Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
Key to understanding My Dress-Up Darling is that Gojo and Marin, our leads, are both incredibly awkward people. “Then Why Don’t We?” opens with Gojo having a, shall we say, rather involved dream starring his new bestie. Understandably he feels nervous and even a bit guilty about it. Less understandably, he tries to avoid Marin for most of the day because of it.
Dress-Up Darling has this issue wherein the leads’ awkwardness, especially Gojo’s, can be either endearing or incredibly annoying, and the line between the two is dental floss-thin. This entire segment is thankfully pretty brief, but for the first third or so of the episode, which it takes up, I wanted to strangle Gojo. I don’t believe in any silly gender essentialist nonsense like the man “having a responsibility” to confess or whatever, but he makes someone he already considers a friend feel pretty bad because of his own insecurity, and that just sucks.
On the plus side, hey, the girl with the two-tone hair puts in another appearance! She introduces herself as Nowa (Larissa Tago Takeda, who has a string of support roles like this under her belt and is also an illustrator, among other things.) and she and Marin’s other gal friends do little to help the situation.
She also refers to lollipops as “suckers,” but that’s fine. Character flaws are important.
Things are better elsewhere in the episode, and the whole misunderstanding (if you can even call it that) resolves itself pretty quickly.
Much of “Then Why Don’t We?” is shopping montage, which sounds dull on paper but is spiced up here by Gojo and Marin’s common ground; their love of fashion. It can be easy to forget from moment to moment that Gojo is a near-prodigal designer, and Marin is duly impressed by the incredibly elaborate design drawing he’s made for her cosplay outfit. (The fact that the subtitlers went through the trouble of actually translating his notes deserves praise here. They clearly care a lot about the series.)
The two hit up a fabric shop and a wig store, and Gojo’s eye for detail helps bring the outfit to life, much to Marin’s delight. The joy is infectious, and My Dress-Up Darling remains at its best when it’s geeking out over cosplay minutiae.
This is the face of a woman about to drop $200 on a wig.
They also make their way to a lingerie store, which results in predictable Gojo awkwardness. Less predictable is how they discuss the H-game character this outfit they’re making is based on. No one around them, of course, has the context for understanding the conversation, so people…get the wrong idea. It’s pretty amusing.
Later, Marin geeks out even more about cosplay stuff; flipping through her phone and showing off photos of cosplayers she likes. She gives us this bit of truth and wisdom.
Do not ever forget that Marin is a bi icon.
Other than a brief flashback where Gojo explains that he has difficulty calling these pics of cosplayers truly beautiful–his standard for such things is his dolls, of course–there isn’t much more to the episode. Gojo finds out he has two weeks to finish this outfit which sure doesn’t seem like a lot of time to me, but what would I know?
“Then Why Don’t We?” is a very low-key episode of an already pretty low-key show. The production remains compelling; Marin gets a lot of great expressions here, and the music is frankly so bouncy that it skips into a Hallmark-y light music register that doesn’t quite match the episode’s tone. (It’s fun, regardless.) All told, this is a decidedly minor beat in the story of My Dress-Up Darling.
Even that in mind, it’s a worthwhile one, mostly for the mutual geeking out that Marin and Gojo get, which remains their strongest point of chemistry. I will say though, hopefully we actually get to see Marin’s finished cosplay next week. In terms of pace, there’s a fine distinction between easygoing and languid.
And as a bonus, the Egregious Horny Score, back by inexplicable popular demand: 2/5
Until next week, anime fans.
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