My experience with My Dress-Up Darling can be best described as a sandwich. There are aspects of it that I believe are absolutely delicious and delightful, but it’s wrapped in unsavory bread. Maybe not full-on rotten, disgusting bread, but enough mold spots to make it mildly uncomfortable to digest. Which is a shame, because I adore the glitter-covered romantic comedy burger, and having connected with the show’s premise, I should have landed right in the middle of its target audience. So what exactly in the recipe had me crinkling my nose? Before I get into that, I’ll start with what I liked about the show first.
As I mentioned, the premise and characters had me intrigued. The introverted dollmaker Gojo Wakana, having long given up on the idea of being accepted by others for his passion, meets the unabashedly-passionate Kitagawa Marin. After discovering that Gojo knows his way around a sewing machine, she asks him to make her cosplay costumes of her favorite waifus, and romantic tension ensues for the next twelve episodes.
One of the immediate concerns I had about this setup was that Gojo would quickly become a self-insert vehicle in this new subgenre of show called “introverted awkward nerd guy at school gets dragged against his will into the shenanigans of a hot senpai who relentlessly makes fun of him” that I’m not too fond of. Thankfully, Dress-Up Darling mostly circumvents this by establishing his very specific set of circumstances and giving Gojo a legitimately niche career choice in hina doll making. This helps set him apart from his contemporaries whose usual shtick is that they consume anime, games, and/or light novels until it eats their personalities from the inside out and fashions them into a skin for the viewer at home to wear. But Gojo feels different; he’s a gentle and sensitive soul suffering from social anxiety, and one particular monologue of his in the first episode genuinely squeezed my heart from how deeply I connected with his discomfort around others. It felt so real.
But of course every popular anime of the season needs to have a beautiful poster girl, and it’s definitely easy to see the appeal of Kitagawa Marin on paper. “Popular” girls in media tend to be characterized as intimidating snobs who turn their nose at anything deemed unusual or lame. However, Marin twists that expectation by actually being a huge otaku who wants to cosplay as erotic video game waifus and is unapologetic about her hobbies. On top of that she’s cheerful, accepting of everyone, and has no issues saying what’s on her mind. The gap between these two and their lifestyles leaves a lot of room for fun character writing and interactions. Gojo and Marin openly talking on the streets about erotic visual novels and freaking out innocent bystanders got a laugh out of me.
Although the Opposites Attract trope is done to death, My Dress-Up Darling does a wonderful job of establishing why Gojo and Marin gravitate towards each other. More than anything Marin wants to have someone appreciate her hobbies with her. She loves seeing passionate people do what they love, and in return Gojo wants nothing more than to find reassurance for his choice of lifestyle and make his first friend happy. The chemistry between the two is sweet and heartfelt, and I loved witnessing them find happiness in each other with interests that would see them ostracized by most people. As any good romcom should, this show is at its absolute best when focusing on this aspect of their relationship and seeing how they help one another realize their passions. Like many other viewers I am not actively into cosplay and even less into the art of doll making, so it is really Gojo and Marin’s relationship that kept me tuning in every week.
While we’re speaking of positives, I want to give a shoutout to the incredible animation and sound. Cloverworks, while notorious for screwing up a few too many productions, managed to keep a stellar level of consistency for all of Dress-Up Darling’s runtime. The character designs and animation do a wonderful job of conveying body language, even if I found Marin to be a tad over-animated in the first few episodes (I find there’s a fine line between “realistically energetic body movements” and “if she stops moving for 0.5 seconds she will die”). Every reddening of cheeks, every sparkle in the eye and shake from laughter, it’s all captured with such an attention to detail it’s hard not to be impressed. The background art is also great, with familiar locations like Gojo’s home and a train station rendered with warm lighting that really helps to fit the cozy slice-of-life mood. Coupled with some A+ fake anime and video game segments that ooze with passion and a few standout romantic melodies in the OST, I loved almost everything about the production.
But now, I’d like to address the elephant in the room: the slightly moldy bread slices, the things that kept me from giving this show a 10/10, and maybe gave me mild indigestion. You might remember that when referring to Gojo’s potential to be a wish-fulfillment vehicle, I said the show Mostly manages to circumvent this. While he is characterized as a dedicated and very talented guy with specific reasons to act the way he does, he’s also a repressed hormonal teenager. And Marin, being not only an amateur model and very straightforward, knows she has sex appeal and isn’t shy about flaunting it. So naturally this romantic comedy’s main brand of Comedy mostly revolves around the shtick of Marin being bold and flirtatious while Gojo freaks out in the background. I’ll be the first to say that flirting between friends is totally normal, and people who are sexually forward have been around since forever. But to me this joke becomes less funny when it comes off as a one-sided breach of someone else’s boundaries. Gojo doesn’t seem to enjoy having panties flashed at him or bras shown off in his face, and even limits his involvement in one of Marin’s cosplays because he’s uncomfortable with the amount of skin she’ll be showing. And yet the punchline to most of these jokes is “he jerked off a lot afterwards” which isn’t particularly funny to me, so instead it comes off as wish-fulfillment on the part of the audience that wants a high school girl to flash her panties at them and feel totally OK about jerking off to it because “she’s a model and she’s totally comfortable with flaunting her body like that don’t worry guys it’s not creepy!!”
Indeed, fanservice is one of the biggest contentions when discussing this show, because it brings up a lot of questions about how to do fanservice “right”. And my answer to that is that there is no answer. Everyone has different boundaries when it comes to sexual content, and to some, even a little fanservice is too much fanservice. Now don’t get me wrong; I love boobs! Even butts, on a good day! Girls are great! I love girls! My only real issue comes when the production and the narrative have to start infringing on each other in order to make the fanservice work.
Marin and her sexual openness suffer from what I call “Persona 5 Ann Syndrome”, or P5AS for short. Both characters are written to have their beauty be something they’re acutely aware of and have no problem showing off. Fashion and beauty to them are ways of self-expression, so being gawked at by others is a compliment and an acknowledgement of their hard work. In other words, they do not mind being objectified so long as that objectification is happening on their own terms. However, this trait suddenly gets thrown out the window when it’s convenient for the audience. Ann becomes embarrassed and insecure in her Phantom Thief outfit because the writers thought it’d be funny if the confident fashionista got all flustered when put into a skin tight boob suit (which is a problem no one else in the cast suffers from because they get magical costumes materialized from their rebellious spirit and that’s Awesome). Marin isn’t allowed to go any further in her flirting or actually make moves on Gojo despite their OBVIOUS romantic and sexual interest in each other because this is a twelve-episode anime and they need more will-they-won’t-they fodder for the inevitable season two. Once a character is afflicted with P5AS, it’s pretty much set in stone that she’ll be bold and confident in her sexuality until she suddenly becomes a moe-ified virgin so as to not alienate the viewer consuming the series for wish fulfillment. If you aren’t going to respect the character’s personality and give legitimate reasons for them to be like this, what was even the point of writing them this way in the first place?
The most egregious example I can think of is the infamous love hotel scene, wherein Marin somehow manages to accidentally book a love hotel for a photoshoot backdrop and she and Gojo unintentionally end up in a compromising position. Despite my earlier complaints, I wasn’t expecting them to actually go any further on a physical level, as part of me isn’t entirely comfortable seeing minors do the deed. But what I WAS expecting was some kind of acknowledgement of their attraction to one another. This scene came at a point where the two leads were already at least somewhat aware of their feelings for each other, and the tension between them was at its peak. So what is the outcome?
The phone rings, they chicken out, they never talk about it again and their relationship is not even the SLIGHTEST bit changed in the next episode. It’s just back to the status quo. Despite there being mutual attraction and no real reason to prolong a confession, the ball of fanservice contrivances just kept on rolling. This was when I realized this show was probably not going to respect my time. How cruel, I remember thinking, for this anime to get me so invested in the main couple only for it to go nowhere in this whole season but instead try to keep my monkey brain satiated with a panty shot every now and then so I don’t lose interest. It got to the point where I was relieved when a scene between Marin and Gojo didn’t have any random boob-ogling or panty close-ups because it felt like less of an insult.
The worst part is that I feel like most of my issues with the show would have been resolved if all the characters had just been aged up. I’m getting too old to feel comfortable with seeing the meticulously animated jiggle physics of high schoolers who I’m assured are “mature enough for their age” and “comfortable with being objectified” even when those traits are totally at ends with their P5AS and they’ll never be able to exist outside of that comfortable box. I let out the loudest groan when Gojo accidentally glimpsed the buttery-smooth coochie of a girl with the physique of a middle schooler and subsequently got blackmailed over it. I gave a toast to missed potential when the one character who could have represented the struggles of plus-sized cosplayers was essentially a walking boob joke with sticks for limbs. I would have been able to buy Marin and Gojo prolonging their relationship because life is hectic after high school and adults generally have a lot going on. But lonely people wanna relive their glory days of adolescence while also projecting their present sexual fantasies onto them, so all aboard the Uncomfortable Fanservice Train, where we need to sell enough Blu-rays to fund a season two!
And yet even with all of my complaints, I find it hard to harbor any intensely ill will towards My Dress-Up Darling. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m still humming the music track that played during the bridge scene in episode three, or the fact that mangaka Fukuda Shinichi clearly researched the ins and outs of both cosplaying and hina doll making to portray them with such care and respect. I can’t stop grinning when the characters talk about how happy cosplay makes them. The fireworks scene in episode twelve was done so beautifully that I wanted to tear up a little. Of course that immediately got ruined when a potential confession got curb-stomped Again (I’m blaming Nozaki-kun for this one), but I felt like I could sigh and forgive it with a smile just one more time. It’s a weird dichotomy where I want to be critical of the show, and yet the mood it carried and feelings it gave me were so genuine it’s hard to be legitimately mad. So will I be watching a season two of My Dress-Up Darling? Despite the fact that I’m obviously getting a little too old for all of its shenanigans, the answer is yes. Yes, so long as it comes from a place of passion and care, I will suffer this mild indigestion again. The voice actors put their hearts into their performances. The team at Cloverworks gave it their all. And more than anything else, that’s all I could really ask of any sandwich I choose to spend my time eating.
Thank you for reading! :)
