Spotted Flower Chapter 18 (Manga)
Spotted Flower manga chapter 18 review

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

NOTE: For the purposes of this and future reviews, until the characters are given names, since these characters are obviously from Genshiken (or Genshiken Nidaime), I will call the “not-Saki” character !Saki, the “not Madarame” character !Madarame, and so forth for all other unnamed Genshiken characters.

!Madarame comes come to discover a number of bags packed in the hallway. !Saki explains that this is so they can leave in a hurry, if she starts having the baby. After chatting a bit, !Madarame reminds his wife that he’s ready to drop work and come home when the event happens.

!Saki produces a package and jokingly asks if it is a porn game. He figures it is, which she finds unbelievable, but he says it was a preorder. She tells him to play the game since he won’t have time when the baby comes. She claims to be sleepy, so when he thinks she might be asleep, he goes to check out his game in his study.

!Madarame is startled when the door opens and his wife is there in cosplay of a character !Madarame likes, wearing shimapan, and acting truly embarrassed by it all, but emphasizing to help entice !Madarame. When he doesn’t have a reaction, she ups the ante with a special offer for him while he plays the game.

!Madarame stops his wife and apologizes to her, stating his actions have been unfair to her. With that, he takes the helmet off of his wife and sites her on his lap. However, as he starts to initiate relations with his wife, she believes he’s starting to have contractions. !Madarame rushes to get them out the door, but !Saki forcefully tells him that they aren’t going anywhere until she gets out of the cosplay gear.

Thoughts/Review:

Man, I have to say that Spotted Flower chapter 18 was the most powerful chapter to date in the entire history of the manga.

All along, I have wondered how !Madarame could neglect his wife sexually the way he has. In more recent times, I have met guys online (via a message board) who’s porn addictions are such that they endangered or even destroyed their relationships with wives or girlfriends. Reading their stories online, I was given a startling insight into the mindset of a porn addict who’s in a relationship. I’d never thought of this before, but it is clear that !Madarame is a porn addict.

(Of course this begs the question on how he was able to bag !Saki in the first place, but maybe we’ll see that in Genshiken Nidaime. 😉 )

Kio-sensei proves he knows how to hit the ero button and hit triggers for those trying to abandon a PMO lifestyle by having !Saki make her very submissive offer to !Madarame. ^_^;;; Normally, I might say that I could do without this, but in this case, it was an amazing setup because what resulted from this act of !Saki was so powerful.

For the first time, !Madarame had his eyes opened to realize how his wife has been desperate for his attention and for her to go to this extreme did not hit him on the ero front, but hit him in the heart. He knew that his wife was truly embarrassed by this, but the fact that she was willing to do this just to get some affection from him made him stop her and apologize to her. I teared up just a bit for this because I’ve been wanting !Madarame to wake up for a long time.

Had it not been for !Saki apparently going into labor, !Saki’s seduction plan would have both failed and succeeded. It would have failed because !Madarame wasn’t just going for his wife out of lust, which was basically the level she’d been reduced to attempting to reach her husband. However, she succeeded on a different level, because !Madarame was being with his wife whom he loves, not as the character she was cosplaying. I really appreciated that.

I really hope Spotted Flower continues after !Saki gives birth. I know the whole premise of Spotted Flower is a frustrated, pregnant wife trying to get her husband’s attention sexually (with a side of seeing how characters from Genshiken/Genshiken Nidaime are years after college is over).  !Saki may not have gotten to have sex, but she did succeed in a greater fashion, and I would love for Kio-sensei to explore !Saki’s and !Madarame’s relationship after the birth of their first child, especially how it affects !Madarame’s otaku activities.

In the end, Spotted Flower chapter 18 was the best chapter of the lot, and having 12 pages helped tell the story properly and powerfully. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next.