The Anxiety of dressing girls up as anime characters
My Dress Up Darling is a manga, which has also been adapted into an anime, about two high schoolers, Wakana Gojo and Marin Kitagawa, who decide to do cosplay together.
Gojo has been training his whole life as a Hina doll craftsman, which gives him skills that translate to making costumes, while Marin is a girl who likes anime a lot — so much so that she wants to embody the characters she adores through dressing up as them — but she isn’t good at making costumes, and so needs his help.
The two of them team up and Gojo starts to make costumes for Marin, and gradually a ‘will they won’t they’ romance emerges. The anime was a big hit, both in Japan and in the west, with the centre of the appeal being Marin, who is forthright, likeable and attractive. She made it onto lots of ‘best anime girl’ lists for 2022, and won ‘Girl of the Year’ at an anime awards.
Calling a fictional character ‘attractive’ in a piece you’re writing is a pretty extraordinary thing. How could this have happened, Alex?
Well, here’s the thing. In the West, our reference for the ‘will they won’t they’ romance model is sitcoms like Friends and The Office, where alongside the comedy you get little serotonin rushes from watching a romance unfold piece by piece. Sometimes they’d hold hands, sometimes they’d be forced into an intimate situation, someone would fall asleep on someone else’s shoulder, and you weren’t sure what you would get episode to episode.
The denial, surprise, and forced refusal creates the angst that makes the intimacy sweet and addictive.
A single Cheetos Flaming Hot would kill the average middles-ages peasant. Your average 90s Westerner watching Friends every other week and indulging in Ross / Rachel would be immediately slaughtered by a couple of episodes of My Dress Up Darling.
Like other anime of its type (ToraDora, Komi-San) it is precision fucking engineered to give you the biggest endorphin hit possible. You thought the occasional Jim / Pam wayward glance sent your heart aflutter? Get ready for modern anime. In labs in Japan they’ve been preparing emotional anthrax for the past two decades.
The premise itself is a perfect formulation for this — Gojo picks clothes for Marin, does her makeup with a trembling hand, they visit each other houses to put costumes together — and it’s all helped by him being polite, a bit shy, and easily embarrassed. This allows Marin to be constantly winding him up, saying things to make him blush, teasing him etc. Marin is attractive and popular, and Gojo (which is you, dear reader) has the plausible deniability of being a loner who has a defensible reason to always be hanging out with her (making her costumes).
If you add to that the youthful longing of the pre-college setting, and the fact that manga and anime girls are drawn with a sort of terrifying, inhuman, neotenic precision — wide eyes, big lashes, perfect skin, hair drawn strand-by-strand — and you start to get a picture of just how weaponised things have gotten over in Japan, when you compare it to the West, which is still trundling on with things like The Good Place.
So when I say ‘attractive’ — well, it’s a visual medium, and how Marin is presented is fundamental to how the show works. The whole thing can be seen as a vehicle to get to her next expression or batting of the eyelids, which in the anime are rendered in a naturalistic high-framerate which is clearly where all the animation budget went. The attention lavished on her by author, animator and in turn fanbase is loving and endearing, an obsession familiar to French directors who train a camera on some newly discovered starlet’s face and make three hour réalisme pieces that consist of capturing her every glance and pout.
Sections like the sequence below (Chapter 67), where Gojo takes a series of photos of Marin with a new camera, emphasise the point that romance manga are essentially just girlfriend simulators:
The tactics used to enact this simulation are downright evil, and perverted as a matter of course. Marin is supposedly in high school but from the first chapter we see her in states of near-naked undress (to be fair, manga has weird rules about high school settings, which are a sort of default setting onto which more adult emotions can be mapped). Chapter 2 (2!) has a shy Gojo measure her in a bikini. She tries on underwear for the costumes, and every blush and wrinkle of the skin is obsessively recorded.
The fact that the author — Shinichi Fukuda — is female, and that many manga readers are female, and that the cliches the series deals in are common to the genre, does nothing to soften this perviness and the general indulgence of the content, which is a conveyor belt of contrived situations — making a costume for the culture festival, having two other girls join Gojo for a cosplay, ending up at a love hotel by chance.
But the show is also intelligent and unique, and ends up saying something painful and worthwhile about art and youth, which is what I want to talk about here.
Part 2
The word most used to praise the series, despite the above, is ‘wholesome’. It’s wholesome because no-one bullies anyone else, because it plays with gender by having the popular girl be the nerd while the boy is into dolls and clothes, and because the romance proceeds at a charmingly oblique angle to the central pursuit of cosplay.
I think people call it wholesome, and other shows like it ‘wholesome’, because it is actually about something — in this case, two teenagers working together in a collaborative pursuit of a shared love.
It is about overcoming something, but it isn’t about a problem, or a trauma, or about battling, but instead a positive fulfilment, high-stakes in practice but low-stakes in concept, a curiously unusual focus for a piece of popular media, certainly when compared to the West.
Gojo’s main motivation for helping Marin is that he knows all too well the feeling of falling in love with a perfect piece of art. When he was a child and first laid eyes on a Hina doll, he wanted to do nothing else but practice to become a craftsman himself. In her desire to embody the characters she loves, Gojo recognises his own passion, and so he wants to help her.
His selfless desire to fulfil her desires, because he knows first hand what it feels like to try and fail to replicate a piece of art you fell in love with, is the ‘wholesome’ personal motivation that animates the narrative. The characters are portrayed as ‘true to themselves’, in the translated language of the manga, because they pursue their nerdy dream without fear of judgement.
Young people get into art very strongly, and then start to fill their identities and obsessions with that art. Gojo and Hina are always being described as being in love with the art itself, a kind of disembodied projection of the love they will eventually project for one another:
The plot of the manga actually proceeds without Gojo wanting to make costumes so that Marin will fall in love with him, or to satisfy her, or as an excuse to hang out with her — his intentions are pure (read ‘wholesome’) in that his self-interested, almost asexual desire is to turn Marin into a kind of doll in her own right, a perfected object like the ones he is practicing to create as a doll craftsman.
In the culture festival arc, he wants to make Marin ‘Number One’, a depersonalised pursuit:
And the arc reaches apotheosis when he nearly admits her feelings for her, but only when he sees her dressed up in the clothing and makeup he himself prepared. That’s the one time he can feel something which was like his original love of the Hina dolls, which the page below makes explicit:
Gojo is only capable of realising that he loves Marin when she is someone else — that is, made to look like something which they both like from a separate piece of media.
The path towards the completion of the romance is weirdly unclear. I don’t see how the author can move from the above panel to an eventual resolution where Gojo realises he loves Marin. He is so explicitly in love with his own artistry. And that lack of being able to be original — to realise his own desires rather than the desires of an external form (the Hina dolls, the character sheets) — is also the psychological block that prevents him from realising whether or not he is in love with Marin. It’s about pursuit of a goal, not about your own opinion on the matter. The engagement with the idea of a doll which he himself might like to make that exceeds the formal demands of Hina dolls is neutered on reflex in the same way that the internal question ‘are you in love with Marin’ is neutered. You aren’t meant to make ‘your own’ cosplay, you aren’t meant to listen to your own feelings.
I don’t think the above is me projecting an argument onto a thinly-crafted romance manga — I think that that is really what is going on in the series itself.
Because of this weird, self-neutering, inwards-looking undercurrent of darkness, the series has never really struck me as wholesome. Gojo’s repeated anxieties and lonerisms related to him never being able to be good enough to make the thing he originally appreciated are stressful and beautifully articulated.
And Marin, who falls in love with Gojo, in turn is afraid that he is only hanging out with her because he’s doing her a favour for the costumes — or is at least more in love with making cosplay than in love with her, the mannequin.
The manga is not finished, but in the latest arc, the central conflict — the asexual pursuit of being ‘like the art you like’ even when it is a real human you are dressing up — is brought anxiously to the fore.
An Evangelion parody, Mandate of Heaven, by mangaka Shiba Tokio, contains a character that Marin very much wants to dress up as, the Angel Haniel.
Tokio, however, the artist-as-God, is described as entirely uncompromising, not even approving of a pretty-good anime of his own manga. Tokio is explicitly unwilling to see an imitation of his art that is not perfectly in line with his vision.
This makes him the perfect final boss for the series. Angel Haniel, who looks suspiciously like Marin, was her first inspiration for getting into cosplay in the first place — her own Hina doll. But now the pair face the familiar downwards pressure of having to live up to that art, without disappointing its hard-to-impress creator.
If not even a whole anime studio can satisfy the artist’s vision, how can the two of them, working with fabrics and contact lenses, hope to match the original art?
The dread of living up to the art you love is expressed in Mandate itself, where the object of ‘love at first sight’ — the angel, both human and beyond human — has a disdain for lesser humanity, wanting to engage with it while also knowing that her God-given job (in the plot of Mandate) is to destroy.
Like Marin, Haniel wants desperately to take on a separate form, one which reflects the Angel’s actual intentions, but yearns painfully at only being able to conjure a facsimile:
Gojo and Marin’s task suddenly begins to transcend its setting. It becomes what its parodical roots always threatened, which is a manga about manga, a making-of-art that is about making art.
The horrors, pressures, self-hatreds, ego-threats, anxieties of making art.
Nothing could be bigger than that. After recounting his worries about the weight of the forthcoming task — Marin’s origin-story character, guarded by an uncompromising artist-father — one translation gives us:
Beating God is both Marin’s seemingly impossible task of confessing her love to Gojo, and is also her encouragement to him that he can create the Hina dolls he wants to, and that he can create the most difficult costume they have worked on so far.
In the codex of youthful angst and longing, for them ‘beating God’ means getting to be with one another, realising the impossibility of fulfilling the fantasy behind that extraordinary downwards force of the ‘crush’ which occupies every waking moment, and which is never fulfilled.
Suddenly something low-stakes and wholesome is high-stakes, existential, will be the most important thing you ever try to do.
The current arc isn’t over, but it feels like it might be the last arc of the whole series. It will probably result in Gojo creating the perfect costume, Tokio approving of it at a cosplay convention, and then Gojo realising at last that he loves Marin, not just because of the cosplay, but because she embodies it. The threads of romance and art-making will surely intertwine in a moment that concludes both.
But there’s a tantalising panel that suggests that those polarities might be inverted, that maybe they will fail at last at cosplay, that the trajectories of the manga — already unexpectedly well-articulated for a romcom series — might be upset:
It’s honestly one of the few pieces of art where I don’t really know where it’s going to go. It’s broken through to this rarefied realm of commenting on itself which allows it to subvert rules and go somewhere new. To do that while also being a shameless endorphin-stimulator is worth applauding.
What began Gojo’s path towards being an artist was not a desire to create, or some natural instinct that sprung from him, but instead it was witnessing something he called beauty in the artisanship of an object whose artisanship took decades, half-centuries, to refine and perfect.
Really, creativity was over the moment he saw that icon. Rather than ‘art as a path to self-expression’, it became ‘art as a path to perfect imitation’. This is the same as cosplay, where creativity isn’t actually the goal.
A child exposed to great art who then wants to go on and make something like that art — something which adequately returns to that feeling — has in a sense skipped to the ending, or knows, rather dreadfully, what the best ending looks like. You’ve seen the best Hina doll ever, and now your life is spent getting ever closer to that — 70% approximation, 90% approximation, 99% approximation.
But who knows if you will ever get there? And within those years and years of work, who is to say you won’t lose patience, or fall out of love?
For many who try to create things, this has always been an anxiety. You are necessarily set off on your road of poetry, painting, sewing, by being inspired by someone else’s thing, and it’s usually the best thing of that type. You read Shakespeare, and then you want to write like Shakespeare.
But you will never write like Shakespeare. The struggle of the neurotic artist is that they have good enough taste to know that their writing is bad, that it is not like the writing they like, and this hampers their ability to progress until they can make something that they do like.
And their engagement with art has taught them that the highway of history is lined with great artists who spent their lives toiling in futility to be like someone better, that a true genius appears only once every half century, and that if you aren’t a genius, which you are not, then your art is worth very little, is only a shade, and it is your own endlessly refined taste which teaches you this.
You are destined at the very best to be stuck as an imitation of a greater artist who you could not get beyond, and within whose great silhouette you failed to originate, whose costume you could not even wear convincingly.
This would be well known without Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, which sets out the above in a Freudian exchange of poets through history — Shakespeare started literature, and everyone wanted to be like him or toiled within the enclosing emblem of a father poet that they were not as good as. Tennyson wanted to be Keats, Frost wanted to be Whitman, on and on.
What the Anxiety of Influence tells us is that this was always a problem, people have always looked at their shoulder at the best thing which they want to reach, knowing their whole lives that someone else did this better.
My Dress Up Darling attests to the modernity of this problem. There’s lots of manga and anime. A lot of it is weapons-grade good.
And you can now google ‘Hamlet pdf’ and read the whole play for free. That would be enough to occupy your whole life. But you can also google ‘To the Lighthouse pdf’ and ‘Paradise Lost read online’ and have your day ruined all over again.
Unlike in the fairly recent past where there would at least be a barrier to accessing infinite amounts of free, master-level literature, films, paintings, TV and manga, now we are in a kind of age of content where not only are you hyper-exposed to the most cherry-picked works from throughout human civilization, but you are throwing your own creations into a void alongside this easily accessible content.
No one really chooses to read Shakespeare over some cool modern novel or interesting new poem — but nevertheless, the precursor is there, thanks to the internet is more present than ever. And it has within it more content than anyone could ever consume in a lifetime, certainly enough for a lifetime. We do not need more art.
Gojo and Marin exist in a world where there are already characters. The corridor of their own expression is hemmed by the multitude of manga which they consume, there always being a next favourite character to pretend to be. Born into a museum rather than an open field. Cosplay can only exist because someone else made something.
This is not the only option. You can set off on your own path, make art which is apposite to your history, and achieve creativity. This is in fact what people do anyway. We do, of course, need more art.
You have still to try and stand up and create something out of that, to see art as a social goal rather than as a neurotic one in itself, and you need to feel that we need new art (and new forms, more than anything else) that can say new things, and you have to pursue the compulsion within you, that it is worth articulating something even if you know that some of your aims are selfish, are swallowed by a desire to be like the thing you liked, to create something that might make yourself or someone else feel like how you felt — even if you aim off a bit, land in your own personal hell (or heaven) that wasn’t quite like the hell you saw in the art that originally inspired you.
That’s finally what My Dress Up Darling is about, anyway, if you don’t overthink it — both within the form of the content and within the imperative to not make Gojo a loner, the series’ imitative art is ultimately social, is ultimately designed to take him out of the world of practice and onanistic repetition.
Early on, his Grandfather tells him that the more beautiful things he experiences, the better his art will be:
