My Dress-Up Darling was a show I enjoyed immensely and one I ended up watching multiple times, including for the Anime Explorations Podcast. I appreciated how the show got into the work of creating cosplay costumes. However, it felt like there was something missing, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what. Watching the first season of 2.5 Dimensional Seduction made me realize what those things were, because this show filled those gaps remarkably well.

As per usual, a couple times a year I like to watch a fanservice series or so to just sort of gauge the state of the genre. For the Spring 2023 season, I went with the Cafe Terrace and Its Goddesses, to see if it fares a little better than the last fanservice series I watched with Goddess in the title. The answer is very much “Yes”.

The first season of Uzaki-Chan wants to hang out was a fun, if kind of standard, sitcom RomCom anime which played into the whole concept of “male character being lightly bullied by a younger female character” which also showed up in “Teasing Master Takagi-San” and in “Don’t Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro!” – only this time moving the concept up to college. Unsurprisingly, the anime adaptation got a second season – officially titled “Uzaki-Chan Wants To Hang Out W” (but using the lower-case Greek omega, because it looks like an anime character’s mouth getting mischievous). There will be some spoilers.

I’m a sucker for an anime that has an element of instruction and education to its premise, and as someone who also appreciates cosplay, but who does not cosplay himself, I’m interested in the craft behind it. So going into the Winter 2022 season, I’d already suspected that My Dress-Up Darling would be my jam on that front. What I wasn’t expecting was to get a tremendously sweet love story along the way.