Difficulty Ranking: 2*
Subs / Transcript: unknown
Number of episodes: 27 (2 series + 3 OVA)
Everything you ever wanted to know (and probably more) about オタク culture.
This series is hilarious!!! It's about a university society called 「現代視覚文化研究会」 (society for the study of modern society and culture [i.e. anime, manga, and related games]), or げんしけん for short. It follows a group of students through their time at the club, and eventually out into finding work when they graduate university.
Most of the episodes introduce some aspect of オタク culture, or problems that arise in the character's lives from it. The main explanatory device is through the character Saki... she is not an オタク and begins hating them, and only hanging out with them because of her boyfriend. So they end up explaining a lot of stuff to her like anime porn, or cosplay, or making models.
Anyway, i laughed a lot while watching this series, it's definitely fun to watch!
*Right, about the language: i've marked it as difficulty level 2, because that's about how difficult it was, generally speaking. You can learn a lot of fun Japanese watching this series for sure (not just オタク stuff, but generally funny stuff as well). HOWEVER! I would rarely say this, but i wouldn't advise watching this series without subtitles!!! There is so much anime / manga talk with shortened titles and references to who knows what series that even the character Saki sometimes says "please, speak Japanese!!". So, unless you're an オタク yourself, you'll probably spend a good deal of time wondering why you can't understand what they're on about if you don't watch it with english subs which contain those extremely helpful notes english fansubbers do... ;)
Yeah, Genshiken is great! The official DVD subs are awful though (found them on Youtube one time)not just because of the blindingly yellow font, but also because they have no translation notes whatsoever, which makes most of the characters sound like they are nuts.^^;
ReplyDeleteHave you seen Animation Runner Kuromi? It's kind of like Genshiken, only instead of looking at otaku culture from the fan's point of view, it's a 2 episode OVA which shows how an anime is made, and is also really funny as well.