Popverse's top stories of the day

• Milhouse lives! What will happen to The Simpsons after voice actor Pamela Hayden's retirement?
• Watch the official Dragon Ball DAIMA panel from NYCC 2024!
• Before Doctor Doom takes over the MCU, he's taking over Marvel Comics with 2025's One World Under Doom

She’s one of the first characters we see in the My Dress-Up Darling anime and yet, until recently, she was a mystery to fans. The girl appears right at the beginning of both the anime and manga and tells Gojo Wakana that his interest in hina dolls is weird and creepy sets the tone for the entire story, but who exactly is she? For years, fans speculated about her identity but the manga only recently explained who the mysterious girl at the start of My Dress-Up Darling is and why her words Gojo so deeply.

We’ll be discussing heavy spoilers for some of the recent chapters of the My Dress-Up Darling manga so be warned before you proceed.

Who is the girl who makes fun of Gojo Wakana in My Dress-Up Darling?

The moment when that young girl told Gojo Wakana that “Dolls are for girls” was the genesis of the neuroses that he carried with him into middle school, so her identity was a mystery that needed to be unraveled eventually. Who was this girl and why did her words cut so deeply into Wakana? Turns out, it has a lot to do with when she said what she did as well as her words themselves.

The girl Gojo Wakana refers to as Non-chan is actually Nobara Aoyagi, his cousin who he lived with after his parents died when he was young. The pair were close, but Nobara struggled to help her cousin through his grief. He was always in his room, hiding away – until his grandfather showed Gojo the hina dolls he had made. The sight of something so beautiful and delicate brought about Gojo’s first genuine smile since his parents’ deaths and sparked a sudden fit of jealousy from Nobara.

It is the timing of Nobara’s words that made them cut so deeply into Gojo. He was still emotionally fragile from losing his parents and in a time of upheaval in his life. He was suddenly shamed for his interest in the first thing that had sparked joy in his heart, which made him want to hide that part of him away forever. Aside from the excessively slow-burn romance of the story, the most important arc of My Dress-Up Darling has been Gojo learning to embrace that side of himself rather than hide it away.

After that moment, Nobara and Gojo rarely, if ever, saw each other until their teenage years. Then, Chapter 103 of the My Dress-Up Darling manga rolls around and Nobara is back in Gojo’s life. Thankfully, she’s not nearly as childish as she was back then. Nobara quickly apologizes and explains that she wanted to be the one to help Gojo find happiness and was jealous that he turned to hina dolls instead. The two have a heart-to-heart before Gojo heads over to Marin’s house and finally finds the courage to confess how he feels.

This probably isn’t the last time we see Nobara Aoyagi in My Dress-Up Darling, though it seems that the mystery around her identity has been largely resolved. How much she goes on to feature will probably depend on how long the series continues now that Gojo and Marin appear to be a couple. Once a series crosses the will-they-won’t-they line, it can be tough to keep the dramatic tension up.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

• Why the finales of My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen, and One Piece feel like the end of an era in manga
• Why is One Piece more popular now that the anime is 25 years old? We asked around and found out
• Dan Da Dan is weird, profoundly inappropriate, and the perfect anime this season
• Why One Piece's Monkey D. Luffy is the perfect anime hero for the dark times ahead
• 40 years after its debut, Dragon Ball is a pop culture force like few others