My Dress-Up Darling Season 2

Episode 18

If Gojo is happy, I'm happy. If the show keeps finding new ways to make him happy, I'll rank it highly. I don't need a stronger metric for the quality of the show outside of that, and I'm not even joking, considering how much his happiness and development are intrinsically tied to the show's intended purpose.

This performance and cosplay feel like the first real climax of the season, yet it doesn't feel like this big explosive thing, but I don't think it's supposed to. This was just a school festival competition. Gojo's classmates wanted to beat the other classes, but I don't know what they would've won. Everyone just wanted to lock in and do the best that they could, and that's all I needed. There wasn't anything grand or tangible on the line here, and that's good because it would've taken away from the major developments that Gojo went through in this episode. Last week, he started recognizing that it's okay to ask for help, and now he is looking inward and recognizes his place with his own story.

It was adorable and precious how his classmates wanted to make an event out of watching him put on Marin's makeup. The way that Gojo tries so hard to downplay his importance and role in things is one of the saddest yet most relatable aspects about his character. Unlike a lot of other stories where people try to present themselves as the main character, Gojo is a main character who almost refuses to see himself as such. You could make an argument that there's some meta-commentary going on there, considering that Marin is very much the face of the franchise and the show revolves around her. I would sooner argue that Gojo is the real and definitive main character of the show. The way he tries to accept the fact that he is a side character in HER story, only for her to shift all of the attention and praise over to him after she's done with her performance, should be proof of that.

Gojo is so close to realizing that he's absolutely in love with this woman, and it's almost hilarious. We know Gojo holds Marin in very high regard. He sees her as a source of inspiration; she ironically keeps him grounded despite how eccentric she acts, and as far as we know, she is the only person that he has called beautiful, which holds a lot of emotional meaning to him. He did call her that back in season one, but it was in a passive way that I don't even think he realized. Here, he is so starstruck by her that he explicitly starts putting the pieces together and almost verbally acknowledges it to himself before he gets cut short. This makes sense, because Gojo's insecurities are slowly being stripped away, which means there is less in the way for him to realize just how much this girl means to him. If we have more or less closed out Gojo's insecurities when it comes to developing friends, then the next step is to realize that he is allowed to have strong feelings for another person like that. I hope that ends up being the final direction that this season takes.

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