My Dress Up Darling is OBJECTIFICATION!
2I really like My Dress Up Darling. It's a nice little romantic comedy manga about the world of cosplaying written by someone who did an incredible amount of research for it. Some people don't like the manga or anime, which is fine, but at least have your criticisms be sensible.
This person cited how the manga has "terrible writing," and I absolutely beg to differ on that front. I think the writing is pretty solid as far as characters are concerned, and I'm actually more leaning on Gojo being the ideal romance character more so than the obvious otaku bait Marin Kitagawa.
This person cited this reviewer who complained that the story relies a lot on coincidence and how that is "bad writing." I re-read the first 60 chapters of the manga out of at the time of writing 115, and I don't know what the hell this writer was going on about. For one, they are classmates. So, the chance of them meeting together every day is incredibly high. For two, it's only a "coincidence" in the first chapter. The rest of the events proceed entirely on their own will. Not a coincidence at all.
But this is connected to the writers' second criticism, which is incredibly nonsensical.
// Shinichi Fukuda has never heard of consent.
I'm sorry, what?
// That's the best explanation I could come up with for how a woman could be capable of writing a show that grossly objectifies and abuses its female protagonist as much as it does.
No, it does not abuse the female protagonist at all. Kitagawa's passion about her hobbies trumps her protection towards her body. Not to mention she's sharing her passion towards someone that she's very comfortable sharing with, and she gets increasingly more comfortable sharing them overtime with Gojo as her romance develops. It makes perfect sense to me.
// The protagonist of Slippery Girls 2 is forced to join a club for sexual humiliation. In other words, he engages in sexual situations without his consent. That's bad.
Is this really the level of "media criticism" that we are praising? This is like saying "That prick killed John Wick's dog. That's bad." Yeah, we know. It's fiction inside another fiction.
// On top of all the times that Kitagawa's consent is never prioritized.
Marin Kitagawa is a fictional character. She's not real. Her consent is never prioritized in this blatantly fantastical romance story that I really like. If you actually read the manga, she absolutely consents to almost every scenario that she puts herself into, especially the fan-service heavy ones. Just because the writer makes her character oblivious to the security of her own body doesn't mean that the writer doesn't understand consent.
This criticism is terrible. It's just another reminder that media criticism is an art form in and of itself, and a lot of people on the internet are just really bad at it.