2025 marks the 15th year of romance, 500 years since its serialization. These boys, the manga comes from Yamanaka, an extraordinary all-around creator. From science fiction, boys such as 500 Years of Romance and Ikigami & Donor love Munga. I wasn’t a bit surprised to see his romance of 500 years discussed at a conference where he took part in human-robot interaction in the boys’ love/girls’ love cartoon a few years ago.
Recently, I revisited this single volume series and realized how, despite it being a story from 15 years ago, it was just as fresh, exciting and approachable as ever. I also reclaimed certain questions and topics that came back to what I had decided to discuss through this comic.
Humans, nature
His romance for 500 years
It was the early days of the pandemic and we were under strict lockdowns when we began to give more serious thoughts about how we communicate and how we communicate in general. How people naturally attribute human emotions and behavior, and how nature “takes revenge” or “reclaims space” animals, like deer, have begun to appear in the streets of the empty city today. It is interesting to me that it emphasizes why this human perspective applies to the way natural behavior is beyond the scope of this post.
What nature does is simply restore balance. The lack of the above thought process is that there are in fact constantly controlled and maintained boundaries between urban life and natural habitats. There are invisible but constant interventions: pest control, pruning, repairing, garbage collection, cleaning, noise, air pollution present on the streets. If you remove it from the living space, the animal will become natural after a while.
It is interesting to note that we are present, we are extensible by ourselves, in our relationship with our communities, and as an extension in relation to the world. We forget that we take up space, consume, pollute, and leave a mark rather than in the way we can possibly imagine. We also forget how we relate and communicate with each other, both. That we are omnipotent and not omniscient. Fiction often deals with the fear that humans are not at the top of the food chain.
For example, the meaning of our communication being human can be seen in the way we talk to pets we share our homes with. The only way we know how to reason is to use words. It’s about pleasing, warnings, cute name assignments, sweet talk. Or, when I see a dog panting, I think it’s a happy and smile just because the corners of its mouth are curved upwards.
And that asks for a question. Why are nonhuman beings and natural resources innately valuable? Why should humans protect them, they must consider them “humans”? This appears in the naming of animals belonging to endangered species. Only by viewing them as “one of us” and assigning them a character is what we care about.
Only humans
His 500-year romance, Yamanaka Hiko
But humans are the only way we have to do with communication. Aside from the discussion of complexity, we cannot tell you how dolphins and cockroaches do things. Unless they are taught by repetition, just like how we learn a foreign language, cats and dogs cannot understand the language and respond to us accordingly with movements and sounds.
I revisited these exact ideas when generative AI and ChatGpt became available for use by the general public, but of course, the research on artificial intelligence dates back to the 1950s.
If you don’t know the basics of how AI or computers work, if you press a button to get an image, text, or melody, you’ll have to assign “creativity” to your machine. This is because the human beings behind these works are invisible. Just as electronic music and digital illustration were not considered legitimate art, people appreciated the ability to train the creativity behind composition and performance of songs, and therefore looked at AI like they did computers at the time.
Given that we are still behind understanding the importance of intellectual property, it is not all that creators, journalists and academics bring online, and not “free real estate.” By presenting data that is invisibly trained as a “machine that does it,” AI makes it impossible to truly discuss the meaning of releasing such technology without a proper legal and ethical foundation. That’s actually nothing more than a huge meat grinder.
Robo Sapiens
Robo Sapiens: Tales of Tomorrow, Shimada’s Toranosuke
That said, I think this perception is inevitable that we will not be able to sense human feelings about machines. Robo Sapiens: Tales of Tomorrow of Tomorles of Torres of Tomering by Shimada’s Tales, humanoid robots are tasked with patrol storage and radiation levels. At first, humans visit this robot weekly, monthly and annually. They gradually stop interacting with the robots, but stop by to collect data and leave while the robots smile behind their backs and stretch the waves.
A century later, they stop visiting for good, and there is a panel where the robot sits under the lights of its head. Even if you understand that unless your readers program the robot to stop patrol, it’s still a catastrophic panel. I can’t help but feel empathetic to the robot workers. It evokes a sense of abandonment.
Robo Sapiens: Tales of Tomorrow, Shimada’s Toranosuke
His romance for 500 years
The understanding of AI as a “machine to create” and the humanity of our projections is interesting to me and why I felt it would pull to read his 500-year romance again. This is the premise of a beginner’s story.
The Ota and Yamada family have bad blood between them, and the hostility continues to live with their current sons Hikaru Ota and Torao Yamada. The dynamics change is that Torao falls on Hikaru, and when they meet by chance at a gay bar at a university, it becomes an emotional interplay. Hikaru compares the relationship between Romeo and Juliet, as Hikaru almost dies while he tries to save someone.
The life they have built up all these years will unexpectedly collapse and crush Torao under its weight. He attempts to die by suicide, but does not die, but cryo-freezes until the medicine progresses until it progresses well to treat the young man. His family also decided to create an android on Hikaru’s portrait when Torao wakes up, including memories, habits and more. He wakes up 250 years later, and Android Hikaru is there to Torao activate him. However, Android, which appears to be the perfect copy of Hikaru, is 30% shortfall. It’s not mine, it’s the estimate of Torao.
Even with the goodwill of his family, Torao rejects Hikaru B. Because despite the sound of him being very similar to Hikaru, he is making Hikaru, Hikaru, the seemingly insignificant details. While he was frozen, he marched relentlessly at that time, but for him, he blinked and now he is here. On top of that, he is expected to continue falling in love with this unideal, scented, screaming, and creepy version of his perfect, beloved partner, who sacrificed much to be with.
Interestingly, Torao ends up falling in love with Hikaru B. Even when he presents the completed copy Hikaru A, B is discarded and lost in the desert after protecting Torao, and Torao searches Hikaru B for the next 250 years. Therefore, 500 years of love.
But Hikaru B is this version of Hikaru frozen in time and is stuck forever. Unless you program him differently or give him new data, he will serve Torao until the day he breaks down.
A complete defect
His 500-year romance, Yamanaka Hiko
Hikaru, a human, is perfect in his human imperfections. He is in the body, he is the person that Torao built his life together. Eventually, we can raise the question of whether there is a big difference between the two situations, but unlike Hikaru B, he was uploaded in just a few seconds to mimic the lover, rather than the top of the data on TORAO. In this sense, Hikaru B is an incomplete copy of Hikaru, imperfectly perfect. Coupled with his “Android-ness” permeating his speech, Hikaru B feels like all the insults Torao cherishes. In particular, he was gay and rejected him for falling for “Ota Guy”.
Torao awakens this annoying Android programmed for heavy duty with the body of a housekeeper, so they have to coexist together as Torao is detached from the ever-changing world and need the help of Hikaru B. The time they spend together is constantly parallel with the time he spent with human Hikaru, emphasizing all the ways in which Hikaru B is roughly the same as his blueprint, but not perfect.
His 500-year romance, Yamanaka Hiko
Educational video Torao is necessary to end to emphasize that Android and humans can safely coexist. Initially, Mao Zedong constantly rejected Hikaru B’s hand, but in the end he is only human. Why can’t he feel the warmth of his companions who try to make it better to peel an apple for him? How can he not find sympathy and acceptance when he embraces his thorny personality, just as his Hikaru did in the past? After a while, despite his mechanical smell and incompetence, Torao can’t help but be inevitable, as if he was approaching a human.
If he allows him to enter sleep mode by pretending to be sleep, even though he is probably not needed in the way humans need sleep, then you will see it. He fears Hikaru B when his arm is amputated while trying to protect Torao. He’s used to being awakened to the energetic “Good morning, Tora!” “Not at all,” he is used to a new life with Hikaru B. Not as a copy, but as something, as someone else.
To love is human
His 500-year romance, Yamanaka Hiko
And this love story is only possible through the humanity of Tlao. It is the ability to change, the resilience to adapt in the most unexpected ways and even in the aftermath of a horrifying event, allowing the trao to heal from the pain of his elbows and fall in love again. Because even if you carry traces of nostalgia and the luggage of past life, it is also a completely different love.
We can debate whether this can be called truly “love” and whether a machine, hologram, or fictional character can “love” in the way humans love humans. They are easy to form attachments. They don’t snore while they sleep, they don’t die leaving you, they don’t act in unexpected ways, and they don’t change. They never change, just as Hikaru B does not serve Torao. He continues to accumulate in Oze the unfortunate excuses for the house from scraps, waiting for Torao, no matter how many days and nights have passed, when or when he will appear. This is an algorithm iteration. But we can only see the grandeur and romantic gestures in his mechanical dedication.
Is our humanity a blessing or a curse? Who do you know? It certainly lies at the root of our insecurities and confusion with the exact same things that humans have created, scientific, artistic or whatever. At the same time, our ability to change, care, create and love our abilities brings this ocean of unpredictable possibilities. While there is no precise way to predict where we will collectively take ourselves in the distant future, our best bet is perhaps a blessing to believe in our imperfections. After all, we are humans.
His 500-year romance, Yamanaka Hiko
His romance of Yamanaka for 500 years can be read in English on Book Walker and rental.
Do you love boys more? Check out K-Comics Beat’s Boys Love for Life column!
Like this:
Like loading…
