Usagi's Playplace

Tumblr decided to eat my post so I’m remaking it over here… let’s see if this works…

I got an anon ask on tumblr:

I’ve been in the fandom and translating it since 2010… so I’ve just read the manga many many times and thought about it a lot since then lol. Honestly, I could probably write whole essays about this manga if I wanted to at this point… The more people ask me about it the closer I get to it?? These are practically essays already.

Sadly I’m not Takanaga… because if I was we would not be crying so hard in my discord while searching for spoilers when every chapter comes out.

So, on to your main question! Yes! I think there’s lots of proof he wants to have sex, some more obvious than others. The ones mentioned were some of the more obvious ones.

Really it all starts with volume 3 where they have a conversation at the love hotel that is basically setting up the rules for the rest of the volumes in how Souichi agrees. It’s not that he never wants to do it, it’s that he wants to complain every time anyway lol.

(I was trying to pick out a few lines from this but nah it’s the whole thing…. I haven’t edited this chapter yet I’m sorry)

So we’ve established everything from volume 3 on is consensual as long as Morinaga kind of asks and Souichi doesn’t say anything or hit him in return lol… So when Morinaga asks to kiss him and he doesn’t say anything against it, he’s consenting.

Volume 4 is kind of a special case so we’ll mostly skip over it for now… But Souichi says we can have sex and Morinaga’s like no I want to respect you and so Souichi kisses him. He initiated. Souichi is very aware of it after and avoids talking to Morinaga to avoid talking about it.

In Volume 5 when Morinaga shows up in Canada he never actually says no. He’s into the kissing and everything and the reason he stops isn’t because he doesn’t want to but because he’s so turned on by it that he’s surprised and runs away. In his mind he’s thinking, he had just been trying to masturbate by himself a few days earlier and he couldn’t do it without thinking about Morinaga but then when Morinaga is actually there it’s too easy. He’s still trying to figure out his feelings so he’s confused but he’s not saying no either.

So in Volume 6 he’s still dealing with that. He thinks he’s not gay so he shouldn’t be turned on by Morinaga, but finally Morinaga tells him it’s okay because he’s not gay if he only likes him and Souichi can deal with that (for now) and so he stops complaining. So essentially it’s not the sex he’s disagreeing with, but what it says about him. So this time Morinaga makes him choose to go to his bedroom, makes him open the door himself, all to make Souichi show that he’s consciously agreeing to it. He also tried to make him say he wanted Morinaga to put it in but that was too far for Souichi… but he called his name and scratched his back so good enough lmao.

Then we get 7-8 Masaki shows up, Souichi’s jealous, Morinaga’s hiding things… Souichi gets upset and says he’s never wanted to do it with him and Morinaga’s like “wait, so I’ve been wrong about this the whole time??? I thought we had an understanding here.” And so he gets upset and decides to leave. If Morinaga thought about this more he probably could have figured out that wasn’t true on his own but he’s emotional so he’s dumb. So when Souichi finds out Morinaga’s planning on leaving he’s finally like “okay, fine, I don’t want you to leave and I don’t want things to change either. We’re doing this and I’m not running away from it anymore.” He asks why Morinaga’s not doing anything. He tries to act like he’s not asking about sex but he is. Morinaga tells him he wants to respect him (back to the issue of vol 4 lol) and Souichi tells him what he actually meant by saying he didn’t want to do it with him is something more like “I’m demisexual I don’t really care about sex so I don’t usually have a desire for it really but I don’t hate it and you weren’t forcing it on me either. I could have stopped you if I actually wanted to.” (He’s definitely less eloquent about it. He doesn’t know what a demisexual is lol. It’s not his field of study he doesn’t care.) Souichi kisses him on his own to make him understand that he’s fine with it and tells him he’s not running away. So Morinaga asks him what he wants to do and he kisses Morinaga on his own again and he unbuttons his shirt on his own. He’s actively agreeing to it and participating.

And so that was the original ending. Souichi agreed to be in a relationship with him without being in denial about it (between them… definitely not in public lol) But of course these characters won’t leave Takanaga alone so it still continues.

In volume 9 Morinaga’s still being all respectful about and and they reestablish the rules of volume 3. It’s consensual as long as Morinaga kind of asks and Souichi doesn’t say anything or hit him in return!

(Cringes and pulls out the old scans badly edited from Chinese scanlations)

He gets angry about them doing it in the entryway but he isn’t angry about the sex itself.

(Welp, I cringed so hard I had to edit these pages new. I’m really sorry these volume 9 translations… They were 10 years ago and I couldn’t get good scans of the magazine so I was translating off bad pictures of the magazine and editing Chinese scans. Two of the chapters I didn’t even do translations of until years later because I couldn’t get pictures at all and then gave up on them until people in my discord bothered me to do it lol)

I think this scene is probably the most egregious error I made translating this series and because it was volume 9 and I gave up on it I never went back and fixed it after I noticed it >.<

I know I’ve mentioned how I messed up Souichi making a joke about gay sex in my discord before lol

So anyway, Souichi does this a lot. He stays quiet and doesn’t say anything to agree. Meanwhile Morinaga is over here making wild assumptions about how people feel and assuming that means he’s not in love with him. Morinaga. NO! He’s already in love with you!

Volume 10