Publication Date: April 25, 2002

Genres: Comedy, Drama, Slice of Life

Type: Manga

Chapter Amount: 127

Rating: 4.5/10

/Summary

A guy named Sasahara joins a club full of otakus called Genshiken, that's it.

/Review

I enjoyed the first 30 or so chapters until the mangaka realized that he'd have to have some kinda plot to keep the story going or else it'll get stale. A lot of slice of life manga run into a similar problem. Some of them like watamote just keep trucking along ignoring the problem, some are just well made and know how to keep things fresh like Yatsuba, but the worst one is trying to shove romance into it. Which this manga does.

Now I enjoy romance of all flavor when it's written well, but this isn't. The only two characters that actually feel like a couple are Saki and Makoto, but Makoto's slowly is phased out of the manga. The main romance is between our mc, Sasahara and Ogiue. Holy shit they're soooo fucking boring.

Sasahara in general isn't a interesting character and is really flat compared to every other character in the story. This dude is barley involved with most of the shit that happens and just sits in the background. So why would I want to see a romance between this flat circle of a character and a similarly basic one? The answer is that I wouldn't.

The manga does a similar thing with Madarame, the best character. They introduced some flat ass chic who's name I don't remember towards the end because "well we need everyone to be dating!!" and everyone in the cast was taken. The manga goes from a fun story about a group of otakus doing bs to a shitty d-tier romance that put me to sleep.

It feels really long too, the mangaka introduces all of the romance things that where supposed spice it up but it's still falls into the slog problem. I swear they go to comiket like 6 times through the whole book doing the exact same thing, it's absolutely boring. How do you have a 120+ chapter manga and your characters are stagnant? The anime is probably the better way to get through this since it's shorter and doesn't adapt the whole story.