Spotted Flower Chapter 16.5 (Manga)
Spotted Flower manga chapter 16.5 review

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

NOTE: For the purposes of this and future reviews, until the characters are given names, I will call the “not Saki” woman “Oku-san” (a term for a wife) and I’ll refer to the “not Madarame” guy as “Danna–san” (a term for a husband).

!Yajima makes a call, informing her help that !Hato wants to make a copybon, thus they will be working all night. She assures her help that they’ll make it to the doujinshi event in time in the morning, but she needs her helper to set up everything.

After hanging up, the irritated !Yajima scolds !Hato for adding to their workload, though !Hato is so inspired after watching some recent anime episodes and sharing fan art online.

After working all night, they get done. However, when !Yajima goes to take a shower, !Hato mentions how they’ve been to busy for quality time. !Yajima angrily scolds !Hato, but !Hato says that it would be over in five minutes. !Yajima gives in and though they weren’t finished in five minutes, they did get to the event on time.

Thoughts/Review:

No !Saki nor !Madarame in these “.5” chapters, which have been chronicling !Hato’s and !Yajima’s life. In the first two chapters of theirs, it was clear that the two were close, but generally speaking, friends and partners in the doujinshi manga field.

With this chapter, we learn that they are in an actual relationship of some kind. While !Hato appears to have gotten breast implants, !Hato is still very much male. His five minute request of !Yajima went to show just how male he is.

Beyond the surface stuff, this chapter seems to continue to push the notion that these unnamed Genshiken characters in Spotted Flower are how Kio-sensei sees his Genshiken characters ending up in the future. Indeed, recent events in Genshiken are setting the Hato x Yajima ship on the next leg of its journey, so I don’t think it is a coincidence that Kio-sensei did what he did this chapter. (I’ll be reviewing chapter 115 soon.)

If it is true that Kio-sensei is making Spotted Flower the canon story of what becomes of the Genshiken characters, then I’m hoping to see Saki return there in the future to hook up with Madarame. 😉

In the end, this was an amusing little chapter continuing a peek into the lives of !Yajima and !Hato.