The protagonists of anime My Dress Up Darling occupy a kinder world, more free to explore their identities and passions. Our world has more dangers, but have we given up on treating causes of harm when kids have latitude to express themselves, in favor of treating the symptoms with crude amputation?
I love the anime My Dress Up Darling, which might come as a surprise if you haven't braved past the title yourself. Watch enough anime, as a woman of taste, and you learn to look askance at a premise like "the popular girl secretly loves cosplaying characters from adult games, and this shy unassuming male character is going to make costumes for her!" To be clear, it's less the slightly lascivious qualities of the premise that bother me, but this genre's median quality level: wretched. Generic protag-kun meets his magical pixie dream girl and either she likes his bland ass for no apparent reason, or, worse, she torments him while he gripes the entire time. And, yeah, if the premise being a little risque DOES bother you, the bad writing only compounds that unpleasantness.
Shockingly, though, mangaka Shinichi Fukuda imparts protagonist Gojo with an honest to god personality. Personality and personal trauma, stemming from bullying received as a child because of his passion for hina dolls. This might have particular resonance for me: my mother was a dollmaker. Reading the more literally translated title--"The Bisque Doll Falls In Love"--made me smile, as I can remember my mom pouring bisque slip into molds to make doll heads, just as I can remember how creepy friends found those doll heads sitting around with no eyes or hair. Like Gojo, my sense of normalcy was a bit skewed by a sheltered upbringing on top of visible autism, and much of the show revolves around Gojo's growing acceptance of his atypical, and feminine, interests. Yes yes, we've heard it all before Samantha. Look, if I'm doing Slice of Life shows or Romances, I have my preferences, and they're toward subtextual queerness, neurodivergence, and struggles with gender FOR SOME REASON.
Marin, the titular "dress up doll", is also a well rounded and lovable character, profoundly passionate about cosplay, and a devoted fan of games that she may or may not be old enough to play, expressing her passion with a dorky exuberance. She doesn't so much struggle with her own gender and sexuality as blithely skip through the story not really noticing things like her attraction to girls or her own interest in seeing Gojo put on a skirt. She knows she's interested in Gojo but doesn't seem to know what to do with her desires. Oh well! They're young, and they've got a lot to deprogram.
From what I gather from my girlfriend Juniper, the manga ends on a relatively bland note with respect to all this stuff. I'm not surprised--I suspect there's only so far you can take a story like this, as a mangaka targeting a particular audience. As it stands, it can feel a little like the story is engaged in a stealth deprogramming of its own. As Gojo and Marin unlearn their fears and limitations, discovering they can be themselves without facing violent reprisal or scorn, ideally their teen audience might learn with them. I don't, after all, have a problem with SOME didacticism in art literally aimed at children! And if boys, in particular, can discover it's ok to have feminine interests, maybe they'll be kinder to themselves and their peers... and maybe some will be able to take the next step into embracing their own queerness. In a sense, then, I'm ok that this is a story that I see as obviously about a closeted trans girl and her queer girlfriend, where none of that will ever be "canonized". It took me till age 29 to get on feminizing hormones. These kids have some time to figure their shit out. (there's more to be said here probably about the proliferation of "it's ok to be feminine and male! you don't have to transition actually!" messaging that I DO think is pretty insidious, but we can leave it for another day.)
What's stood out to me, as the second season airs, is the way this world is kind enough to allow Gojo and Marin this space and safety, while still having enough sharpness at the edges to still feel realistic to a queer experience. I remarked to June as we caught up on the episodes recently that these teens are incredibly lucky given how vulnerable they are. They're not just naive, they've got a lack of self awareness and sometimes misunderstanding of threat levels that is probably familiar to any neurodivergent viewer. On top of that, they're often engaged in cosplays of characters from h games or decidedly adult anime, which could make them targets of predatory adults. Gojo in a recent episode mistakes two of Marin's modeling hairdressers for older boys hitting on her, and instantly offers to spend time "entertaining" them instead. This goofy egg could really get himself into trouble!
The show makes it clear the world isn't all child-proofed kindness. Gojo's core trauma, after all, comes from being treated as creepy and weird as a child for his unmasculine interests, and that's paralleled elsewhere in the show. Early this season, they encounter a college boy who does drag ("crossplay", in this context) and there's an interesting scene where, asked to pose with some other cosplayers, he immediately discloses that he is male. The other cosplayers react with extreme enthusiasm, but it reads quite clearly, again to those of us who Know, as the kind of disclosure one does when one is worried about being hate crimed later if "exposed". Afterward, he relates his own crossplay origin story and talks about his first girlfriend in college ordering him to give up cross dressing. ("Obviously I dumped her," he concludes confidently.) Marin bursts into sobs at the idea someone could be so unempathetic, in a scene that feels very honest to how it feels to discover, as a compassionate teenager, some new casual cruelty society countenances. For Gojo, the story appears simultaneously triggering--as he listens his face takes on a visible dread--and enlightening. Maybe it's the haters who are the problem, after all, not him or his new friend.
So this isn't a world without dangers, and the kids are even somewhat aware of them. They just wander through the setting kind of like the Thief at the end of the Thief and The Cobbler: stumbling, transfixed on the golden balls, through the comically gargantuan war machine spectacularly imploding all around him. Only instead of swinging debris blasting through struts behind them, I guess Marin and Gojo are blithely dodging con creeps. The show even plays this for analogous humor, at times, like when an elderly fabric storekeeper takes a look at Gojo's pattern for a sexy bunny suit, gazes into his sincere, guileless eyes, and immediately has an entire life epiphany, becoming the world's wokest grandpa on the spot. What could have been an awkward or even dangerous encounter became an old man internally monologuing about how in modern times it's fine for boys to dress as girls, while Gojo looks on cluelessly! (The storekeeper quickly realizes his mistake and apologizes; Marin reassures him that it's true though: Gojo WOULD look great in a bunny suit.)
Of course, that's not the reality we live in unless we, too, get very lucky. The internet abounds with stories of creeps at cons and online, of course, but let's not get too fixated on the boogeyman Stranger Danger. Trusted Adults of one sort or another--parents, teachers, religious leaders, bosses, coaches--can be just as cruel, exploitative, or stifling to queer and neurodivergent kids. It's interesting that this sunny second season airs alongside the anime Takopi's Original Sin, which throws a cute cartoon alien into a situation of such crushing neglect and violence that it at times feel like a pitch black comedy, a parody of just how clueless and bumbling adults can be in the face of child abuse. The shows feel to me like each others' negative space, a reminder of the real world horrors implied to be incorporated as kink into Marin's favorite games.
I don't say that to criticize either her taste or My Dress Up Darling, though. Far from it. Actually, I also can't help but see parallels to the current crusade to wipe not just all erotic content but anything addressing queerness or serious topics from the internet. It's at the forefront of my mind after itchio censored a staggering quantity of works--including some of my own--from their search results earlier this week. Most of the games Marin seems to enjoy most of all would certainly be delisted or outright banned on itch. The fact she plays them at all is a scandal to our modern Werthams and Hayses. They act, after all, to protect kids like Marin and Gojo! From... well, it's unclear. Themselves, I suppose? Corruption? Learning trans people exist and it's ok to transition? I can't help but wonder what's next, if they win here. (And we can and should start organizing to halt their advance.) Neither My Dress Up Darling or Takopi's Original Sin are likely to survive contact with this movement. If you have any doubts about this, consider the anti-sex work, pro censorship group Collective Shout in their own words. They describe Sword Art Online of all things as a "child rape movie", approvingly quote a senator calling for "an immediate review of all Japanese anime movies accessible in Australia." (emphasis mine.) I think Sword Art Online is slop and probably gross slop, but is that grounds for having this "immediately referred to the Australian Federal Police"? To do what, arrest the film ratings board for crimes against taste?
There's a lot of squeamishness--not, I suppose, without reason--in western anime fandom around the medium's frequent or near ubiquitous focus on teenagers, and often on teenage sexuality. Like, I ran into a review of the first season of My Dress Up Darling where the author talked about growing up happily consuming Ranma 1/2, but now feeling reservations about what they were permitted to watch as a kid, and the contents of anime in the present. It struck me that the author was struggling less with the content itself than with a kind of dissonance with their own discomfort. We're not supposed to be LESS permissive and accepting of risque content than our parents, surely!
Yet years of conservative cultural messaging left a mark, and it feels sometimes like we surrendered sexual liberation, and youth liberation, for a world of permanent police action. If a better world isn't possible, at least a marginally less painful one might be, if we surrender more and more of our culture and the autonomy of young people. Oh sure, I think Marin and Gojo's exploration of desire, self expression, fantasy, and identity passes the wholesomeness test for a lot of people. But carve all the rhetorical space for them you want as an aside when you're condemning the Bad Art enjoyed the Bad Way, the effect is still the same: no-one, no adult, no teenager, no-one gets to make decisions about what kind of risk they take on in their engagement with art.
Notably, though, all the censorship and age gating in the world hasn't stopped abuse. This is actually why I think the sexuality on display in the show is good, even important. I get a little rankled with how easily people will dash off condemnations of anime being "weird about teenagers". For one thing, I don't really hear this shit lobbed at shows like Riverdale! But for another, like it or not, Marins and Gojos exist in the world, playing and watching and reading things they "shouldn't be". If I wasn't given the emotional and social context to read the adult books I was already reading late in elementary school, was that the fault of the libraries for allowing anyone to wander into the adult stacks, or the fault of an educational system and parenting orthodoxy that denied me that context? Who does it serve to create media pretending teenagers are not interested in sex, or imposing, over our risque works, a layer of textual shame about "degeneracy"?
Right now we're going through a widespread purge of adult and queer content online as right wing pressure groups lobby the online payment oligopoly and individual online marketplaces to ban "offensive" works. Simultaneously, it becomes more and more undeniable that major figures at the head of American politics--the very people who we're handing censorious power over to!--are serial predators. I don't know, man, I just don't believe that the world is going to be a better place if all the "child proofing" we do is directed at a bunch of works of art, and we don't do anything about the power structures that make violence and predation possible. My positive vision for the future looks a lot more like this anime, even at its most horny, than anything else. Instead of worrying about protecting kids from Adult Content we should be protecting them from having their vitality smothered out of them by the very people claiming to act in their interests.
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