My Dress-Up Darling was a show I enjoyed immensely and watched multiple times, including for the Anime Explorations Podcast (my monthly Anime Book Club podcast). I appreciated how the show got into the work of creating cosplay costumes. However, it felt like something was 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.

The show's male lead is Masamune Okumura, an otaku and the only remaining member of his high school’s Manga Club, and who has no interest in 3D girls after an unspecified trauma in his past. When Lilysa Amano (or Ririsa, depending on your localization), a freshman girl with an interest in cosplay and a love for his waifu, Liliel, walks into his club room door looking to join, the club ends up becoming a Cosplay Club. From there, Masamune ends up travelling down the road of cosplay photography, as several more girls join – each with an interest in cosplay – including their faculty advisor, who turns out to be a legendary cosplayer.

Perhaps one of the really big things that this show has over My Dress-Up Darling is that 2.5 Dimensional Seduction recognizes cosplay isn’t just a hobby, it’s a scene. Darling had a few interactions with characters outside of the main duo. Here, we have a club with a variety of people with different reasons for wanting to do cosplay (though a common enjoyment of a particular series), and they in turn interact loads of people from outside of their circle, and the larger social structure around doing cosplay, from meeting people at cosplay events, to businesses that cater to cosplayers, and so on. We even have a scene in an early episode where Lilysa is talking to a bunch of other cosplayers in the dressing room after an event, most of whom aren’t even named, about all the kinds of things that have gone wrong at events, and how other cosplayers helped them out. We even have scene drama – with a recurring character who is a professional cosplayer who deliberately starts drama with Lilysa because she thinks Lilysa’s a casual.

Also, the cast beyond Masamune has interiority. All of the supporting characters get plenty of time where we get to see what they’re thinking about, and how that’s motivating their actions, and frequently those things are completely unrelated to Masamune and any romantic interest therein. I even got slightly spoiled by the manga when checking TV Tropes for reminders on character names, where I learned (without giving the details), that the club’s advisor – Mayuri – has an extended character arc later in the manga. The other club members appear to provide support, but Mayuri is the focus, and her arc is related to a character who isn’t in the club, and has no prior connection to Masamune.

Plus, on top of all that (and it feels weird to say this), but it shows that guys can cosplay too. We’re introduced to a pair of cosplayers later who are a pair of fraternal twins, with the Cosplay names of Lemon and Lime. Additionally, the brother (Lime) is cosplaying as a female character (the two are dressing as We-Have-Rem-And-Ram-At-Home) and it’s not played for a joke. Like, they deliberately, consciously, actively do not play it as a joke almost to the point of calling out that they’re not playing it as a joke. Lemon asks Masamune to bring something for Lime’s costume that she’d accidentally packed in her bag to him, Masa does, and when Lime asks if he thinks this is weird, Masa replies that he doesn’t – and then the scene ends. This is how you normalize something successfully. Additionally, Masa does get to cosplay some later in that arc – though generally for the majority of the series he stays as the photographer.

This is not without necessarily some issues – this anime started its life as a fanservice manga, and there are some lingering traces of that, though some of those aspects have been downplayed for the anime version – which is fine. Additionally, the show isn’t quite sure how to handle characters cosplaying outside of their body types. There’s discussion of how cosplay is for everyone no matter their body type, but there’s also a sense that the characters who tend to thrive in cosplay spaces are fitting in a more conventionally attractive body type, with in a few cases those characters also are described as taking great pains to maintain that body type. I’d like to hope that in later portions of the manga and subsequent seasons, they get into this with a bit more nuance.

(Note: this review originally appeared on my blog).