How Internet Culture Inspired a Modern Anime Hit

In My Dress Up Darling, Marin Kitagawa’s internet slang makes her character feel more alive.

By Ana Diaz | September 22, 2025 | 3:52pm

Anime Features my dress up darling

How Internet Culture Inspired a Modern Anime Hit

Marin Kitagawa shimmers as the protagonist of My Dress-Up Darling. Exuberant, supportive of her friend’s interests, and always ready to info dump on a moment’s notice, her passion reminds me of the real-life anime fans I’ve gotten to know throughout my own life.

That’s largely because she is just like any other nerd. The anime series My Dress-Up Darling follows the story of Marin Kitagawa, a high school girl who dreams of cosplaying as her favorite characters. When Kitagawa learns her classmate, Wakana Gojo, has some sick sewing skills, she enlists his help to create the perfect cosplay, and the two become friends.

When I watched the English dub of the series, now streaming season two on Crunchyroll, Kitagawa immediately charmed me. She gushes about her favorite NSFW games and her genuine love of anime-underboob is literally inspiring. Her English voice actor, Amanda Lee (perhaps better known by her VTuber moniker AmaLee), brings an unbridled irreverence to the role that feels perfect for the anime-obsessed teen. But Kitagawa stands out for another reason in the English dub: It’s because she literally talks like a 2025 teenager.

My Dress Up Darling localization

Kitagawa will affirm her friends with lines like “so true bestie” and describe a pretty boy as “giving major protagonist good guy vibes.” When watching, Kitagawa feels super relatable and that’s largely because she talks like someone who spends a lot of time on Discord and TikTok.

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I spoke to Macy Anne Johnson, the adaptive scriptwriter for season two of the English dub of My Dress-Up Darling, and asked her if she tweaked any of the lines from the Japanese sub or added any phrases to make Kitagawa seem more online, and she said, “definitely.”

“One of my favorite examples is in Episode 15. [Marine is] checking out at a cosplay store. In the subtitles, she said something along the lines of, ‘Okay, let’s buy it so I can be pretty,’ but I made her say, ‘To eat, we must consume,’ like consuming her goods, and eating, as in ‘slaying,’” Johnson said via a video call.

A lot of internet slang derives from African American Vernacular English and later becomes adopted by a wider audience. However, if you don’t spend a lot of time online or around young people, you might not know that when a young person says an “outfit eats,” they actually mean the outfit looks good. I asked Johnson if the team had done any research to incorporate these elements into the script.

“I think for me, I am on TikTok way too much and I see a lot given my own interest in anime and video games,” Johnson said. “I see a lot of the same things that if Marin was in our world, she would probably be seeing. So I have not had to go out of my way much to do anime or otaku type research, because it’s constant.”

That said, just because something feels relevant to the current times, that doesn’t mean it will age well. Sometimes, it’s common for localizers to avoid trendy or cliché terms. I asked Johnson if she was worried that certain additions could date the show.

“I always try to put things that have been lasting in my life, like saying ‘totes adorbs’ and saying ‘vibes.’ Those words will always have the same meaning, especially something like ‘totes adorbs’ that comes from ‘totally adorable.’ We all know what that means. So just trying to pick things that have remained persistent in my own vocabulary, instead of, you know, like ‘skibidi rizz,’ which probably isn’t gonna make it for the next couple years,” Johnson said.

Kitagawa doesn’t just pull her lingo from the internet. She is also a die-hard fan and that can come with a lot of fandom-specific language that can be tricky to translate. In episode two of the show, Kitagawa uses the term “eroge,” which is a specific term for an erotic video game. According to Emily Fajardo, the dub director of season one of My Dress-Up Darling, what does and doesn’t get localized is determined on a case-by-case basis.

“It depends on the context of the scene and how clear that term is for people who have not heard it before. For instance, ‘eroge,’ she explains what that is in the scene. We did not need to do a lot to change that or make that clearer for the audience.”

However, there are other times when the team found it necessary to do a direct translation.

“For instance, in the scene where [Wakana and Kitagawa] have the home date and Marin is going to make omurice, and that’s omelet rice,” Fajardo said. “Not everybody knows what that is, and so we use the term ‘omelet rice’ in that circumstance. But that doesn’t change too much. But yeah, for something like eroge, [it] is so specific to that kind of fandom and people use that term all over the world, so we wanted to keep that. Those types of things we want to honor.”

According to Johnson, My Dress-Up Darling is a special show to work on. That’s because Marin is a fan herself, so the team gets to think about that part of her character as they make decisions on what and how to translate the show.

“Something for me that’s been unique about My Dress-Up Darling is that, often, in the dub we’ll cut the honorifics like ‘-sama,’ ‘-san,’ ‘-chan,’ but because [Kitagawa is] so instilled in this anime culture, we always keep the honorifics when we’re referring to her character obsessions,” Johnson said. “So [the character] Shizuku is always Shizuku-tan. When she cosplays Rei, it’s always Rei-sama. That helps put it in that kind of otaku sphere for me. And it’s really unique to My Dress-Up Darling, we don’t often do that.”

Kitagawa pops in the English dub and that’s partially due to the way the team wrote her. However, as I spoke to Johnson and Fajardo, I could almost feel Kitagawa in the call with us. Fajardo’s background displayed anime pins and plushies, and Johnson bubbled over with excitement to nerd out about the intricacies of anime script adaptation. In their own ways, both of them reminded me of Kitagawa herself. So while all the tiny decisions can go a long way, I was reminded that, at the end of the day, it was real people with real passions that helped bring this character to life.

Ana Diaz is a freelance culture writer who covers the intersections between internet culture, fandom, and video games. Her work has been published at NPR, Wired, The Verge, and websites.

She loves Pikachu and you can follow her ramblings at @pokachee.bsky.social