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.
