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While live-action anime adaptations have a rocky history here in the West, they’ve been a thing for years in Japan. The upcoming My Dress-Up Darling show coming to Japanese television in October 2024 is the latest in a long line of series to jump from animation to live-action, but it does have a unique problem. Not only does it have to produce the absolutely stellar and obnoxiously detailed cosplays from the anime; it also has to carefully tackle one of the steamiest scenes I’ve seen this side of hentai.

Fans of the My Dress-Up Darling anime and manga know exactly what I’m talking about. Episode 11. The Love Hotel Episode.  Marin, in her ongoing desire to get the perfect pictures of her Liz-Kyun cosplay Gojo has made, booked the pair into a love hotel for a few hours. While things begin in a mostly platonic manner, the teenagers soon end up in a, shall we say, compromising position. Namely, Marin straddling his lap on the bed as they overhear the couple next door in a decidedly biblical activity.

Sure, this scene is dripping with fan-service in a way that I don’t think anyone was prepared for, including an explicit shot of Gojo’s growing… excitement, but there was still an innocence to it in the anime that kept it from feeling too creepy. These are young people who were simply caught up in the moment, just enjoying the act of cosplay and briefly forgetting that they are horny teenagers. The My Dress-Up Darling anime and manga barely got away with this scene – but only just. This is definitely one of those episodes where you don’t want people suddenly walking in on you watching it, but it stops just short of feeling downright pornographic.

The live-action My Dress-Up Darling has some challenges ahead. They’ve got to make the overwhelming personality of Marin Kitagawa somehow feel cute and endearing when slapped on a real person who can’t make the exaggerated facial expressions of an anime girl, for one. But their biggest hurdle is going to be portraying this scene, with all the sordid details within it, without us all needing to collectively go for a cold shower afterward. Putting real people in this situation, which is sexually charged from the start, could feel like the setup to something significantly more adult than the slice-of-life romcom that My Dress-Up Darling is. How they’re going to handle it, I honestly can't imagine.

Some things are easier to get away with in anime – the love hotel scene in My Dress-Up Darling is one of them, but my hat is off to the team of the live-action show for trying.

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