Wakana Gojo has grown up with his grandfather, a talented Hina Doll artisan, and he’s fallen in love with both the dolls and the craft it takes to make them. He hides this from everyone around him though; after some cruel comments when he was younger Wakana is afraid to ever open up to his classmates again and is seen as a bit of a loner.
One day the sewing machine at home breaks so Wakana goes to borrow the one at school, only to run into his classmate Marin Kitagawa and when she realizes he can sew she asks if he can help her make a cosplay of her favorite character.
From a hentai visual novel?!
My review copy of My Dress-Up Darling did not arrive shrink-wrapped but I must imagine that retail copies are since this is an incredibly ecchi series. It’s hard to flip to a random page and not have some kind of suggestive framing at least. While there was certainly a way to tell this story where it was less, horny, I can’t exactly blame Shinichi Fukuda for taking a hobby that does involve taking your clothes off a lot (sewing clothes) and an in-universe source material that needs to chill (Marin’s definitely 18+ visual novel aimed at gamers who find women attractive) and mixing it up with a lot of fanservice.
Most of the shots seem to be framed from Wakana’s eye-line, so panty shots and the like only occur when Marin physically has the high ground. While I’m not sure if that makes the fanservice any more or less leery it is an interesting touch. This also does mean that most of the fanservice occurs either in the context of the visual novel or when Marin is getting changed in front of Wakana, i.e. it’s consensual and all of that combined went a long way to making me more okay with it.
Honestly, I found the relationship between Wakana and Marin to be rather cute. I enjoyed seeing both of them getting into the cosplay hobby and just enjoying it. Fukuda goes into as much detail for the steps needed to create Marin’s cosplay that a sports manga might to explain the rules of the game; her research seems to have paid off and she was able to keep the story moving without feeling like the crafting details were bogging down the pace.
The preview for volume 2 does seem to introduce some tension, the dreaded “con crunch” as the event Marin is hoping to debut her cosplay at is in two weeks, and I think I’m going to stick around and see how it turns out!