How My Dress-Up Darling and Dandadan Subvert the “Outcast Loves Popular Girl” Trope

Instead, Dandadan makes it clear that Momo and Okarun have a mutual fascination with one another from the very beginning, and that their different social strata aren’t necessarily as far apart as they seem. Momo was bullied as a kid because her grandma was training her to use early psychic tools that made Momo come off as unusual and which, at the time, Momo didn’t understand. She may seem put-together and cool now, but her sympathy with Okarun being bullied makes way more sense when you know her history. Also, she’s plenty strange herself; she just has figured out how to cover it up better, as many people who are socialized female are forced to do. Momo and Okarun don’t immediately have crushes on each other; at first, they’re friends, then besties, and then maybe something more. This is more of a deep friends-to-lovers story, or a will-they-won’t-they, with sci-fi and supernatural elements and tons of other charming characters along the way. The fights that the duo has with aliens and ghosts often result in them learning more about themselves, in both comedic and strikingly poignant moments. Now that I’m completely up to date on the show and watching it week-to-week, I can’t believe how much the pilot episode whiffed setting up a fantastic story.

My only complaint, which is a longstanding issue I have with a lot of shows, is that the writing for Dandadan—and, unfortunately also My Dress-Up Darling—seems far more comfortable with ascribing interiority to its nerdy outcast male character than to its slightly-more-with-it female character (who, in both cases, turns out to be a closet dork). As a woman who felt like I often had to hide my nerdy interests as a teen girl, I find Momo and Marin (the female protagonist on My Dress-Up Darling) to be very relatable, or at least, I feel that way about what little I see of their interior thoughts and perspectives. Even though I would argue Momo is the protagonist of Dandadan, it’s the male character Okarun who is the emotional core, and the one whose thoughts we most often hear about in dialogue. On My Dress-Up Darling, it’s male character Gojo who is definitely the lead character, so it makes sense that we get less of Marin’s thoughts, but it means that her motivations are often as mysterious to us as they are to Gojo.

It’s too bad, because Marin is an altogether fascinating presence on My Dress-Up Darling. A popular high school girl who works as a model as a part-time job, she’s used to being seen as beautiful, and she’s comfortable in her body in ways that many teenagers are not. It’s her personal interests that she holds closer to her chest, such as her devotion to a series of fictional dating sims with lots of erotic scenes that put a harem of female characters into submissive sexual situations. The show doesn’t really get into the idea of whether Marin is attracted to the girls in the games; her crush on Gojo is undisputed, of course. But in the most recent season, she gets a body pillow of one of the game’s female characters and spends several minutes humping the pillow in her bedroom while Gojo looks on, dumbfounded. Even if not necessarily an expression of a queer crush, Marin’s behavior here reflects her unabashed interest in alternative sexual expression.

The interesting thing about the will-they-won’t-they arc between Marin and Gojo is that Gojo isn’t even secure enough in his sense of self to have a fully realized crush on Marin. He sees her as completely out of his league, and so in every interaction they have, he forces himself to be reserved and polite at all times. When Marin tries to flirt with him, he perceives this as her making fun of him and of the very idea of them being together, because of course they could only ever be friends. Meanwhile, his insistence upon this is what leaves Marin regularly distraught, as she does realize she has feelings for Gojo, but all of her normal flirting maneuvers don’t seem to work on him at all. The only thing that would work would be for both of these teens is to be honest with one another, but they’re teenagers, so that’s not gonna happen.

Meanwhile, the two of them navigate the cosplay scene together, as well as regular conversations about gender roles in society. Gojo has great shame about his interest in sewing because it’s “girly,” and Marin (as well as other cosplayers) makes it clear that his interest is actually cool and his talents are very impressive. Meanwhile, Marin grows to feel comfortable telling Gojo about more of her quirkier interests in sex games, and he is similarly non-judgmental and often endearingly befuddled by learning about pornography variants of which his naive self was previously unaware. The show is surprisingly progressive about all of this, considering it’s also a show about Marin undressing for Gojo to let him measure her (for example), or Marin delightedly dancing around in a bunny pin-up outfit that Gojo sewed for her.

Both shows make me laugh, but they also strike me deep in my heart, remembering how it felt to be a teenager who often felt misunderstood and weird. It’s deeply validating to meet somebody else who also feels that way, even if their reasons aren’t the same as yours, and that’s what both shows are ultimately about. They’re still sex comedies with jokes about boners or whatever, but that’ll just catch you off guard for when there’s suddenly a really moving episode about gender identity or grief at losing a parent. Above all, they’re both shows that go a lot deeper than I ever expected them to go based on how they started out. I’m glad I stuck around.

Maddy Myers has worked as a video game critic and journalist since 2007; she has previously worked for Polygon, Kotaku, The Mary Sue, Paste Magazine, and the Boston Phoenix. She co-hosts a video game podcast called Triple Click, as well as an X-Men podcast called The Mutant Ages. When she is not writing or podcasting, she composes electro-pop music under the handle MIDI Myers. Her personal website is midimyers.com.