Karen's Anime Blog

This week, it’s time to prepare for that school anime staple, the cultural festival. Gojo and Marin’s class decides to do “Russian Roulette Takoyaki” and err, I have some concerns. I’ve had takoyaki before and liked it, but would I really want to eat takoyaki when some percentage of the fish balls have a giant wad of wasabi or something in there? Oh well, to each their own. The kids in class are super-motivated to get top rank in the festival, and it’s nice to see. The kids in my school back then were always way too “cool for school,” quite literally, to lower themselves to caring about a school contest. Watching these school anime is kind of like experiencing a better version of that time than I actually lived, just a little bit.

More relevant to our purposes though, there will be a beauty pageant. Since she’s a model, everyone wants Marin to be the contestant. There’s a twist though: it’s cross-dressing. Marin could not be any more psyched for this than if the winner got a year’s supply of free chocolate and snacks. What kind of school is this where cross-dressing is encouraged? A pretty damn cool school, I’ll say.

“Yes I would love to dress as a man! I would like to dress as ALL THE MEN!!!!”

Marin wants to dress as Rei from The Student Council President is the No. 1 Host, which brings us to what is rapidly becoming my favorite segment on this show: the anime-within-an-anime. PrezHost isn’t as in-depth as WitchWatch gave us with the fake shonen Uran Mirage earlier this season, but still, it’s pretty good.

The two faces of Rei-sama, star of PrezHost.

PrezHost is a charming otome-game type of setup, similar to Uta No Prince-Sama, where a young high school girl from a girls’ school is surrounded by a bunch of handsome hosts from a nightclub. The student council president, Rei Koyogi, moonlights as a host at the club, with the help of a trusty wig. The show plays it totally straight, and by the time this segment was done, I wanted to watch a real anime with this premise. They even reveal later that Rei’s patrons know she’s a woman, which surprised me. Everyone is very supportive of genderqueer performance in My Dress-Up Darling, even the fake characters.

How is this not already an otome game?

Back to Marin and Gojo, they have a strategy session to plan the Rei costume. What’s interesting about this is that Gojo is getting increasingly vocal about their artistic choices; he’s not just sewing the costume, he’s visualizing how to best play the character, including the props and the makeup. I guess he always had those kind of feelings regarding his work with his traditional dolls, but it’s great to see him so confident about something. Marin realizes that Gojo has all her measurements memorized and it makes her feel kind of vulnerable; if she got to continue that train of thought before being interrupted, I bet she would have concluded that Gojo is the kind of guy she doesn’t mind having that information.

The trouble is, they’re pressed for time, so Marin declares she’s going to make the costume herself. Oh no, no Marin darling, that’s not a good idea. Gojo foolishly goes along with this, but then when he shows up to work on the cultural festival project with the other kids, they don’t understand why he isn’t working on Marin’s costume. Gojo assumed he had to do everything, never considering the fact that the other students might pick up the slack for him while he works on the costume. Gojo is learning that he doesn’t have to soldier on and take everything upon himself, which is good…but I wonder. Sometimes you really do have to do everything yourself and it sucks, but Gojo’s mistake was assuming that was the case without giving his classmates a chance to weigh in first.

Gojo lets the class know that Marin is doing the shopping for the costume, and everyone freaks out: Marin cannot be trusted with shopping, she’ll just buy snacks! Cute, but I think they’re all underestimating Marin’s devotion to cosplay.

Marin, goddess of snacks with zero nutritional value.

Gojo catches up with Marin and they go to the fabric store, where they meet up with Usami, Handicrafts Manager, who is probably my favorite minor character this season. They pick out a nice, though expensive fabric for the Rei suit, and it looks like we’re ready for the Beauty Pageant next episode. I wonder what kind of performance Marin will do in her outfit?

Usami is “Handicrafts Manager.” That’s so cool.

Kind of an unusual episode since so much of it was dedicated to PrezHost, but the show is still tons of fun.