Spotted Flower

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Was a pretty enjoyable "Alternate Universe" spin off story, but not as compelling as the author's other works. Started to fall in love halfway through until the author decided to take a COMPLETE left turn and jump the shark in the last couple chapters.

I am not being hyperbolic when I say it completely ruined everything up to that point and kind of bothers me now knowing it is hinted as being a future into the Genshiken storyline.

Even if it isn't canon it leaves a bad taste in your mouth for sure. :/

I'm hoping this is just some bad bizzaro timeline ... and that Kio develops it more, though I doubt it'll make up for how much of a slap in the face that twist turned out to be.

KINDA SPOILERS AHEAD

I was really, really enjoying this series as an alternative continuation to Genshiken. It has some really cool insight into the future of some of our favorite characters, and overall was very wholesome/heartwarming. It is very reminiscent of regular ol' Genshiken, lots of weeby references but more of a focus.
However.. in the latest few chapters, the writer made an absolutely strange plot choice that drags his wellbuilt characters in the mud. It completely ruins the heartwarming feels built up over the 20 chapters, and IMO stains Genshiken. I don't know how I will ever be able to read Genshiken again without flashbacks ... of this tragedy.. Not going to say I didn't wish I read it, but I wish I could forget it exists.

I don’t get why Spotted Flower makes everyone so upset, this shit is amazing.

Okay, maybe I do understand. It’s the messy one, a questionably-canon take on the Genshiken cast in their thirties working, having kids, and keeping in touch with one another. Maybe a little too in touch. This is a manga to remind Genshiken readers that the author’s first love was not otaku culture, but cheating dramas. And it’s so much fun for it.

Genshiken’s unspoken forte has always been in depicting the complicated emotions of those who have feelings towards their friends and will not ever share them, just letting it all stew forever ... instead. There’s some real bittersweet interiority there, and Spotted Flower is kind of an entire manga of that! Some of the romantic relationships are swapped around so that the losers from Genshiken actually ended up with who they wanted to. Are they happy now? Well, sometimes. Either way, a giant web of cheating and drama ensues. If Genshiken is het, and Genshiken Nidaime is about yaoi, then Spotted Flower is the yuri one. Few can truly appreciate all three, and in this case being able to do so is a sign of a balanced media diet and good taste.

A lot of people treat the actions of the Spotted Flower cast as completely out of character to their Genshiken incarnations, but I think it’s all pretty grounded, as long as you able were able to grasp everyone’s unvoiced desires and not just what they were saying to each other’s faces. Also, did you really think that the crossdresser everyone had sexuality problems with *wouldn’t* be a homewrecker. If this was a big enough betrayal that your scanlation group dropped the manga, then that’s on you, sorry.

I wouldn’t care about this kind of drama if it was all characters I’d never met before, which is why Spotted Flower's ties to Genshiken are so important. It’s a space where we can witness these characters finally acting on their desires, come what may. It’s liberating and hilarious and made my jaw drop more than once. Another direct Genshiken sequel wouldn’t have made sense – we’d be so many years removed from the original cast that keeping them around at all would eat into their own agency. This is the best-case continuation.

To me, Genshiken has always been about experiencing a college friend group kind of ferment and evolve over time, as people join and graduate and reach new stages of life at different paces. Eventually, more than a few people begin to have Realizations about sexual orientation and gender, there’s ingroup crushes, and things get messy. I’ve lived this! Which makes it so cool to see reflected in media. And while I can’t say that the exact sequence of events in Spotted Flower have happened to me, I maintain that it’s far too maligned for what it’s doing.

If you are into harsh turns of events, then this manga might be something for you.. otherwise most likely not.

The story follows a lovey dovey married couple who are expecting a baby. It mostly focuses on the issue that the husband can't get excited over her anymore, which entails many funny situations of how his wife tries to change this. Nothing too dirty or oversexualized though.
The couple is cute, characters have a nice chemistry together, it is a light read without requiring you to follow deep interactions or some complex storyline... if it wouldn't be for the (currently) final chapter, which simply throws everything ... over board.

Said plot twist left me with a bitter taste about the entire story, so that alone already was a big minus for me. What troubled me the most though, was that (at least from what is shown about the characters so far) that turn of events felt completely out of place for me. Sure, a good plot twist should be unexpected, but it should not go completely against a characters behaviour up to that point, unless there would be a good reason to it.

Spotted flower.

Or rather: waisted premise.

It started as a weird spin-off or an alternative take on archetypes from Genshiken, but all went south for no reason really.
Last time I was this disappointed about pointless turnarounds and shockers, was when I did watch the Disney's Star Wars trilogy.
But from the top.

Me, like probably most people here, looked at this series because of the author's previous works, the "Genshikens". Those two series were long serializations about students spending their free time at the uni manga and anime club. Something like Big Bang Theory, but funny and sans cringe.

So "Spotted flower" takes archetypes from that series, looks and traits, ... mix it up, and leaves the reader with pregnant wife and hers husband, who likes to rub out to some loli and shota porno games. Like any normal Japanese man would, right?
Wife is progressively getting more into her pregnancy, and because of that, and how actually many men feel, she wants sex and her husband is reluctant.
Funny shenanigans happen, comedy, slapstick, slice of life and some dirty adult jokes as well. All is fine.

This manga started before Genshiken Nidaime (second Genshiken manga "season") really took off, and surpassed that publication because it was made at slowest pace possibly.
And as the Nidaime started devolving into weird harem-gay tropes for no good reason, same did happen to this series.
It degenerated.

For me personally events in the series, which should be a one shot, or 2-5 chapters at most, are just random.
There's the power-duo of husband with weak character and his wife, who's strong and rather direct, which is then supplemented (to call it lightly) with 10 or so "side characters", who take the lead and derail the narration.
Series goes for a full plate of cheap soap opera plot twists.

I'm wondering if those events are some repressed urges? Or did Shimoku Kio and his editor just spent too much time indoors and forgot how world filled with humans works? Even for a comic series, and I've read some unbelievable junk, events in Spotted flower just don't add up. None is cohere after few chapters here.
Those are, again, just disconnected events, and plot holes are filled with more and more idiosyncratic people, popping every chapter.
Narration is chaotic and story just loses its core to wander aimlessly around some weird fantasies I presume?
It would be all good, if it was connected with buildup, premise or at least some logical hints. But nothing like that was present before hand.
Story just randomly drops the bomb, and the drama ensues - just like in Nidaime? No. Just like if you were reading a book about carrots, and in fourth chapter there would be only explanation how different diesel engines work, and no more mentions of said carrots.

Because I was following said previous works for very long time, and it was probably the only serialized comic that made me wait at night for the next chapter to be released, this off-brand "Genshiken" is tarnishing the good memories I had of the adventures of the otaku club members. Author unintentionally made a stinker, and I have so little words to stress this fact until I go into excessive swearing to express my anger.
It's that bad.


After reading what is available as of May 2024, there's just this one question: why?


If you are also someone who knows Shimoku Kio because of Genshiken - just stay away from this. If "Spotted flower" is your first read from this author, just know, it's probably his worst piece to date.

DISAPPOINTED!!/10

This one's bizarre.

According to the author, Spotted Flower is meant to be a Genshiken "What-If" where he's doing things with the characters he felt he couldn't do in the original manga, which essentially means fucking and more blatantly taboo shit. Long-time fans of Genshiken will find this extremely hard to ignore, especially considering the many visual and straight-up narrative references being made throughout the story, to the point where differentiating the two is essentially impossible. Unfortunately, I can't give you the first-time impression of someone who's never read Genshiken, but I seriously doubt that anybody who reads "Spotted Flower" and looks into it at any ... capacity won't find themselves going back to Genshiken either way (and chances are they'll enjoy it much better). Still, I feel as though my issues with this manga aren't as harsh as the general consensus and I'd like to make the point that it's still worth a read, even despite the way it's going.

Madarame, essentially, breaks up with Sue and ends up with Saki after she breaks it off with Kosaka, going as far as to expect a baby. The manga starts off kind of throwing you into this situation without all too much backstory, throwing out enough hints as to what this is supposed to be without being overly referential. For some, like it was for me, I'm sure scenes like Madarame breaking his hand or Ohno creaming at the thought of getting Saki into cosplay will come off as welcomingly nostalgic, but the author never specifically references anything in a way that a new reader would feel like they're missing something (at least from what I can tell). The "pregnant wife trying to get his spineless otaku husband to dick her" shtick doesn't get old as fast as I thought it would and honestly a lot of these chapters are relatively fun and kind of steamy considering that the sexual content has been turned up a few degrees. I'd say my only real issue with the first 15 chapters is that Madarame doesn't come off as nearly as charming as he did back in Genshiken, especially for complete newcomers who don't have the goodwill of the previous series to back his character up. I guess this has a lot to do with the overall absence of the rest of the Genshiken's male counterparts, at least until the later chapters.

Chapter 15 and onwards is when shit really starts getting goofy for me, which isn't necessarily a bad thing: the story's still fun, but the line between the "Spotted Flower" alt-universe canon and the "Genshiken" canon really starts to blur in ways I think may confuse some new readers and throw a lot of Genshiken fans under the bus.

A shit-ton of counterparts start getting some time in the spotlight later on, most notably Hato-kun, Sue, Yajima, Oguie... Sasahara?... or are they? Who the hell are these characters, anyways? Some, like the Hato and Sue counterparts, seem to be pretty blatant, but others seem to be either fusions of old Genshiken members or complete reinterpretations, to the point where it starts creeping back into Madarame and Saki themselves. To put it simply: around this point is where the characters stop being verbatim "Genshiken" characters and start taking on their own identities, although I can't say that any of them feel entirely new due to Shimoku's instance on continuously referencing Genshiken, which while forgivable and welcome in the earlier chapters, now feels like throwing a wrench into what are now being pushed as not being the "exact" characters we know and love.

Now, I sort of get it. Genshiken had a lot of fully-realized, iconic otaku characters and it'd be hard for Shimoku not to hit some of the same beats with these characters, but I feel like he's had a hard time even deciding what he even wants to do with this story. Like with Genshiken or its re-serialization, Spotted Flower was only meant to be like a volume long fanfic experiment or something (unsurprising coming from the guy who published a hentai doujin of his own series) (lmfao), but Shimoku probably had some one-off ideas he wanted to try and felt that it'd be better to go forward with them in a pre-existing series rather than start something new altogether. But what's happened as a result is that he's essentially trying to balance this new more explicitly adult-oriented narrative with the pseudo-realistic heartwarming world of Genshiken and the two aren't really playing well with each other, which makes the whole thing come off as an awkward mess that didn't have any business going on for more than a few chapters.

I seriously doubt Shimoku didn't see this coming, which is why he went for the "twist" that he did, a controversial yet undeniable shake-up that drives an even further wedge between the two worlds. For the sake of not upsetting the MAL guidelines or whatever, I won't talk about it in detail here, but I want it to be known that I actually kind of like the twist.

I'll admit it requires some suspension of disbelief, as the only reason I feel this way is because I've decided to regard these characters as their own. Odd, considering I've been using the counterpart names for this entire review, but my reasoning for this is that this is (mostly) just the Genshiken cast, but not in the pseudo-realistic world they inhabited in the previous series. What it feels like Shimoku's going for here is the future of a Genshiken cast that grew up in the real world, where the cartoony "near-misses" and sexually taboo undertones of the original series don't exist; everything that happened, happened, albeit with slightly tweaked characters and designs. Think of it this way: in the real world, Madarame's miraculous "popularity" at the end of Genshiken's re-serialization probably wouldn't have gone down the way it did, it's much too anime and the entire cast is fully aware of it. What we're seeing now is the natural progression of Genshiken if it were set in an even-more realistic world, but the characters have been altered enough so as to not be mistaken as an actual sequel. It's just what it is, a "What-If" scenario. So, while Madarame doing what he does at the end of Chapter 22 just wouldn't fit in Genshiken's pseudo-realistic world of irony, I can't say that he wouldn't be capable of it in a world where the dial is slightly turned up. It's shitty, yeah, but it's interesting, and throws a load of spice into what was otherwise turning out to be a fanservicey Genshiken nostalgia party.

It's also worth mentioning the title: Spotted Flower. If Genshiken is a flower and this universe is meant to be a spotted version of it, imperfect yet fundamentally the same idea, then I think it basically speaks for itself. It also helps that the art is stellar as always, with plenty of fun expressions and designs to boot, even if plenty of its better visuals are directly borrowed from Genshiken.

Personally, I'm excited for the chapters to come (and get translated) to see if Shimoku's narrative swerve ends up paying off in the long run. Not for everyone, but I think Spotted Flower is interesting enough on a metatextual level that it'd be hard for me to completely disregard, especially considering that Genshiken is currently my all-time favorite manga.

TLDR; Read this if you're a Genshiken fan and aren't overly sensitive about reinterpretations of your favorite characters dealing with some taboo, yet fun sex shit. Skip if you don't know what the fuck a Genshiken is. And go read Genshiken.

I can’t empathize with the main character. I think pregnant women are ultra hot and had a lot of fun with one when she was with my kids. That said, I have heard a lot of guys have this issue. They can’t get a woman can be a mother and a lady at the same time. It’s particularly odd here since our hero is into Porno games where you can impregnate the girls.

The hook is supposedly about this otaku who somehow got a girl pregnant. I tend to look at this more from the wife’s perspective as she is starved for attention. This is ... played up for yucks as she is horny and the husband won’t touch her. She tries to play on his love of hentai and various other otaku things to get his motor running. Haha. It’s funny because the guy is really neglectful of the mother of this child. Apparently.

The second volume takes a turn. The focus seems to be more about this backup duo of a mangaka and her editor who have a thing for each other and BL comics. Cool…and then their story runs into the the husband and wife in a real bad way. And the author is apparently a trans woman? Not a clear point until it was made explicit. The whole second volume seems like a good set up for a third but it hasn’t surfaced in a decade.


When I read it, I did not know this was supposed to have anything to do with Genshiken.