YMMV / Genshiken

• Ensemble Dark Horse: Asada. Not even named in the original manga, you know her as the girl with the constant cat mouth.
• Fandom Rivalry: Genshiken fans tend to be at odds with fans of The Big Bang Theory for taking more or less the same idea and making it less inherently geeky and more about sex and relationships.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: If the proportion of fanfics is anything to go by, Kasukabe and Madarame.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Massively more popular outside of Japan than in.
• Hollywood Homely: According to Kugayama, Ohno is an "ordinary person who's cute", while Kasukabe is like "a model". Like you could tell the difference.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Sasahara brings up in a job interview that he didn't like how Kujibiki♡Unbalance continued on after the main cast had graduated, to the editor who came up with the idea. Though this was more likely a reference to how all the third years had graduated before him, one can't help but wonder his feelings over Niidaime.
• Ho Yay:
  • Madarame/Sasahara get a lot of doujinshi and fanart devoted to them most likely because of Ogiue's event in the manga and anime.
  • In-universe, Madarame gets involved in both Ogiue's and Hato's yaoi fantasies.
  • There's a few moments between Kasukabe and Ohno.
  • Massive amounts of it between Madarame and Hato, almost to the point of Implied Love Interest in the later chapters.
  • Sue and Ogiue in the later half of the manga.
• Memetic Mutation: Ohno saying "This is what I [CENSORED] to!", to correct what type of pornography she likes, gained some memetic status for a while.
• Ron the Death Eater: Kousaka sometimes gets this treatment in fanfics that are Madarame X Kasukabe.
• The Scrappy: Kasukabe, for much of the first season; she's pretty much a hateful bitch to everyone but her boyfriend, who she likes primarily because of his looks. She mellows out a bit as time goes on, but she never really gets called out for any of her past behavior, so it comes across as her getting off light.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Because of the 6-year gap in between airings, the third season features an entirely new voice cast, with both Madarame and Kuchiki sounding deeper than last season.
  • There are some that view Nidaime as this, since most of the new cast are fujoshi and as a result, a lot of chapters have that as a focus.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The series is a snapshot of the Japanese otaku subculture as it was at the time it was first published / aired. The references are contemporary, and it notably deals with the Moe boom and (to an extent) the "mainstreaming" of otakudom around the middle of the Turn of the Millennium. The gap between the old guard and the new generation is increasingly evident in Nidaime, where the idea of "otaku" has gone from something of an internalized, somewhat shameful identity to a (relatively) unstigmatized descriptor of someone who enjoys his or her hobbies with a shameless, fiery passion. Likewise, Kousaka playing Guilty Gear X, or at least one of the games in that subseries, specifically puts the series somewhere between 2000 and 2006.
• The Woobie: Almost every member of the Genshiken can be counted as a woobie; however, the standouts are Ogiue and Madarame.

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