Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Something’s in the air. Maybe Dress-Up Darling was the warning shot, but to hear Megan Thee Stallion tell it, the era of the Otaku Hot Girl is upon us. If we are not prepared, that’s probably on us.
Look upon your god and despair.
2.5 Dimensional Seduction, another entry in the “girl with a gimmick” subgenre of romcom, opens with insert narration. Here, our female lead, in voiceover, waxes rhapsodic about cosplay as the ultimate form of transformation and devotion. I don’t know about all that, but it’s certainly a very involved hobby. I don’t have the figure for it, myself, but I can imagine someone caring this much about it pretty easily. When we meet this person a few minutes later, we will find that she cares this much about basically every aspect of otakudom, so it’s certainly in character.
The first character we meet after the OP plays isn’t her, though. It’s Okumura Masamune [Enoki Junya], the president and sole member of his high school’s ‘Manga Research Club.’ Which is to say; he spends his free periods holed up in a club room watching OVAs by himself. In introducing himself to us, he tells us, charmingly, that he doesn’t like real women and only cares about anime girls. In telling us this, he recounts a remarkably quick series of mini-vignettes of romantic rejection and ostracization from his peers. This is as good a place as any to pause.
I already talked at length about the girl-with-a-gimmick setup on the 4th when I wrote about Roshidere, so I won’t repeat myself too much. But it’s worth briefly contrasting these shows to bring up a main difference between them. In Roshidere, the male lead seems to have a reasonable amount of self-esteem, despite being a huge nerd. In 2.5D, this is clearly not the case, or is only the case in that sort of weird sideways way that nerdy people tend to do where we convince ourselves we’re somehow better than everyone else for having slightly unusual interests. The geekboy persecution complex is a whole thing I don’t have the space or desire to get into here1, but there are two key things we should take away here. A. Given everything else we see in this episode, Masamune talking about how he only likes 2D chicks is clearly a coping method for managing rejection. B. Related to that, he is not a reliable narrator of his own feelings. This makes him a bit interesting, because it means, despite his misogynistic sentiments which they are clearly meant to be able to relate to, that he is not just a cipher for the audience to project onto. You’re not as much supposed to think that you are this guy, and more that you’re at least kind of like him. (Even if you’d handle the situation better. Maybe especially if so.) We’re led to both empathize with and look down on him, a perspective that bears some distant relation to the strange, schadenfreude-driven ethos of manga like Rent-a-Girlfriend. Thankfully, despite that, there’s nothing so heavy here. Our main boy is mostly just kind of a twit, and I’m pretty confident that we’re supposed to be laughing at him at least a little, even if the show does assume you’ll also root for him as a sympathetic (and presumably also nerdy, teenage, male) audience.
This becomes more obvious when our female lead, and in many senses our actual main character, Amano Ririsa [Maeda Kaori], barges into the clubroom and into Masamune’s life. They quickly bond, to Masamune’s own frustration, over a shared love of the character Lilliel, a magical girl from a series called Ashword Wars. From Masamune’s own point of view, this is a perfectly Shakespearean tragedy. Here he is, having proudly sworn off real women, only for one that he can’t ignore to crash into his life. Even without that other element that I’m deliberately dancing around this far up the page, this would already be a perfectly serviceable romantic fantasy for this show’s target demo. The two talk about minutiae in the Ashword Wars OVAs. Ririsa compliments Masamune’s frighteningly extensive collection of Lilliel figures, including the one with an exploding outfit. They play a fighting game together. What’s not to love?
In fact, if Masamune were more confident and well-adjusted there almost wouldn’t be a story here at all. There’s a real “Man vs. The Self” element to his inner monologue, which runs throughout much of the episode, in which he denies any attraction to this girl. He acknowledges that she’s attractive, and can even bring himself to say that “despite her gender” (goodness), she’s a true otaku. Were it not, he thinks, for the fact that she just has one too many dimensions, she’d be perfect.
Thus enters the cosplay angle.
I might describe the overall plot of the first episode as “guy gets incredibly freaked out upon learning a girl is way, way more of an otaku than he is.” Ririsa, you see, loves the same sexy heroines that Masamune does, claiming she projects herself onto them. This is—I hope I’m not shocking anyone by saying this—a real thing. Tons and tons and tons of girls, the world over, love and adore female characters who are, in some sense, made to cater to some kind of male fantasy. The world we live in is, unfortunately, patriarchal, and thus dominated by male fantasy. One plays the hand they’re dealt, and active reappropriation of these characters is a thing that any woman engaging with a male-led fandom2 learns to do. It’s second nature at a certain point. I found myself vibing pretty hard with Ririsa here, essentially proving the show’s own point! We’re not otherwise particularly similar people, but I love magical girls a lot, too! If I looked good doing it, I would probably cosplay at least occasionally. All of this is taking the long way around of saying; it is not actually surprising or unrealistic that Ririsa is who she is and loves to cosplay. Her sheer boldness in undressing in front of a male classmate is surprising and unrealistic—as is her taking him at his word when he says he’s not attracted to actual girls—but we can excuse that, as you please, as either naivete on her part or just a necessary narrative greasing of the wheels to make this setup work at all.
Ririsa explains that she truly fell in love with cosplay when a nascent fascination with the idea led her to attend an in-person event. Seeing all the other beautiful girls there dressed up in sexy outfits awakened something in her (I have rarely so quickly decided a character is bisexual), even after she was gently shooed off for being too young to attend. (To give you an idea, one of the cosplayers describes it as a “softcore” event. These girls are selling photoCDs filled with suggestive pictures of themselves, and that’s not something the show avoids talking about.)
Driven by the, ahem, beauty and passion on display she saw that day, she’s determined to eventually sell a photo CD of her own. Honestly, despite the ostensibly saucy subject matter, her attitude toward the whole thing is mostly just cute, but her passion for the hobby is clearly genuine. She ropes Masamune into taking pics of her in not one but several Lilliel outfits, and predictably he gets really into it. Enough so that he conks out from Ririsa calling him “Ashford-sama” (another character in the manga, you understand). Some further developments aside, the episode ends with Ririsa wondering why her heart is pounding so fast when remembering the photoshoot later that day, thus setting us up for future romantic adventures that will presumably involve a lot more photos of Ririsa in kinky outfits.
The fairly straightforward resolution may make one wonder. All of this subtext, the stuff about reappropriation and whatnot, that I’m reading onto the show, is any of it actually intentional? Without a direct line to the mangaka, it’s hard to say, but it also only half matters. A funny side effect of the show’s focus Ririsa is that, despite everything I said earlier about Masamune not being a simple audience stand-in, and despite not being the one with a running inner monologue, she actually comes off as having more interiority than he does, especially given that the interiority he does have is not particularly flattering! Ririsa is certainly the more sympathetic of the two, and I would not be at all shocked if this series picks up a decent-sized periphery of female fans who relate to Ririsa in some loose sense, even as the show, going by various promotional materials, gears up to get racier. This wouldn’t even be the first time such a thing has happened in recent memory.
My Dress-Up Darling, the other hot 2020s property about a guy and his hot cosplayer gf, is the obvious point of comparison here. But what’s striking to me is how different the shows feel. Dress-Up Darling has a lot of delicate character work, but it’s also actually more salacious than 2.5D has been so far. (In terms of the respective anime at least. I’ve read neither manga.) The two halves of that show can, in fact, feel like they fit together uncomfortably, when it’s doing closeups of lovingly-animated boob sweat in one episode and melancholic-romantic train rides home in the next. I can only speak for myself, but when watching that anime I often wished it would settle down a little. It really sings in its more character-driven moments, so the ecchi elements can feel like a distraction except in the rare occasion that they gel just so with everything else that show is doing. Even so, Dress-Up Darling is pretty straightforwardly the better series, and not just because Gojou is a much more likable male lead. I would be very surprised to see 2.5D even attempt to access some of the more complex emotional currents that MDUD consistently manages to, even in its weaker episodes.
2.5D is a series of much more limited ambitions, in general. The goals here, as of now, are to gently push Masamune and Ririsa together and have them engage in Convoluted Horny Situations, goofy antics, or both—in alteration or combination—the entire long way. There’s still a character arc visible from the start here, but Masamune is a much simpler character than Gojou from MDUD, and because he is also an otaku, he and Ririsa are instantly much more on the same page than Gojou and Marin are. Masamune denying his attraction to Ririsa, and then justifying it by claiming she’s a “2.5D girl”, is a bit. Something to make You, The Horny Teenage Boy Watching This Show, think he’s a lucky bastard but laugh at the same time.
A less cut-and-dry way it’s less ambitious lay in its visuals. 2.5D’s first episode has essentially one standout moment—the “headshot” when Masamune sees Ririsa in costume for the first time—against a general temperature of looking pretty good. But it’s not quite as striking as Dress-Up Darling or even Roshidere, so that does count against it a little. Even then, it’s hard to care too much when even “not as good as those other two shows” still looks pretty good. It also doesn’t seem nearly as interested in the finer details of cosplay and costuming as MDUD is, so I could see that being a negative for folks who want an authentic depiction of the experience. Certainly, I found myself missing it.
Overall, though, while I don’t know if I’d call 2.5D a particularly great show, I’m forced to respect its craftsmanship, as an honest critic. I can appreciate that, on some level, it is doing everything in its power to get these two dating. I will also admit to just having a weak spot for shameless audacity, and because 2.5D’s audacity isn’t tying a romance narrative I like a lot more down (so far, anyway), I am more charitable toward it than I might be if it were trying to do more things at once. Is that unfair? Yes! But that’s just how these things go sometimes. I think this show is alright; long may the Otaku Hot Girls reign.
1: For one thing, it’s not unique to otaku, at least not in the loanword sense of that term. When I was in high school, people were just as willing to get this kind of defensive over liking comic books, D&D, fantasy literature, alternative music, even video games well past the point where those had gone firmly mainstream. I imagine the boys at the younger end of Gen Z are fighting this particular fight even still, as we speak.
2: Which is most fandoms. Because the patriarchy privileges men in any given hierarchical system, you see.
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