HUH?
The temple dates are over. Someone is looking overwhelmed…
Whaaaaaaaaaattttthapppppppppeeeeennnnnnnneeeeeeeeeddddddd?
Chapter 121 raws have appeared and the course of true love remains rocky.
Please, Mada, don’t screw up!
(and wtf is roku/ro-go-go-san/sa/za-go ?)
Much Later: Turns out the cryptic 65535 on p13 isn’t Japanese number slang; 5-5 = go! go! No ro-go-go-san-go. It is a Japanese forum-slang reference to counter memory limits in old-school games. For instance, the maximum amount of cats that one could ever lure into visiting in your Neko Atsume game, or something. Somewhat like “power level over 9000!” but more in context of “At Maximum”or “Overload!”,which could apply to confusion level, embarrassment, or any number of things.
Meanwhile, a fresh review of chapter 121 is up at Ogiue Maniax: https://ogiuemaniax.com/2016/02/26/nayami-heat-genshiken-ii-chapter-121/
What’s all this talk about Saki? Why did her name come up? Keiko? Sounds thin to me.
HEARTS OF FURIOUS FANCIES 
I just now saw your comment on my blog. Yeah, I have a great deal to say but I am super-busy with grading papers and exams right now. Also, I’m a bit overwhelmed myself–both from your post on last month’s issue and the issue itself. Rest assured, Muda-kun, I still read both your blog and Genshiken, though the demands of reading and grading those nasssssty little monsters called “assignments” has kept me from writing on my own blog more often than once every six months or worse.
Thank you for dropping by! Work, can’t live with it, can’t eat without it, but sounds like it is in the holy cause of education, which is a good thing! Congrats! Yeah, I’ve been going overboard. Too many words, Joyously squandering my free time. Also trying to learn basic Twitter etiquette and stumbling around Tumblr too much too; the range of fan reaction and sources for these grows –
one of the things I find insanely interesting about Genshiken.
The Twitter-verse has already provided a concise summary of the freshly swiped chapter 121.
SPOILER WARNING Lets see if I can do the HIGHLIGHT WHITE TEXT BELOW TO READ thing.
Mada clammed up on what happened and who he chose. An apres party at Yajimacci’s descends into drunken excesses of pestering, free lurv advice and embarrassing personal revelations. Kuchiki forces things by demanding that the issue be decided by lot – kubiji again. Mada snaps to and announces that he will/can/has (??????) decided for himself. Wait until March 25 for the bombshell.
My side-bet with myself is that Mada and Hato already decided, or at least decided to follow the Ogiue example and go through Hato’s lewd drawings (and maybe Mada’s hideous trap games) and they have gone into stealth mode. Kio is playing the second time around thing pretty hard. Whether anything actually comes of all this? Keiko brought up the obvious and I’m betting Casablanca.
Meanwhile some of the rabid tumblratti are holding old-school fanboy tear drinking parties and insisting that this is the dawn of a new slashy Genshiken or hard gay Genshiken, or at least Love Conquers All Genshiken. It is poignant to watch their “investment”. Being slightly part of it, I feel a bit of what they feel and love every bit of it. And I’m impressed that Kio Shimoku handled his end respectfully.
So, thanks for reading my blog, dropping by, and I will hope that when the dust clears you will wade in with your take on the great Genshiken romantic slow-motion trainwreck!
RE: 65535 ( roku/ro-go-go-san/sa/za-go ?)(see ch 121 p13) Nope. Not number slang; using 1st syllable of numbers to make a phrase. Old-school game speak for maximum level possible in a game. If power level, equiv to “over 9000”. If confusion or embarrassment level use this. Took a bit to dig this one up.
Well, I have a feeling Mada will either decide on Hato or he will decide on no one. As much as I like Sue and think she deserves it the most, I don’t think she’ll win. Besides, even if she did, I don’t think they’d really know what to do with themselves. I’m curious as to how Sue is going to take the heartbreak, as well as Yajima. As for the latter, man, I was right there alongside her when she just ripped into Hato about femininity. Being a guy with a less-than-ideal physique, I can really relate to her feelings.
The transition from male-dominated space to female-dominated space has also had a profound impact on the idea of “safety” and security for the individual’s psyche. Mada doesn’t really have a safe-space anymore–perhaps it stopped being a safe space once Saki showed up and over the years his safe space has basically evaporated. Now he’s in over his head.
Personally, I don’t like Hato at all. I do have sympathy for his confusion and the difficulties he is facing but at the same time I have a degree of disapproval toward his outright manipulation of Madarame. In issue #120 when he tried to back out I tasted blood. Hato is ultimately self-centered and cowardly–by themselves not necessarily traits that make someone dislikeable but the thing is, he’s been toying with this HatoxMadaxHato fantasy and Madarame is incredibly vulnerable. If they actually do try to make it work out, it could end in tears a la THE CRYING GAME. Not a pleasant thought and one I think is most probable. I don’t see Mada as gay, nor even bi, but VULNERABLE. Hato is probably bisexual and leans more towards homosexual but he is confused and trying to figure himself out. Unfortunately, there are better ways to do it than to target the weakest person in the group for your experiments in self-discovery. That’s really why I don’t like Hato–he’s taking advantage of Madarame and now that both of them are realizing that the reality of an intimate male-male relationship isn’t what it is in trap eroge or fujoshi doujins his backing up is only going to complicate Madarame’s own perceptions and feelings even more. The moment that Hato started behaving like the Yamato Nadeshiko, I knew that it was precisely the thing that would cause post-Saki-shootdown Mada to get emotionally bewildered.
Frankly, I hope Madarame chooses nobody. I think he needs to grow a spine and realize that he’s allowed himself to be victimized by the situation. None of the girls nor Hato really see Madarame as MADARAME. Much as I chafe at using the term (I think it is loaded, overused, and politically saturated), I have to admit that they’re objectifying him and not treating him as a person. They’re in love with an IDEA not with an actual human being. Madarame deserves better, in my opinion.
Yet Shimoku has a strong grasp on how humans learn and grow–often it requires a lot of pain and suffering for someone to actually mature and gain wisdom. Perhaps Madarame needs this experience and all the good and bad that it entails in order to really start behaving like an adult.
And this is EXACTLY why I found myself going multi-position while mulling over chs 119 and 120.
Even without malice, even with the best of intentions Hato easily reads as “dancing to his own narcissistic scripts” and at very least dangerously irresponsible. Even wily, manipulative and predatory. Then I hear the heartfelt arguments from the pro-Hato camps that advance the arguments that Hato has fallen hard and is overwhelmed at the hopelessness of (their) chances when up against real women. That argument hits home too, and no one ever said that working through a horribly powerful crush brings out the smartest and most considered behavior in anyone. I would completely buy that if the Hatos would just lose it and start yelling about how fucked up the situation they finessed themselves into has become. Isn’t Kio Shimoku replaying Ogiue&Sass? Ogiue had a meltdown, where is the Hato meltdown?
I wish Mada would act a bit more like a Japanese Kerouac horn-dog to balance the karma a bit. Perhaps he will be revealed as evil-Mada who secretly plans to pimp Hato out to a soapland? Mwahhhh Haaa Haaaa! “Lend me some money Hato-chin…”
That said, I hearken back to your point and the earlier long analysis in your blog; The girls are really shredding every last bit of Madarame’s personal space and dignity. The Twitter summary of ch121 by A. Wilgus (posted to my tumblr) notes that what she can make out of ch 121 is damn creepy, but unfortunately totally in character with drunk University club members who decide to stick their snouts into other folk’s love lives. Yeah, thinking back, yup… So Kio Shimoku is doing this for a reason.
And yeah, I don’t see Madarame as gay, or as “seeing” Hato as female. As a result, I really find it hard to figure out how Kio Shimoku can finesse anything but drunk virgin guys failing embarrassingly at pawing at each other and then at best, “lets not try that again for a while, Video game time?” And I am serious about the pop-Sedgwick reversal trick that I smell Kio working towards. Otherwise he would have written them more as friends before. The weakness of Sedgwick, and the slash/rotten communities is that they hold male friendship as something so rarefied and special as to be unattainable and incomprehensible to females/ female readers. Therefore it always must be “transformed” into something more manageable and useful (just as most males who befriend females always end up “betraying” the friendship – cue violin section and the howls of Friendzoned! from the guy’s bleachers)
A bit later: FOOD! I almost forgot the food. One pro-Hato correspondent made the point so clearly that I am now partial to the argument. Of all the harem, who ended up getting food for Madarame and later cooking for him when he was laid up with a busted wrist? And it goes back further. Hato was genuinely rattled when Mada casually did up a stir-fry and fed him after Hato conked out at Mada’s flat. If I remember right, Hato-kun blurted out something about Mada trying to “tame him with food”. So the entire mess comes down to the sad absence of manly outdoor BBQ culture in urban Japan. You can’t fire up the grill and carbonize meat with a bro over a few beer because the neighbors will freak out and thou must never freak out the neighbors in Japan. Finally! The whole decline of manly man-ness in Japan, herbivore males, BL and Yaoi etc., explained. In any case, I was even prompted to hunt up some “make miso soup” detournments about how Hato was itching to prove to Mada that he could cook too. Yes, it still could come off as stalking the vulnerable, but I think Kio Shimoku is just poking at the fujo need for a rigid power imbalance in m:m relationships VS real life which is not hung up on that kind of crap.
Whotthehell: Time for the HELMUT quote again:
“…reminds me of a German guy I knew in Tokyo to whom I lent some Eroica slash stories. Helmut returned them to me in agitation. ‘Don’t these writers realize men can be friends and not want to have sex?!’ Naturally, I said, but the point of the slash exercise is that the guys do have sex. He didn’t see it.” -Mary Jean Johnson/ Aestheticism (noted early western fujoshi site, now at Archive.org)
Sun going down on the Afghan plains… Roll to rifle…
You may be right in suggesting that Mada flip the whole crew of them the bird and escape into the real world.
From a wider POV, It is funny how most male Japanese fans are inured to the stuff and will just roll their eyes at rotten subtext, which is pretty well stuck into all media properties, just in case. Whatever.. It is always there for the fujoBux. Meanwhile, in the last few years, the creative class in the West, first the UK/BBC then Hollywood has discovered the fan-girl and is giving her LOTS of bait. Fangirl bait and subtext to 11, load forward tubes, LOS! And then some activist commentators (its all about us, look this way, notice meeeeee sempai!) are saying that they are doing it to “queer’ or engage a whatever audience. Oh yeah, freaking Absolute vodka ad time, my hairy ham hocks. Pay no attention to the slash girls, they don’t exist, your secret is safe, nudge nudge wink wink, buy our product. We be marketing to gay guys, oh yes, they be so unsophisticated as to buy this crap. (we won’t turn down their bux either, if by chance… Capital knows no Sexuality. The machine needs feeding. But fan-girls are soooooooo easy.)
Exhibit A: The Abominable Abominable Bride. Man they fucked that one up. Whatever Abbey with squabbling ineffectual Watson x Holmes, It was also released as a movie theater movie in Japan for the fan-girls.
Clumsy! Muda! Muda! Muda!
Kio Shimoku must be documenting some of the fallout from what is a normal “isolationist” tendency within the fandoms when “the female gaze” is recognized and monetized. University clubs in the West will soon feel the gale force of these winds. However, at the end, The Genshiken is a lacking example because there would be no Madarame, no Hato and just a the usual Japanese female homosocial, with the Japanese male homosocial(s) somewhere else, never interacting, growing even more distant from any chance of interaction or understanding. And later, everyone finds out how easy it is to stay single in Japan. Dining alone, it is really quite common. Nice meal? Excellent, get back to work.
But here I’ve gone on again.
Thanks for taking the time, Hope to read more on your blog when you get the chance!
Later: Dr. O. Maniax has a fresh and insightful summary up at: https://ogiuemaniax.wordpress.com/2016/02/26/nayami-heat-genshiken-ii-chapter-121/
I am now very interested in why Saki’s name came up.