User blog comment:Mattalamode/A Second Opinion: The Dress/@comment-27148182-20171014012538/@comment-31194372-20171014060939

Oh, God, "a few months ago," you're just, like, infinitely far behind... speed it up, Star.

Yeah, I wouldn't show "The Dress" to anybody either in some attempt to sell them on the show. I'm simply here to reassess, and while I admittedly think the episode isn't all that bad, that doesn't make it particularly strong, and it certainly doesn't epitomize the quality of the show. To go out and decree "The Dress" a complete trainwreck, though, doesn't really give enough credit regarding how much it was able to do right considering both where the show was at and what they had to work with.

As for crossdressing Gumball: in my defense, the levels of meta-irony over everything in Season 1 are strong that I can't necessarily gauge the degree with which people's (I'm tired so I'm not gonna try to adjust my word choice) pleasure is legitimate. That being said, the show's consistently used crossdressing to explore something more psychological as opposed to creating a thinly-veiled excuse to do a quick lap for the sake of fan service (excluding "The Worst," ugh). Just leave it to TAWOG to take some terrible, cliched premise and find a way to both make it self-aware and actually functional.

Y'know what, though? You just keep doing you.