Popverse's top stories

• Jeremy Renner and his Marvel co-stars laughed at Thor’s foam hammer when they made the first Avengers film
• Simon Kinberg on writing X-Men movies, producing Glenn Powell's The Running Man remake, and co-creating Star Wars Rebels [Popversations]
• Which Dragon Ball Z characters are the most painful to voice, according to the voice cast themselves

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... 

• Aggretsuko vs Chainsaw Man: Two Wildly different anine with the same anti-capitalist message
• The Summer Anime season return of Kaiju No. 8, Sakamoto Days, & Dan Da Dan are forcing me to break my vow of watching less anime
• From Tomo-Chan to Oshi No Ko: How some of your favorite manga creators got their start in hentai
• Piracy is baked into anime's past, but, like Crunchyroll, we should move on from it
• Flying whales, mechs, and Miyazaki vibes: Inside Netflix's Leviathan anime with the people who made it
• How AI translations of manga continues the 'enshitification' of the medium, and why Japanese publishers are "less precious" about it
• I never wanted a Cyberpunk Edgerunners sequel, but God help me I'm going to watch it
• The Summer Hikaru Died delivers its cosmic horror at an agonizingly slow pace
• The one thing that Dan Da Dan does better than Demon Slayer ever did
• Studio Ghibli movies have never been as cozy as you think they are and that's what makes them magic