Genshiken 58

I love them all already.

Yes! Raws!

For the record, no, I'm not going to scanlate this yet. Mangastream's cleaners could probably kick my arse five ways to Friday, and their translations aren't unreadable. I guess. I suck at translating things that other people are already doing, anyway. Zero motivation. So yeah, this is just gonna be ranting and raving and rambling from me. Spoilers below the cut.




The focus is on Yoshitake, Yajima and Hato (well, mostly Yajima with a side of Yoshitake and a smidgen of Hato) this chapter, and the way they interact is a bit different from the original cast but also very Genshiken. God damn I love this manga.

I'd worried a bit that Yajima might end up like a female version of Kugappi (two-dimensional throwaway character who ends up written out of the story) but I like how she's shaping up. She feels kinda like a "normal" otaku stuck in the sometimes ridiculous Genshiken, where the president once made a habit of leaping out of windows, there's an honest to God crossdresser in the club, and every single female, past and present, ever in the group and two guys, one of whom is the aforementioned crossdresser, ranges from cute to impossibly pretty. That's gotta be a blow to your self-esteem, especially when we can see that Yajima obviously doesn't think much of herself in terms of appearance--even outside the obvious bits like where she outright compares herself to Hato, you can see how she wears the same clothes all the time (in comparison to everyone else, which is kinda rare in manga come to think of it), those clothes are baggy, meant to hide her figure rather than accentuate it, and even her hair's pretty unkempt and utilitarian compared to all the other girls with the possible exception of Ogiue. I wonder how she'll evolve. I really hope she gets a lot of development--it's been too long since there's been a pudgy character who gets developed beyond the bare minimum.

Obviously Hato has loads and loads of issues. Hell, Issues with a capital I. No points for guessing that he's gonna get tons of character development as he sorts himself out with the loving (?) support of Ohno and Ogiue and everyone else. And Kucchi. Oh god.

Yoshitake's the most immediately noticeable, but at the same time she's kinda the flattest. She's a perky girl, a shameless fujoshi, and...? Honestly, Yoshitake would be fun to have as a friend but her obvious lack of actual social experience--she acts like an otaku; honestly, there's no real way to explain it if you don't have a shameless otaku friend except to say that if she wasn't cute and female she'd be Kucchi--might get to be a headache. Then again, Ohno had a bit of that and Sue is still like that (granted, she gets a pass to say and do weird things because she's a foreigner) so we'll see how things play out. I will admit, however, that her calling Yajima "Yajimacchi" is utterly adorable.

AND GODDAMMIT KIO YOU HAD BETTER LINK THIS INTO SPOTTED FLOWER SOMEHOW OR ELSE.

一心不乱の大荻上を！