Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

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I’m revealing my age here, but humor me for a moment. Are you, dear readers, familiar with classic party rock track “Centerfold” by The J. Geils Band? (If not, Stereogum’s Tom Breihan, a critic I admire very much, wrote a pretty great article about it as part of his pretty great-in-general column The Number Ones. You can consider this a recommendation.)

That song is a boiling soup of emotion. The song’s narrator finds out his high school crush poses in an adult magazine now and he’s hit by some admixture of guilt and desire. “Centerfold” doesn’t sound guilty, though, it sounds celebratory, from its production to the nagging “nah-nah nah nah nah nahs” in the chorus. Any actual negative feelings in the song are washed away by its presentation. It all sounds like a good time, and because pop media’s presentation informs its message, it is a good time.

I bring this up because, in a very roundabout way, that’s also, in a very broad sense, sort of what I think of My Dress-Up Darling. The situation presented in its second episode, “Wanna Hurry Up, and Do It?”, would be, in a series that were even slightly more connected to the real world, appalling. Marin completes her strong-arming of Gojo into becoming her cosplay outfitter. Along the way, she both rambles at him about eroge games and eventually shows up at his house unannounced to make him take her measurements. (That’s what the episode title is referring to. What did you think it meant?) But the presentation sells it as a good time, at least in a comedy anime sort of way. Dress-Up Darling‘s second episode is almost all comedic, and it leans heavily into the series’ ecchi side. (If I’m giving every episode an Egregiously Horny Score out of 5, we can call this a solid 4.) Which isn’t to say it’s devoid of more substantial character moments, as there are a few, but let’s just say this is an episode where I had to be judicious about what to take a screencap of.

But let’s talk about our actual characters for a moment here, because it’s Marin who launches this whole sequence of events to begin with. One of the things that makes Marin seem like a real character as opposed to a cardboard cut-out is that she’s extremely assertive. Honestly a little too assertive, to the point of obliviousness, which is where a lot of the comedy here comes from. The episode opens immediately after the closing scene of last week’s, and it’s in the very same room where the two have basically just met that Marin goes into a bit more detail about this character she’s trying to cosplay. For one, her name is Shizuku-tan. She’s the gothic type.

^{At one point Marin refers to the chest area of Shizuka’s outfit as a “boob bag,” which gives My Dress-Up Darling the dubious honor of being the first anime I’ve ever seen use the term in-fiction.}

For two, she’s from an erotic dating sim. Called…this.

(The title is immediately drawn attention to, of course.)

Gojo takes all this in with a disbelief that is pretty common among those who have just had their head dunked into the far side of otakudom. (I’m actually kinda with him here, I’ve never really understood the appeal of eroge either. Not out of any moral objection, I just can’t fathom being horny while gaming. They are mutually exclusive activities in my mind.)

Marin also repeatedly calls the series “epic,” which I’d say is only a bad pick because someone her age nowadays would probably say it’s “based” instead.

There’s also a pretty funny style cut where Gojo brings up that stuff like this tends to be 18+ and Marin, we’ll say, selectively declines to hear him.

It sounds–and is–simple, but a huge part of what makes this come across as funny instead of just weird is Gojo’s reactions. Over the course of the episode, they slowly ramp up from “in vague disbelief as to what he’s hearing” to “looks like he’s just survived a war.” I will cop to finding his increasing distress amusing.

That second reaction doesn’t come until the latter half of the episode. While Gojo does agree to help Marin with her outfits, he reasonably proposes that they should wait to do measurements until Monday, since by the time this episode starts it’s already quite late on a Friday evening.

Naturally, Marin shows up unannounced at his house the next day while his grandfather happens to be off running an errand. (She notes that she googled his last name and “doll shop” to find the address. That’s honestly kind of creepy! But hey, comedy anime.)

^{Sidenote: the fit is insane.}

She barges in and shows herself around. This alone makes Gojo nervous, but it is absolutely nothing compared to the fact that–as Marin correctly points out–measurements are generally taken while the measure-ee is undressed. Of course, Marin is very cognizant of the fact that she can’t well strip down to her underwear in the house of a boy she only met a few days ago. That would be nuts!

A bikini though. That’s fine. Obviously.

^{There is going to be a whole section here where there are very few pictures of Marin and a whole lot of pictures of Gojo’s absolutely devastated facial expressions. You may thank / curse me for my modesty in the comments.}

Maybe I’m a simpleton for still finding stuff like this funny over a decade into being an anime fan. I think I actually appreciate naked stupidity like this a bit more than I did when I was actually in the target audience for this series. But can you blame me, here? Look at Gojo, guy’s about to die.

^{Na na na na na na.}

This particular visual dynamic–Marin doing something teasing and sexy and then Gojo reacting like he’s been stabbed in the gut–makes up most of the rest of the episode. It’ll wear thin if this is what the whole rest of the show is going to be like (I want the cosplay dates alluded to in the OP sequence, damn it!), but as a single episode thing? It’s pretty fun.

In spite of his own raging hormones, Gojo does successfully take Marin’s measurements. Marin herself even gets flustered at one point, in an amusing but also genuine and human moment. This episode was fine–if one has a high tolerance for H comedy, that is–but those moments of real connection between our two leads are where I think Dress-Up Darling is at its strongest. I hope we get more of them as the series rolls on.

But if not, hey, the sight of Gojo studying Slippery Girls 2 like he’s prepping for exams so he can get outfit references is pretty goddamn funny.

^{Godspeed, Gojo.}

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