Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru
My Dress-Up Darling
その着せ替え人形は恋をする
High school student Wakana Gojou spends his days perfecting the art of making hina dolls, hoping to eventually reach his grandfather's level of expertise. While his fellow teenagers busy themselves with pop culture, Gojou finds bliss in sewing clothes for his dolls. Nonetheless, he goes to great lengths to keep his unique hobby a secret, as he believes that he would be ridiculed were it revealed. Enter Marin Kitagawa, an extraordinarily pretty girl whose confidence and poise are in stark contrast to Gojou's meekness. It would defy common sense for the friendless Gojou to mix with the likes of Kitagawa, who is always surrounded by her peers. However, the unimaginable happens when Kitagawa discovers Gojou's prowess with a sewing machine and brightly confesses to him about her own hobby: cosplay. Because her sewing skills are pitiable, she decides to enlist his help. As Gojou and Kitagawa work together on one cosplay outfit after another, they cannot help but grow close—even though their lives are worlds apart. [Written by MAL Rewrite]
Synopsis
High school student Wakana Gojou spends his days perfecting the art of making hina dolls, hoping to eventually reach his grandfather's level of expertise. While his fellow teenagers busy themselves with pop culture, Gojou finds bliss in sewing clothes for his dolls. Nonetheless, he goes to great lengths to keep his unique hobby a secret, as he believes that he would be ridiculed were it revealed. Enter Marin Kitagawa, an extraordinarily pretty girl whose confidence and poise are in stark contrast to Gojou's meekness. It would defy common sense for the friendless Gojou to mix with the likes of Kitagawa, who is always surrounded by her peers. However, the unimaginable happens when Kitagawa discovers Gojou's prowess with a sewing machine and brightly confesses to him about her own hobby: cosplay. Because her sewing skills are pitiable, she decides to enlist his help. As Gojou and Kitagawa work together on one cosplay outfit after another, they cannot help but grow close—even though their lives are worlds apart. [Written by MAL Rewrite]
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Trailer
Reviews(20)
Space_Boyfriend
March 26, 2022
I cannot emphasize this enough, but My Dress-Up Darling is an ECCHI rom-com. Forget the synopsis about the interesting life of a cosplayer and doll-maker respectively, this is a terrible high school slice of life with some of the worst ecchi sequences I have ever seen. I would like to preface at the beginning of this review that My Dress-Up Darling has become one of my most hated anime. Admittedly, that doesn’t excuse me from just trashing the show entirely, so I will still try to be as objective as I can, since this review is meant for potential viewers. I’ve seen many shows and moviesthat focus on high-schoolers. This time, the series mainly focuses on the relationship of a tailor and a cosplayer with the shy introverted boy Gojou Wakana and manic pixie dream girl Marin Kitagawa as our leads. Wakana is a quiet kid without many friends. He is reserved and afraid of expressing himself or discussing his hobbies due to a ‘trauma’ he experienced. That ‘trauma’ was when a little girl Wakana met as a kid said something like “Ewww, your dolls are ugly” and ran away. This 1-minute backstory is supposedly the only explanation for Wakana’s social awkwardness and is never touched upon in the rest of the TV series. Marin on the other hand is a quirky girl who somehow went flying head first into Wakana’s desk; this leads to the contrived beginning of two kids who ‘happen’ to learn about each other’s unique hobbies and each other. You’d think that based on the synopsis of the story, there would eventually be a shift in primary focus from cosplaying to romance-drama, but you would only be half-correct. Occasionally, there are detailed explanations for the requisites of certain cosplay in order for someone to create and dress up in their attire; these moments actually illustrate what exactly it takes to become a cosplayer, as the show had advertised in its PV. Undeniably, when the series decides to offer insight on Wakana’s character, his struggles, and his dreams, it is able to do so very well. Marin, when she’s bearable, can act as a strong supporting character by establishing a fairly interesting contrast between her vibrant personality and Wakana’s insecurity and awkwardness by offering herself as a confident and quirky friend and eventual love interest. Even at its peak, the romance will be very cheesy, but at the very least, it’s a passable experience at that very scene. “Wow, that sounds like a good show compared to the show you just said in the beginning! How are they the same?” Unfortunately, the aforementioned show is only something I wish Dress-Up Darling stays true to. Not only are all the aforementioned good aspects kept to a minimum, a lot of its potential is wasted since the writer had ‘different’ ideas on their agenda. I’m going to start with the ecchi, probably the most controversial aspect of the series. If you’ve never seen a clip of Dress-Up Darling, just know that the number of explicit and uncomfortable shots of Marin, an underage high-schooler, are lengthy and many. Marin is a high-schooler who has kinks such as ‘wanting to be a sex slave like her favorite anime character’ and legitimately strips down in front of a guy she just met since he knows how to use a loom. Particularly in episode 2, a lot of these explicit shots of Marin are also sexual innuendos that are meant to be funny and relatable as Wakana blushes uncontrollably, afraid he’s going to do something wrong. This kind of situation would never believably happen because there’s no girl in existence that acts exactly like Marin does around a guy she just met. If anyone thought that was bad, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Sometime in the middle of the series, we are introduced to Inui Sajuna, a loli tsundere character who also happens to be interested in cosplaying. I wish that when the audience met Sajuna, it was going to be a normal meet-and-greet where Marin and Sajuna had a fun conversation about how passionate they were about cosplaying and how Wakana could help both of them out together. Instead, we are delivered one of the most god awful scenes in the show in which Wakana opens the bathroom door and sees a slipping Sajuna fall onto the bathroom floor and reveal…everything. This sequence leads Sajuna to threaten Wakana with blackmail for sexual harassment which eventually becomes ‘consensual blackmail’ when Marin enters the picture, because everyone is friends now! Whoopee, how convenient and forced can you get?! Sajuna’s secondary purpose in this series is as a cosplayer with some of her own unique dreams and experiences, but her main purpose is to act as a second love interest for Wakana while wearing kinky outfits for the audience to see. She’s arguably the worst character in the series and one I hated seeing on-screen. The less screen-time she had, the better off the series was. I know that nitpicking details and cherry picking aspects of any piece of media rather than analyzing everything as a whole is generally looked down upon, but someone needs to warn potential viewers that these awful fanservice portions exist because the jarring shift in scene transitions and tone are just overwhelmingly appalling, even by ecchi standards. The main problem I am highlighting here is that all of these concerning scenes are supposed to be ‘hot’ and ‘funny’. Regardless of context, these types of scenarios utterly fail to provide the appropriate atmosphere for actual cosplayers and instead offer a tarnation hentai plot for a target audience that isn’t likely to give many damns about cosplaying. If anyone thought this portrayal of cosplayers was horrendous as is, the list goes on. There’s an entire episode in which skin darkening, a very racist and unnecessary behavior in the show, is present and even an episode where Marin and Wakana go into a love hotel and lay on top of each other for ‘cosplaying’. It’s so contrived and so frustrating to see because the ecchi is not appealing at all to an adult who doesn’t want to see high schoolers in their birthday suits. I know there is an argument that: ‘Because the show is from the perspective of Wakana, that means his sexual inexperience near girls can appear as what is seen in the show, specifically towards Marin.’ Supposedly, this can be compared to Bakemonogatari which is self-aware of its fanservice hijinks. However, to that argument, I would like to point out that this makes no sense in multiple occasions where a camera shows physically everything about Marin, from head to toe, not in Wakana’s first-person perspective. For example, in the skin darkening episode, the camera is completely in the third-person perspective in which Wakana cannot see, since Marin is in a locked bathroom. In other words, this argument is very inconsistent and in my opinion, not valid. I swear it’s as if every single of these inane situations are an extremely bad excuse for a hentai plot without sex rather than being a character study of cosplayers. On a semi-related point of the writer’s agenda, allow me to discuss Wakana, Marin, and their relationship to one another. There is a fundamental flaw in the creation of these characters. When Wakana or Marin are alone, actually focusing on their passions, their personalities shine. We see the depth of their personas as they express fears of not being good enough and how to showcase their love for their craft and hobbies. However, in an ironic twist of author’s intent, the reason both of these characters are irredeemable is because of the other. It’s because of the romance. Wakana’s personality can devolve from ‘nice thoughtful guy’ to ‘horny teenager’ in a matter of seconds because Marin does something abnormal and hypersexualized. It gets to the point where Wakana can become the aforementioned first person POV for the audience members as they see Marin do whatever the hell she’s doing. It’s not even that this happens for the whole episode; it’s just that this kind of ‘slice-of-life romance’ happens long enough to the point it becomes unbearable every time. On the other hand, we have Marin, in my opinion, the second worst character in the series. I really cannot fathom why people like her for anything except her character design. She is possibly the most idealized waifu animated in 2022. Always ‘attractive’, always optimistic, always thinking of her crush Wakana, always working hard, always so lovable regardless of whatever she does. If speaking objectively, her flaw is that she is quite literally a stalker who found Wakana’s address and trespassed into his home uninvited, even visiting his house at night once when Wakana didn’t respond to her texts. But Dress-Up Darling doesn’t seem to think of that as a problem, because it romanticizes stalking as well as everything about Marin. When Marin is all uWu over Wakana, the writer has no holds barred as they make her pander to everything a lover could want: sexual teasing, sweet-talking, objectification, anything and everything! At this point, you may call me Captain_Obvious, but Marin is NOT a realistic nor believable person, but a caricature of a ‘real woman’. I want to note that Dress-Up Darling is also supposedly a seinen, which means that the target audience is supposed to be young adult males. I want to ask the writer: Why? Can we please have the characters be adults so we don’t have to look at HS kids this way? Even if these characters were young adults, it would still be just as bad because of the fact that Marin is a stalker, that there are numerous contrived scenarios involving nudity, and even blackmail portrayed in a ‘good’ or ‘funny’ part of the show. It’s a fact that none of these awful parts of the show had to happen if the writer didn’t want to cater to a male’s ideal wet dream. I’m not even going to lie, I have seen MORE wholesome and enjoyable H series than Dress-Up Darling. It’s probably one of the biggest disappointments I’ve seen in my life. I hadn’t even hoped that Dress-Up Darling was going to be good until I saw the show peak in episode 4 and 5. But after it peaked, the bar kept dropping one episode after another, until the anime had reached the depths of despair, because Dress-Up Darling doesn’t care about quality. It just cares about its shitty ecchi. I’m not going to deny that the technical qualities of this show are on-par for some of the best of the season. Admittedly, there are occasional still frames. However, if a potential viewer is able to bear with the story, the detailed character designs and overall fluid animation are able to enhance certain elements of the story, character, and as most likely intended by the director, the ecchi. As much as I genuinely hate CloverWorks and most of their works, I reluctantly have to admit this is visually one of their best works. As for sound, the voice acting is certainly serviceable but nothing impressive. The OST is fairly forgettable and not worth mentioning in my opinion. I’m sure there is a lot more to talk about, but I really cannot force myself to analyze more of this piece of shlock that I wish no one the burden of watching through. I’m sorry to fans or anyone else I offended, but for potential viewers, this is not your anime of the season, nor an anime you should watch unless you unconditionally love ecchi rom-coms. My Dress-Up Darling does have some decent moments every once in a while but searching for those scenes are like finding a needle in a haystack. If you want genuinely good, funny ecchi, go watch Ishuzoku Reviewers or Imouto Sae Ireba Ii. At least those characters are definitively adults.
