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The ending of My Dress-Up Darling season 1 seems to set Marin and Gojo up for a pretty intense relationship. Episode 11 was certainly, ahem, memorable and Episode 12 included multiple sweet scenes that certainly felt like they were building toward some sort of conclusion. However, that isn’t the case, and, until recently in the manga, the pair have been going in circles since 2018. Unfortunately, the arcs coming up in My Dress-Up Darling season two are the worst offenders, so fans should brace themselves for a bit of a let-down.

The good news is that there are some really fun moments in the coming chapters of the My Dress-Up Darling manga. The Halloween party where the people around Marin start to question her relationship with Gojo and the school festival (there is always a school festival arc, after all) are both cute and have some good costumes that the pair work on together. Season two of My Dress-Up Darling should cover both these bits of the manga, so why do I have such low expectations for it? Because none of these arcs feel like they push the story forward.

When Marin was directly asked if she was dating Gojo, it should have been a catalyst for them to explore the feelings they very clearly have for each other. When Marin resolved to make the all-important confession to Gojo at the end of the school festival, it should have been a culmination of the will-they-won’t-they formula. And yet both times the pair managed to return to the status quo faster than a cosplayer changing into their civvies at the end of Comic Con.

I’m not saying that My Dress-Up Darling season two will be bad when it finally comes out. Provided that they stick to the manga, I think it will be pretty funny and have some great costume designs. Watching Marin try to tap into her masculine side while cosplaying a male character is going to be a treat. The problem is that none of this is going to feel like it is going anywhere. At the end of episode 24, our two main characters will feel frustratingly similar to how they were in episode 13 so what is the point of it all?

Especially after waiting so long, season two of My Dress-Up Darling is probably going to feel like a bit of a letdown for fans, though I would love to be proven wrong on this one.

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
• Dan Da Dan's most emotionally devastating sequence proves that sometimes words aren't necessary
• Gnosia, the "Among Us meets Everything Everywhere All at Once" visual novel is getting an anime adaptation that needs to be as weird as possible
• Assassination Classroom is a Shonen anime well worth revisiting, ten years on
• Sony is making big moves to own the anime industry by buying Kadokawa, publisher of Oshi no Ko, Sword Art Online, and Konosuba