How the alternate universe Genshiken spinoff Spotted Flower caused fans to disown a beloved millennial otaku icon

(Just as a heads-up: I’ve kept things relatively non-graphic, but very late in this piece I describe a sexual assault in the manga in question. I'll also be talking about a comic that only exists in English in fan scans, and which for reasons we will get into is extremely unlikely to be officially released.)

It’s very rare for a popular manga to get dropped in unofficial translation. On the official side a cult series might not finish its translated run if fans have to actually pay money to read it, or it’s too expensive to buy 20 books at $15 apiece (Buy Fist of the North Star today), or if it’s produced in such small numbers that they can’t get it even if they want to. But this story isn’t about the market.

Thanks to the sheer amount of fan translators out there, and the amount of effort that they give, most manga with even a small following will be available in English somehow: albeit illegally and without paying the creators, albeit not necessarily to a professional standard.

Nor must it be about liking the series: the work is there, the group gets it done. If things go bad in the comic, maybe the translator will leave a complaint in the credits page and slowly lose interest.

It takes a lot for the content of a popular series to be so offensive to its readers, and indeed the people translating it, that said translators just stop at one critical moment… and nobody else picks up the work in their wake, even as it continues to run in Japan.

Well, that’s exactly happened to Genshiken, via its alternate universe sequel Spotted Flower. One shocking chapter made many fans retroactively swear off Genshiken forever, even though the “parallel universe” wall. The reaction was so bad that it caused the series to sit untranslated for a three-year gap. Nobody wanted to see any more of what Kio Shimoku had in mind for his beloved characters. If anything, they were afraid of what he might do next.

And having caught up with Spotted Flower in English recently, I gotta tell those people… they were right. It gets worse.

I don’t think there are any rundowns of what exactly happened in Spotted Flower that made Genshiken fans disown it— just a lot of horrified “Oh my god” social media reactions and blog posts — and I don’t think very many English speakers have heard about the objectively more terrible thing that happens later in the story. So kind of like my Angel Cop piece, I thought I would write it up as a matter of public record.