Dec 13, 2023
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
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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. I can’t say that Spotted Flower has happened to me (yet), but I maintain that it’s far too maligned for what it’s doing.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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