When a prequel comes out years after the original series, how much of an impact can it have? Turns out quite a bit: whether you’re talking aboutĀ Star Wars orĀ Fushigi Yuugi, prequels like Genbu KaidenĀ can actually have a significant impact on how people think of the original series.
This is a series of posts tackling the implications of Fushigi Yuugi: Genbu KaidenĀ on the world -including the timeline- of the originalĀ Fushigi Yuugi manga. This series is broken into parts corresponding to each of the twelve volumes of theĀ Genbu Kaiden manga. It doesĀ not cover the Fushigi Yuugi anime or the OAVs in any capacity.
This series will be followed up by another on the impact ofĀ the originalĀ Fushigi Yuugi series onĀ Genbu Kaiden. How did the events of the original series referencing the Genbu Priestess, Takiko Okuda, play out in her series, which came out years later? That series will be broken down into six parts, covering three volumes at a time (or one volume of the VIZBIG English editions of the manga).
As a note, I use VIZ translations and spellings of names, e.g. Limdo instead of Rimudo, Ohsugi instead of Ousugi, etc. Viz also tends to give names in Chinese, since the stry is set in a version of Ancient China, but for people used to the names from the anime, I include the Japanese names in parentheses beside the first usage (e.g. Tai Yi-Jun [Taiitsu-kun]).