Well, here we are at the end of Feburary, taking a look at one more show with romance in its DNA. Like Tonikawa this is also a fairly recent show with a second season announced. In fact, the first season is less than a full year old at this point. Sometimes I find it odd to review a show where I think “I could have done that as a seasonal entry” but here we are with time marching inexorably forward.
Don’t let that fool you into thinking My Dress-up Darling is otherwise like Tonikawa, though. Tonikawa was a rather soft slice of life with hints of magic. My Dress-up Darling is a fully reality-grounded ecchi comedy. For being well-regarded recent romances, they actually have surprisingly little in common.
What, then, is the pitch of this show? Well, it stars Wakana Gojo. He’s a first-year high school student being raised by his grandfather. Grandpa is a skilled artisan who specializes in making Hina dolls, very high-end sets of classical-styled dolls central to the Girls’ Day celebration. Gojo hopes to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps since he fell in love with the beauty of the art, and in fact he’s a fair way along – he can’t quite match the paint work for the faces, but he can already make the dolls’ fancy clothes. This has caused him some amount of grief, though, as he has a very notable psychological scar from a little girl (presumably a friend) who once flipped out at the idea of a boy liking Hina dolls. Because of this, he’s fairly distant from his classmates, and tries to just be affable as he is separate, thinking that such people live in a different world from him.
Perhaps the most different of all those different worlds belongs to Marin Kitagawa. Marin is gorgeous and popular, seemingly a real social butterfly with a hint of gyaru and a zillion friends she has no trouble talking with. They interact a couple brief times, in which it’s clear at least to the audience that she’s also a nice and considerate person (for instance, coming in to help Gojo with cleaning time when the rest of the class pretty much dumps the tasks on him), so each is aware the other exists, but that’s about it.
That changes one day when Gojo brings his work to school, hoping to use the old home ec room to finish off some doll clothes he was making the night before when the old sewing machine at home gave up the ghost. Marin stumbles on him, and while Gojo is initially terrified of being scorned again, she’s more excited that this means she knows someone who knows how to use a sewing machine.
You see, Marin desperately wants to cosplay her favorite character. However, her attempts at sewing a costume are, as she shows off, so terrible that you’d normally have to be trying to do it wrong to manage such a bad result. Marin begs as best she can, and Gojo ultimately agrees that he will at least try his best to help her realize her dream of becoming this character.
This is our essential setup: he’s a once-bitten-twice-shy introvert, she’s a peppy extrovert, and they get along surprisingly well when Marin isn’t giving Gojo a near heart attack with the show’s ecchi.
A big part of why this works is down to Marin. While certainly a character for which the fanservice can flow both in character (she knows what she’s doing when she reveals she’s wearing a bikini for her measurements to be taken) and out of character (The camera seems to lust for her), and who has some seriously questionable tastes (the character she wants to cosplay at the outset, Shizuka-tan, comes from an apparently extremely explicit eroge that she really shouldn’t have access to at her age), Marin skews more sweet and wholesome, and it really helps the show not be painful or awkward to watch.
Gojo is simple – he’s sort of the everyman protagonist var. spine challenged. He does have traits uniquely to himself, namely his love of dolls, but it’s pretty clear that he’s not the one by in large carrying the show, Marin is. One part Manic Pixie Dream Girl (an archetype I’ve expressed mixed feelings for in the past), three parts nerdy dork and another three or four parts each popular girl and absolute bombshell, Marin can seem like a character who stands as wish fulfillment incarnate. Do you have an uncommon hobby that you have trouble sharing with other people? Don’t worry! Surely there’s a 10/10 girl even quirkier than you who’d love to hear all about it.
But, as much as she could come off as patronizing if looked at through jade-colored glasses, I do think that Marin both works as a character in her own right rather than just a tool and that better was meant out of her than the worst and most cynical read would imply. In the worst case, you kind of write off the idea that she’s constructed as a person, and I don’t think that’s fair. Marin Kitagawa has a consistent persona. She’s a nerd. She gets deep into things and becomes entirely too avid, even obsessive, regarding them. She’s confident and quite difficult to fluster, and together this means that she’s the kind of person to end up leading a moment or doing her own thing, and the fact that people follow her is down largely to a degree of natural charisma. Her likes, in terms of media and characters, are pretty diverse, but I don’t think that’s a sign that they’re an degree of fakery so much as… people have multiple archetypes they’re into a lot of the time.
As for her kindness, the fact that any teasing she may engage in is the lightest you could find… that’s kind of needed here. Because Marin has all the social power in the dynamic with Gojo (she has the looks, the friends, and even the money) if she wasn’t outright kind she could very easily come off as abusive, and that’s not what anybody wants to see (I would hope, but then Nagatoro has an audience so maybe some of you all do want to see that. I don’t.).
So, Marin wants to cosplay, and Gojo is willing to help with the outfit. He takes her measurements when she finds her way to his place (a very ecchi scene mostly focused on his discomfort having a gorgeous classmate in a bikini in his room. I suppose that would be rather intimidating), Marin lends him the H-game her dear character is from, he actually plays it and takes studious notes on the costume, they go out shopping for materials in what amounts to an informal date. It’s all in all a good time, at the end of which Marin mentions there’s a cosplay gathering in two weeks.
The “actually played the game” is a moment I’d like to highlight. They talk about it at the end of the shopping trick (in all its eroge detail, the joke being that a stranger overhearing them doesn’t know they’re talking about a work of fiction) and Marin mentions that most people she tries to share her interests with just kind of smile and nod, rather than taking her seriously, and that she appreciates that Gojo went the extra mile. I think this is actually a very connectable moment, for the characters with each other and for the audience, especially any members who have had a fringe interest. It also helps establish that while Marin is popular, that doesn’t necessarily mean that her connections with her other peers are deep.
In any case, Gojo takes the mention of a meet in two weeks… a little seriously, rushing to get the outfit done in that little time, despite his grandfather having a little bit of a hospital scare and exams being an issue. When Marin finds out, she’s deeply moved, but also distraught since she didn’t mean it as a deadline. Soon enough, though, everything is ready, and Gojo and Marin head out to a cosplay gathering where she makes a very impressive debut with her very detailed outfit. There are a few hiccups, like the number being a bit too heavy for a summer outdoors, but by in large it goes well.
Shocking Gojo, though, Marin has no intent of ending their relationship here. Not only does she consider them friends (with a crush starting up at that), but she has plenty of other characters she’d love to be.
At this point, halfway through, the show starts to shift gears. Getting Marin’s first cosplay to completion took six episodes, but there are far more in the show as a whole
The first takes a chance on giving us new characters for more varied comedy. Another cosplayer, one Marin idolizes, comes to Gojo looking for an outfit, since Marin’s in her debut was so good. This cosplayer, Juju, specializes in younger and cuter characters since, despite being older than our leads, she looks like she could be in grade school. She and Marin end up cosplaying characters from the same Magical Girl show, but there’s also another character to consider – Juju’s younger sister, who is bigger than her in every way except the age number, and who normally works as a photographer. She wants to have a chance too, specifically playing the male love interest from the show, but for her exact desired look she’s… not exactly a great fit, and thus it takes some clever work to remake her into the spitting image of a guy for the photo shoot.
This arc executes in half the time of the last one. Afterwards, the last three episodes are one-shots. In the first, Marin tries to pull off a very under-dressed oni sort of girl and it’s just too much for Gojo, scuffing the outfit and resulting in the two more or less going out again.
For the second (episode 11, for those keeping track) Marin cosplays a character where the outfit has to be a good deal more inventive, since the source is a 4-koma without particularly detailed art to back it up. To get the right setting and angles for the shots the cosplay (a succubus who fails in comedic fashion to get an overworked guy to actually fall asleep), she ends up renting a room at a love hotel to use as the “photo studio”, and the atmosphere comes very close to overwhelming our young leads in the end, before a courtesy call that time’s almost up breaks the spell
Finally, we end with an episode that’s less about the outfits and more about daily life, the kids going to school and ultimately attending the good ol’ summer festival, fireworks and all, getting out most of the tropes you’d expect, ending with Marin confessing her feelings of course under circumstances where Gojo can’t hear her. Ah, well, perhaps she’ll get the nerve to try for real some time soon.
And that’s My Dress-up Darling. How does it rate?
Well, let’s look at the components. I talked about the main characters already, and for side characters there aren’t really that many. Gojo’s grandfather gets some half-decent time, and Juju and her sister are actually fairly well developed for the relatively small parts they’ve got in the show as a whole. It really is mostly about Marin and Gojo, who are… perfectly serviceable, skewing towards the good. I don’t think these characters are amazingly deep, but they’re memorable and fun and enough “people” that I accept them. I know Marin in particular went through the cycle where she got insanely popular and then took some very bitter backlash on the chin, but I think when the dust has settled she comes out still looking fairly good.
How’s the comedy? Honestly, in my mind, the comedy was the weakest part of My Dress-up Darling. It can never really go too big, since it’s both trying to be very real and constructing itself around characters who are basically good people. Marin can be teasing at times, but that’s as far as it really goes. For comedy to work in a “laugh out loud” sort of way, the characters don’t need to be crazy and they don’t need to be jerks, but at least somebody probably needs to be one or the other. Marin can fill the “crazy” role some of the time, when she’s really geeking out, and so the best jokes in the show are either centered around her sometimes unhealthy obsessions, or on the incongruity of someone from outside their world looking and not seeing the whole picture, like some of the interactions with Gojo’s grandpa or the bit I highlighted in the first arc. Other than that it’s not bad, per say, but it’s probably not really going to make you laugh when it’s just a question of who’s embarrassed this line.
Speaking of embarrassment, how about that fanservice? The show lays it on heaviest around the start (or perhaps the audience just gets used to Marin more) but there is enough throughout that it’s an element of the show that has to be regarded. I think it comes out pretty well. It’s decently creative and fairly germane, given the subject matter. There’s plenty of Marin in a variety of costumes to look at, and there’s some realism to the fact that cosplay can and does go pretty fanservicey at times. There are points where the camera is heavily interested, but those are also often selling Gojo’s fascination or source of discomfort. It passes here.
Now, what about the romance? Oddly, I think this might be the most important clause that was up in the air. My Dress-up Darling isn’t just an ecchi show, it very much is a romance with a single leading couple that you want to see get together. That means it has to be accounted for by certain standards. We do get to see why Gojo is falling for Marin and why Marin falls for Gojo, which is important. All too often we only see one side. Sometimes this can be clearly intentional, like in Tonikawa where Tsukasa is clearly supposed to start out as a mystery, but that’s not the case here and mercifully they sell it.
If anything, this is another point in Marin’s favor. She doesn’t just fall head over heels for Gojo in a dry and standard way, she clearly gains appreciation for him in particular by seeing what he’s capable of, bonding with him over the course of a good deal of time working on that first cosplay, and when she comes to understand her feelings she reacts like, well, a schoolgirl. It’s pretty cute and has at least a couple facets to look at.
On Gojo’s side, it helps that we felt how crushingly alone he was. Marin can be a lot to handle, but at the same time it’s not a surprise to anyone that he would come to appreciate, like, or maybe even love that.
On the whole, the romance is at least fine.
So, most of these parts are average to above-average, with the comedy being the low point at “slightly lackluster”. The whole package though feels like very much more than the sum of its parts. My Dress-up Darling does a lot of work to capture the feeling of a deep interest. You’re not just watching Marin fall in love with Gojo and vise versa, you’re watching a love letter to a hobby – cosplay in particular, but the kind of energy and excitement could be applied to anything. It is, ultimately, a show about it being okay to have fun and love what you’re doing. You could say that My Dress-up Darling pulls off what Rumble Garanndoll wanted to, and does it subtly with what can be taken out of the narrative, because while some themes need to be laid on heavy and hamfisted, this is not one.
On the whole, I’m torn. The technical aspects of the show, and I mean all the technicals, aren’t really that great, but the experience of watching it was above and beyond. Do I skew the grade lower, trying to isolate the pure rubric-capable bits from the unspeakable experience, or do I skew it higher in respect of how it left me feeling?
I try to be a more objective reviewer, so for all that, I think the best grade I can give is B+. It is better than an average show. Like I said, the basic elements bottom out at a level that still ultimately passes, and while they don’t reach the stuff of legends they do norm significantly higher. The plus, I offer in respect of the fact that it’s one I’ll be happy to come back to and am glad is getting a season 2 somewhere down the road. If you want to hate it, I’m sure you can, but I’d really recommend it, so if you’re undecided and thinking about diving in, go for it.