how they respect and love each other. They’ve learned to know each other better, a concern that they both bring up, which is shown by Kusakabe replying to Sajou saying there are too many people with “I thought you’d say that.” Just like how Sajou kissing Kusakabe in public shows that Sajou knows Kusakabe better, because he knows that would make him happy.

It doesn’t promote rape culture. Partially because neither of the characters have sex. Kusakabe doesn’t even talk about sex to Sajou, and he only thinks about sex in the first place because he feels like Sajou isn’t as passionate about their relationship as he is. But, it is definitely not about lacking consent either because, as I said, Kusakabe gets punished. Also, they are two teenaged boys. Which doesn’t mean they don’t understand consent, but Kusakabe’s character is very much lax towards it in the beginning, he develops as a character. He starts as a teenage boy being in his very first relationship with someone he actually cares about and grows into an adult.

We’re back!

This time, we’ve translated one of Tajima Ikuno’s old one-shots, which was originally published in the February 2019 issue of GFantasy.

Please enjoy!

(Also available to read on our MangaDex!)

There’s a protest going on against AI art over on artstation, so I feel like now is the time for me to make a statement on this issue! 

I wholeheartedly support the ongoing protest against AI art. Why? Because my artwork is included in the datasets used to train these image generators without my consent. I get zero compensation for the use of my art, even though these image generators cost money to use, and are a commercial product. 

Musicians are not being treated the same way. Stability has a music generator that only uses royalty free music in their dataset. Their words: “Because diffusion models are prone to memorization and overfitting, releasing a model trained on copyrighted data could potentially result in legal issues.” Why is the work of visual artists being treated differently?

Many have compared image generators to human artists seeking out inspiration. Those two are not the same. My art is literally being fed into these generators through the datasets, and spat back out of a program that has no inherent sense of what is respectful to artists. As long as my art is literally integrated into the system used to create the images, it is commercial use of my art without my consent.

Until there is an ethically sourced database that compensates artists for the use of their images, I am against AI art. I also think platforms should do everything they can to prevent scraping of their content for these databases.