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 honestly just never know what to make of My Dress-Up Darling. Last week’s episode was, to put it mildly, not a personal favorite. This week’s episode, “For Real?!”, isn’t either, but it starts off with one of the simplest and best story segments in the show so far.

For one thing, the first part of this episode is actually from Marin’s perspective, something we’ve largely been denied explicit access to up until now. We hear her internal monologue and see shots from her point of view. In one of those monologues, Marin reveals herself to have more emotional intelligence than the vast majority of anime romcom protagonists.

Indeed, this whole section is a pretty cute and emotionally striking piece of work. Marin rides the night train home alone, wondering if maybe she should’ve more seriously put the moves on Gojo while the two had some alone time. But it comes across as the sincere thoughts of a teenage girl, rather than something gratuitous or showy.

We get more of a sense than ever as to why Marin might like Gojo in the first place, and in the process, the season’s premiere malewife / cosplay gf couple become that much more believable.

Were that the whole episode, this would be a glowing review. Unfortunately, all of what I just described happens before the opening title and is not really what the episode focuses on.

The first thing of note that happens after the opening title is that Gojo accidentally walks in on a little girl taking a bath.

^{I’m not posting any of that actual scene, because ew, and because I don’t want to get my WordPress account suspended. So here she is having been caught in the rain. I like the composition of this shot.}

Look, I will level with you. I feel like a fucking dweeb complaining about nudity in an anime. If I could show this article to my teenaged self, I’m sure she’d cringe out of her skin, but come the fuck on. We do not need a convoluted string of Anime Happenings to put a little girl in Gojo’s house off a case of mistaken identity on the part of his grandfather. We do not need the ancient-ass “accidentally walking in on someone bathing” trope. We certainly don’t need lovingly boarded, queasily fetishistic shots of her legs, the only barely-censored space between her legs, and prepubescent chest. God knows we don’t need the show’s shitty attempt at a joke by inserting a wildly inappropriate flashback to when Gojo and his grandfather talked about how “smooth” Hina dolls are. What does this add? Who is this for? Rejoinder: who is the fact that she turns out to actually be older than Gojo for? What am I watching here? Other than something that makes me feel like I’m going to be put on a list?

Dress-Up Darling continues to feel like two shows with wildly different tones and, frankly, levels of decency, that constantly interrupt each other. I’d say it brings down both sides of the series, but the anime’s ecchi half is so noxious to me at this point that I can’t properly gauge that. More to the point; I wish the ecchi anime would stop interrupting my romcom.

This character, for the record, is Sajuna “Juju” Inui. (Atsumi Tanezaki, who you may remember as the title role from last year’s Vivy – Flourite Eye’s Song.) Juju sorta sucks. She manipulates Gojo into making an outfit for her and is a judgmental little shit toward Marin when the latter shows up.

^{And what exactly is wrong with that, you snide little weirdo?}

The real tragedy here is that the last third of the episode is pretty good! Juju wants to cosplay one of the leads, Shion, from in-universe magical girl anime Flower Princess Blaze, a broad homage to the last 30 years of the magical warrior subgenre. We see enough of the show-within-the-show that by the end of the scene I rather wished I was watching that instead. The scene is a full-on loving pastiche, it’s even letterboxed. It looks melodramatic, fun, and very, very extra as it briefly chronicles Shion’s totally-not-a-Madoka-soul gem becoming corrupted and her falling to the dark side. We get a full-on henshin sequence near the start of the scene! This stuff is great, and I really wish more of the episode were like this!

As always, Dress-Up Darling is the best version of itself when it’s about Geek Shit, so this part of the episode is pretty fun in general. Juju also mistakenly assumes that Marin and Gojo are dating, which floors Gojo and puts Marin in a tizzy.

The episode ends with Gojo promising to make Juju her outfit and with Marin chiming in that she’d like to cosplay one of the show’s villains, Neon. (Neon is also Shion’s older sister and apparently people in-universe ship them. Because Dress-Up Darling seriously cannot stop itself from being weird for more than five minutes at a time.)

I wish I could praise the episode with fewer caveats. I feel like a whiner whenever I complain about the fanservice in this series, but I feel entitled to mention it because it frankly really does ding my enjoyment of the show pretty hard. I certainly can’t recommend it to most of my friends who aren’t waist-deep in the anime rabbit hole, which is doubly a shame because romcoms are otherwise a pretty accessible genre. (I’ve had some success along these lines with Kaguya-sama: Love is War! That series isn’t perfect, but it has way fewer problems than this does.)

And not everything needs to be recommendable to necessarily be good. There are plenty of anime I like–from Kill la Kill to Bakemonogatari–that I would not casually recommend to someone without knowing beforehand their feelings on such things. The difference between those anime and Dress-Up Darling is that they are honest about what they are. Dress-Up Darling really feels like it’s trying to have it both ways, and it mostly just keeps tripping over its own feet. This wasn’t even always the case! The second episode was loaded with over-the-top cheesecake, but it fit within the context of what was going on, so it was easy for me to chalk it up to stupid but harmless fun that I was simply no longer in the target demographic for. Four episodes later, I am not sure I can do that anymore.

I will continue watching the anime, both because I am obligated to by it winning the community choice pick for this season and because I do believe there is no small amount of good in it, but I am not enthusiastic about it anymore because of how many things it gets wrong, and that sucks, because I really want to be. Maybe the show will improve in its second half as we move into an arc that’s again more focused on the actual cosplay side of things. But that increasingly feels like wishful thinking. I am not optimistic.

Until next week, I suppose.

Egregious Horny Score: This segment isn’t fun anymore/5.

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