A while back I reviewed the first season of 2.5 Dimensional Seduction. I found it to be a good companion series to My Dress Up Darling, and I was interested in seeing where it might go from there. I started reading the manga in advance of the upcoming second season, and have made it through a couple arcs that I think could be a solid endpoint for that season, and where things could go from there.
I’m going to refer you to my review of season 1 (linked above) for the core premise, so I can get into some of the material that comes after, and generally discuss some of the ways the manga suffers from the series and eventually evolves. Probably the biggest thing is that while the series is somewhat progressing into Masa getting something of a harem around him, it’s also getting him comfortable around women and with the idea that he can, in fact, be attracted to real people. This is set off by the training camp arc and Masa basically getting the pep talk that, to be a better cosplay photographer, he needs to think of how he views the people he’s taking pictures of as people, not just the characters they’re cosplaying as. If he’s only thinking of the character, then it’s no better than photographing figures.
The plots also generally focus on the interiority of the characters. Probably one of the strengths of the harem genre, in a weird way, is because the male protagonists are often somewhat bland, you need to make up for it by developing the romantic interests. In particular, here we get this through our protagonists doing a non-Liliel related group cosplay.
While the season of My Dress-up Darling we’ve gotten in the meantime has gotten more into cosplay as a scene, along with men cross-playing characters, it still hasn’t quite gotten into scene drama. 2.5 Dimensional Seduction, on the other hand, is still willing to get into this and that it’s a problem. The later volumes get into this as we meet the fourth of our Heavenly Queens of Cosplay, the “Queen of Kink” – who ended up developing a caustic personality after being bullied over the craft of their costumes as they were getting started.
All of that said, this is still a fanservice manga, so we get at least one scene per volume, even after the fanservice scales back, where we see the women topless, generally while chatting when changing into or out of a costume. Lime (the boy of the fraternal twins from earlier) is not immune to this, as he also gets a sexualized image of him changing – which I’m not sure is a positive step or not – Lime isn’t implied to be gender-fluid or trans-femme like the AMAB cross-player introduced in Dress-up Darling’s second season, and sexualized depictions of trans-femme characters from Cis-gendered authors can be fraught.
In all, 2.5 Dimensional Seduction, as a manga, feels like a smarter fanservice series than you’d normally think. It’s not the kind of wholesome horny that Dress Up Darling is, but it’s still holding things back enough that it allows introspection of the Cosplay scene rather than diving headfirst into the filth.
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