My Dress-Up Dolling: Be Cringe and Be Free
A few years ago, a friend of mine excitedly recommended I watch My Dress-Up Darling, an anime that was then airing its first season. When I sat down to watch the first episode, my expectations weren’t very high - I hadn’t yet seen it but it had already left an impression. Part of that was the name, My Dress-Up Darling, and the rest was the chatter I’d seen about it online. Together, I got the idea it was a cheesy, fanservice-y, self-insert romance anime, which had never really been my thing. I still hit play on that first episode, but I had already made up my mind on what I’d think of it.
My Dress-Up Darling follows Wakana Gojo, a lonely high-schooler with a passion for crafting hina dolls - tiny, hand-painted dolls wearing historical Japanese clothing. Gojo’s dolls are both the reason he gets up in the morning and the reason he’s always alone. As a kid, Gojo was berated by a close friend for being a boy who liked dolls, and a decade later those mental scars haven’t faded. At school, he puts on a friendly persona but keeps everyone at an arm’s length, letting no one in on his true passion. It’s a defense mechanism - if his peers don’t know what he’s into, they can’t possibly use it against him. They can’t hurt him.
As he idly stares out a classroom window, Gojo can’t help but wonder if the world would be better off without him. What he doesn’t know is that his life is about to change. One day, Gojo sneaks into his school’s Home Ec room to sew some outfits for his dolls. He’s shocked when Marin Kitagawa, the most popular girl in his class as well as a model, suddenly walks in on him. While Gojo expects her to be repulsed by his hobby, she’s instead fascinated by it and elated to find a guy who knows how to use a sewing machine. She then enlists Gojo to help her create a cosplay of one of her favorite characters. She does this by asking a flustered Gojo to turn around so that she can strip out of her clothes, changing into a black dress she had tried but failed to sew together herself. She then proudly shows off the character she’s cosplaying: a character from the (fictional) adult visual novel Saint ♡ Slippery's Academy for Girls.
My first impression that My Dress-Up Darling was full of fanservice wasn’t wrong. While I’d find out much later that the second season tones it down a lot, in that first season it’s inescapable. You know the Final Destination movies, where Death itself kills a bunch of people via elaborate accidents? My Dress-Up Darling’s first season is like that, but instead of people dying it’s putting a flustered Gojo in incredibly intimate and often contrived situations with Marin; be it forcing him to take her measurements, or by accidentally booking a room in a “love hotel” for a cosplay photoshoot.
Despite how shameless it could get, I don’t think the fanservice was why I dropped it after that first episode. I knew thanks to online chatter that, over time, Gojo would lower his guard. He’d grow closer to Marin, who doesn’t just tolerate his love of dolls but is enamored by it. Every person who finds out about Gojo’s hobby thinks it’s the coolest thing, happy to have a friend who can sew or help out with makeup. Gojo has shut himself away from the world for years only to suddenly find out it’s kinder than he’d thought. I thought it felt like a show written by someone who’d gone through the same thing - maybe, I thought, a guy who was really into dolls. Without doing any more research, I figured that the person behind My Dress-Up Darling was a guy who was self-conscious about an embarrassing hobby. I imagined what would’ve driven someone to create Marin Kitagawa, and I assumed that she was the ideal girlfriend that this man wished he had - an attractive, cosplaying girlfriend whose problems only Gojo can solve, whose body the camera seems to thrill in lingering on, whose interest in anime and adult content seems almost tailor-made to endear her to My Dress-Up Darling’s male audience.
But more than anything, I didn’t believe in what My Dress-Up Darling was selling. It was 2022, and only a few months earlier I had created a Twitter alt for a hobby I wanted to get into but knew I needed to keep close to the chest. Only one person knew - the same friend who’d recommended the show in the first place - and this new hobby really wasn’t his thing. I thought that if people knew what I was into, that that was it - it’d be over. Like Gojo, I was a pretty normal guy on the surface, and I thought that image would be shattered forever if word ever got out. I thought My Dress-Up Darling was wish fulfillment written by a guy with an embarrassing interest because I was a guy with an embarrassing interest.
It wasn’t until recently that I‘d found out how wrong I’d been about My Dress-Up Darling - It wasn’t even written by a man. It also wasn’t until recently, nearly three years after watching that first episode, that I let another friend in on that thing I wanted to try, that thing that I’d hated myself for. Like Gojo, I had found out that people could be kinder than I’d thought.
Gojo can still perfectly remember the day he saw his first hina doll. His parents died when he was little, so he lives with his grandpa, who owns a shop selling them. One day, he brought a young Gojo over to a display showing some dolls. Gojo was immediately awestruck. The colorful, intricately woven patterns on their dresses, the hand-painted makeup on their pale faces, all of it created and applied by hand down to the most minute detail. It was impossible for Gojo to see them and not be enthralled.
Gojo can also still perfectly remember the first time someone found out he liked dolls. He was still a kid, and a friend was visiting him at his grandpa’s shop. When he showed one off to her, she called him a freak for being a boy who liked dolls and said they weren’t friends anymore, then ran out of the shop with her head down.
Years later, Gojo and Marin have grown closer. He’s sewn a couple cosplays for her by now, all done with the same precision he sews his dolls’ clothes with. At a photoshoot one day, they meet another cosplayer named Chitose Amano. The character Amano is cosplaying is decked out in a frilly pink skirt, a blazer, and a pink shoulder-length wig with a cute bow on top. Anyone who recognizes the character - Marin included - immediately gushes over the costume and how well Amano pulls it off. A few minutes from now, Amano will shock the two by politely telling them he’s actually a man.
Amano can still perfectly remember the first time he crossdressed. He’s a skinny, feminine-looking guy with a naturally soft voice, something which made him the target of bullying throughout school. He had no confidence and hated himself. One day, his sister decided to put him in a wig and some makeup, as well as dress him in some of her clothes. When she was done, Amano looked in the mirror and was shocked at what he saw but knew he’d found something special. Over time, he got even better at crossdressing - his sister helped teach him how to do his own makeup, and his supportive mom would compliment him when his skills impoved. Amano can also still perfectly remember the first time someone outside his family found out he crossdressed. One day, his girlfriend opened up his armoire and found a trove of brightly-colored dresses. Thinking they were another girl’s, she accused Amano of cheating; when he told her that they were his, she demanded he throw them in the trash. Where Gojo had hidden himself away because of a poor reaction to his hobby, Amano was instead emboldened by it; he ends his recollection of this to Gojo and Marin by happily proclaiming “I dumped that chick on the spot!” Amano doesn’t say it, but maybe he’s only able to look at that and laugh because of the support he’d had back then from his sister, a kind of support that Gojo had lacked for years. By embracing cosplay, Amano’s life improved, telling the two that “The more I cosplayed, the more confident I became. I stopped being such a nervous wreck around other people.”
These moments - a person Gojo and Marin meet sharing the first time they found that thing they’re passionate about - pop up over the course of My Dress-Up Darling, and it’s usually enough to make Gojo and/or Marin cry. Both of them remember that first time they found something special. Maybe these memories stick so hard because you know deep down that what you like isn’t normal. Boys aren’t supposed to like dolls or dress up in skirts. What girl is supposed to be into something called Saint ♡ Slippery's Academy for Girls? If the love you feel for whatever it is that’s dear to you isn’t something you were ever meant to have, you naturally hold it tightly to your chest, as if at any moment someone could try to rip it away from you. With something so fragile that you’re holding with such care, it’s impossible to forget how you ever found it in the first place.
I can still perfectly remember the moment I first found my thing. I was a sophomore in college and it was late one night. My roommate and I were both sitting on top of our beds, staring at our phones. We were best friends and we’d recently started watching anime together, which is why I had followed a bunch of anime accounts on a Twitter I have long since abandoned. I was scrolling through my feed, not really thinking about anything, when I landed on something one of them had retweeted. It was a couple-months-old tweet from a voice actor. She was at an anime con and had posed for a photo with someone cosplaying a character she’d voiced - Elizabeth from the JRPG Persona 3. As far as tweets from voice actors go, it was pretty normal stuff.
What wasn’t normal was the cosplay. It was amazing, don’t get me wrong. The cosplayer had totally nailed Elizabeth’s fit, and they’d even gone through the trouble of carrying her Persona Compendium - what’s essentially a really thick book - around an entire anime con, probably just to stay true to character. They looked exactly like Elizabeth, something that was really driven home by the giant Elizabeth mask they were wearing over their head.
The mask was what had caught me off guard. It looked like it had been lifted straight out of the game’s files, as if someone had taken Elizabeth’s character model and yanked it into reality. If another person hadn’t been standing next to them, I would’ve mistaken them for a figurine or a doll. Except for the wig, the mask seemed to be made entirely of plastic, covering the cosplayer’s entire head with Elizabeth’s, sculpted in a way that replicated the game’s anime art style. I stopped scrolling and just stared at it for a second. “This is kind of creepy-looking,” I remember thinking. And then I kept looking. And after a couple more seconds, I thought “This is the coolest shit I have ever seen.”
I figured this was a project the Elizabeth cosplayer had put together and that it was a shame no one else had ever done something like it. Then I opened the tweet’s comments, and there were replies from people who did the same thing - cosplaying a character they loved, but with the added step of wearing a big, plastic mask mimicking their face. I opened up one of these accounts and saw that they followed hundreds of people who did the same thing, and that those accounts then followed even more people doing the same. I spent another half hour - probably longer - just scrolling through Twitter, looking at these cosplays. I was enthralled by it. Every person’s mask was different. Some cosplayed OCs, but most did established characters, and most characters were girls. If the character already existed, their mask was usually sculpted in a way that mimicked the art style of the original work, although the mask maker’s own unique style always seemed to seep through. To really sell the illusion, cosplayers generally stayed totally silent while in costume, and to make sure they matched their mask’s skin tone they usually wore a sort of skin-colored morphsuit called a hadatai. The more I read, the more my interest grew. I was falling down a rabbit hole fast.
In hindsight, animegao kigurumi (Japanese for literally “anime-face mascot” and usually just shortened to “kig”) is one of those things that I look at and go “oh, of course this would be my thing.” I had always thought mascot costumes were cool and I was just starting to really get into anime; kig is such a natural blend of the two that it feels almost laser-targeted to be something I’d like. There’s also the relative anonymity that kig provides. I’d thought about cosplaying before but only ever wanted to cosplay girls, and I was a masc-looking guy who was too self-conscious to ever attach his face to a crossplay. With kig, I could get rid of what had always been showstoppers; the mask and hadatai would hide my face and body hair, and staying silent while in costume meant no one would hear my masculine voice. People wouldn’t see me trying to dress up as a character, they’d just see the character. Every excuse I’d had for why I could never try cosplaying had suddenly become a non-factor.
To my right, my roommate and best friend was still sitting on top of his bed, scrolling through his phone. He’s a huge fan of Persona 3 - I’m sure I could’ve turned to him and said, “Hey, look at this cool Elizabeth cosplay I found!” Instead, I rolled over, tucking my phone away so that he couldn’t see my screen. I’d always kept whatever interest I had in costumes and crossplaying to myself, never telling anyone because I figured it was a little cringe. I knew this would have to stay close to the chest for a bit, too. Soon after, when I found out about kig’s reputation online, hiding it became something I knew I’d have to do for a long, long time.
There’s this one image that sort of haunts the kig community. It’s a low-quality photo of a bunch of kigs cosplaying characters from the Love Live! franchise. They’re all sitting in a classroom, staring directly at the camera. Overlaid in big block letters are the words “WHY ARE YOU SCARED? ISN’T THIS WHAT YOU WANTED?”
It’s a meme that’s meant to do two things. The first is to make fun of people who are too into anime, the kinds who fantasize on the daily about dating their favorite anime character. The second is to point out how creepy the cosplays all look, and honestly, I can’t blame anyone who feels unnerved by them. You know that the cosplayers under the masks are all looking at the camera, but the eyes on the masks themselves all seem to be unblinkingly staring off in different directions. The masks themselves are also older and uncanny-looking, and even though I think there’s a charm to them I still can’t deny that they look off.
Every now and then, this meme or a variant of it resurfaces on sites like Reddit and Twitter. When it does, the comments are filled with people expressing their sheer terror at seeing a bunch of anime-girls-but-real sitting in a classroom. Some commenters make bets that some or all of the cosplayers in the picture are actually men, while others just straight up fetishize them.
To the meme’s credit, kig cosplayers do often have fun with the uncanniness inherent to the medium, and there are plenty of cosplayers out there who find that specific meme funny. What you won’t find as many fans of, however, are comments like those, which unfortunately aren’t isolated to those posts. To follow this hobby online means that it’s a fact that you’ll see people call it creepy over and over again, be it in replies to that meme or posts from cosplayers themselves. As a fan, it sucks, but it’s something I think anyone in this space is used to; regardless of how much someone likes their hobby, the way other people feel about it is ultimately out of their control.
What’s harder to handle then are the comments made not about the masks but about the people under them. The aforementioned “That’s definitely a guy, right?” comments sometimes go further, stating that the person underneath has to be a gross man who’s only dressing up like this to fulfill some kind of fetish. The combination of an unblinking anime girl mask, a skin-colored morphsuit, and the not-knowing of who’s really under there all evokes imagery of Ed Gein or Buffalo Bill: psychotic, dangerous men who literally hide themselves under a woman’s skin.
At first, these comments didn’t really bother me. After all, I’m not a cosplayer myself, I’m just a fan - it’s not like any of them were directed at me specifically. Over time though, that changed. Where I first couldn’t tell anyone about kig because I thought I’d be made fun of, eventually keeping it secret felt more like a necessity. I’m a guy who wants to cosplay through kig, and all of the characters I want to dress up as are women - what would my female friends think if they found out? Could I really blame them if they thought I was a creep? The more posts I saw and comments I read, the more I was worn down. I’d often end up wondering how I became the kind of person who wanted to do something so vulgar and wrong. How would anyone ever want to be around someone who was such a creep? The same thoughts colored my interactions with people in the community, especially when they showed any interest in the kink side of the hobby. When cosplayers kindly messaged me to offer advice or ask who I wanted to cosplay, I’d always assume the worst, that there had to be some sort of sinister motive that I just wasn’t seeing.
I thought that anyone outside of the hobby would see me as a threat and that anyone within it could be a threat themselves. I thought that cutting myself off from both sides would keep me safe, but all it did was keep me isolated. Kig had become something to look forward to - getting my own mask had shot towards the top of my bucket list. It was also becoming the reason I kept more and more to myself.
One of the many assumptions I’d made about My Dress-Up Darling was that it was wish fulfillment written by a man with a secret, embarrassing hobby. Apart from being mean, it was also mostly wrong. The author, a woman named Shinichi Fukuda, does concede that Marin was partially written as wish fulfillment, but for the much simpler fantasy its male, teen audience was likely to have: wanting to date a cosplayer. In an interview, Fukuda writes: “I do my best to make sure anyone can enjoy reading this manga regardless of gender. But with Marin, I tried to fulfill the dreams of men who previously thought 'I wanted to date a cosplayer' or 'I wanted to date a girl like this in high school.'” The idea for Gojo and Marin to validate each other’s hobbies didn’t come from Fukuda having a niche hobby. Instead, it came from when a friend who cosplayed told her that her boyfriend had threatened to break up with her if she didn’t stop. My Dress-Up Darling is wish fulfillment, but none of that was fueled by a fantasy Fukuda herself had. Instead, “...when writing this manga, I wanted cosplayers, or other people with hobbies they were really devoted to, who read it to see Wakana and Marin as a boyfriend and girlfriend who affirmed each other as they continued their hobbies.”
I’d be lying if I said that a lot of what was in that first season didn’t still bother me. Marin’s work as a model naturally means that she’s comfortable in her body, sure. But her forwardness and lack of boundaries towards Gojo, as well as how the camera often hungrily lingers on her, veers too often into uncomfortable, contrived territory. My Dress-Up Darling is ecchi - an anime with a focus on suggestive content - but that doesn’t mean it needs to be creepy. At the same time, there’s so much going on under the hood. Characters like Gojo and Amano are ones I really see myself in, seeing in them a part of me that I generally keep hidden. The kindness with which Gojo and Marin treat each other’s hobbies, as well as how genuinely interested they are in the people they meet, is heartwarming. When people discuss what they liked about the show, more often than not it’s something about how kind it is, with the fanservice being thought of more as an afterthought than the main course.
If My Dress-Up Darling’s first season was a pendulum that rapidly swung between the two extremes of “creepy” and “thoughtful,” the second season is one that swung towards the latter and never swung back. Marin still wears revealing outfits, but the awkward shots of her body the camera used to linger on are gone; apart from some flashbacks to the first season, I cannot remember a single moment where I felt things had gone too far. Instead, the show spends its time building a supporting cast and focusing on their stories. There’s a woman who hid her interest in anime until she moved away from a discouraging family, and there’s a female cosplayer who once worried she couldn’t pull off her favorite character because he’s a guy. It continues to celebrate what makes these characters tick without ever treating them as objects. I think Amano’s portrayal is especially worth noting given how often men who cosplay women are fetishized, both online and in anime. It would have been easy to make the same, tired jokes at his expense that so many other works do, but My Dress-Up Darling exercises restraint and treats him like a human being. Amano crossdresses but he is never the butt of a joke, and while his hobby is important to who he is, it’s his thoughtfulness and perceptiveness that ultimately define his character.
I never would have watched the show and found out how wrong I’d been had a kig friend not started My Dress-Up Darling-pilling me pretty hard. Like me, she has gripes with the fanservice, but still couldn’t recommend it enough. By now, I’d seen plenty of praise for the show and never really bought it into it, but it felt different coming from a friend in the community. I’m so glad I took her up on it, and the irony of writing off this show as gross nonsense while I was worried people would do the same to myself is not lost on me.
It’s now the end of 2025, about six years since I first stumbled on kig. I’m still waiting to commission my first cosplay - masks are expensive and I have some life stuff to take care of first. Over the course of the last few years, I’ve grown more confident in my place in the community. By opening up a bit, I’ve even made friends in it, like the one who recommended giving My Dress-Up Darling another shot. All of them already have cosplays of their own, and they’ve been more than willing to provide me with encouragement and advice. I used to think I’d never be able to talk about kig stuff with other people, so actually being able to do that has been great. I’m so thankful for it.
Watching My Dress-Up Darling for the first time, I assumed it was just wish fulfillment because I’d never seen what would happen if I opened up about kig to other people. I thought that if I did I’d be shunned by my friends at best and declared a creep by anyone who knew at worst. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Last year, I finally decided to upon up to a close friend about kig - the same one who was in the room when I fell down this rabbit hole to begin with. The kig friend who’d later recommend My Dress-Up Darling had given me some encouragement, and I thought it was finally time to see what would happen. I tried to keep things short, but I let him know that I wanted to cosplay, that this was the character, that it’d look like this, and that I was worried what people would think. His response?
“Dude, that’s pretty normal to me.”
Later, when I half-jokingly told him I’d been bottling that up for nearly five years, he laughed and told me it was fine. It took such a long time to build up the courage to open up, and suddenly that anxiety was gone, at least for a little while. I cannot tell you how nice it felt.
It’s been a year since then. Over the few years I’ve been a part of it, the kig community has grown a lot. Masks are still expensive, but they’re more accessible than ever thanks to the availability of 3D printers and a rise in Western mask makers. You still get a lot people dunking on the hobby and those who do it, but more and more I see kind replies to kigurumi cosplayers when they share something they’re proud of. As someone watching from the sidelines, it’s been great to see, and I’m excited to see how this hobby continues to grow.
I still have times where I question what being a guy who's into this means for me. I’m like if you took a guy who likes dolls and a guy who likes crossdressing and smashed them together, after all. It’s also something that I still keep relatively hidden, only letting people in on if I really trust them. This seems to be common within the community. In a 2022 survey of Western kigs, 56% of respondents indicated that they kept their hobby a secret. In my own interactions with other cosplayers and fans, I’ve found that most tend to keep it a secret for the same reasons I do: not wanting to out themselves in fear that people won’t take it well. As much as I and many others in the community wish we could be open about it, kig’s still something most people have to keep hidden. Kigurumi will never be for everyone, because dressing-up-as-an-anime-figurine-but-real can never be everyone’s cup of tea. However, that doesn’t mean it’s something that deserves to be locked up in a cell forever, its key long since thrown away.
Maybe you, like me, are someone with a hobby you’re often embarrassed by. If you are, then maybe it’s kig (I’m posting this to my kig account, after all), or you wear makeup and dresses in your spare time, or you’re a man who likes dolls. Maybe, at some point in your life, someone taught you that that part of you was worthless. They might have been making fun of you, or you just might’ve overheard them toss out unkind words about a thing they didn’t know you cared about. So, like me and so many others, you might have bottled it up, believing that that thing you hold close is something you were never supposed to have. Whatever that thing is, it can only ever be a dark secret to stay ashamed of and hide away forever if you let it. It’s by allowing people you trust - people with brains wired the same way as yours, people who care about you and not how out there that thing might be - to help you carry whatever it is you hold close that it stays something you are glad to be passionate about.
Most people might not be those kinds of people, but there are more of them out there than you’d think. Why not try to find them?
Works Cited
Towards the end of this essay, I mentioned a 2022 survey of Western kigs. The survey was conducted by ppilotco (shoutouts to the Doll & Kigu Jam they’re currently running) and its results were recently published online. I think it’s a great read and it touches on a lot of things I didn’t mention here. While I’m looking at kig from the perspective of a cisgender guy, their survey includes responses from transgender and non-binary cosplayers who find safety in the anonymity that kigurumi provides. It also goes into more detail on the kink side of the hobby, which I wasn't all that comfortable talking about in depth here. I’ll link the itch.io download to it here if you want to check it out.
I also mentioned an interview conducted with Shinichi Fukuda towards the end of My Dress-Up Darling’s first season. The original interview can be found here, but an official English translation wasn’t available; for that, I relied on this Reddit post from user HakumeiJin.
I wanted to write this essay for a long time, and even if it got way longer than I meant it to (oops) I’m still happy to have put it together. If you’re still reading, thanks for taking a look!
