Month: November 2025

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 20 – “The Answer”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience. The descriptive blurbs for these articles are taken from those of REMOW’s Youtube uploads.

A recurring tension in the Umamusume series is the fact that all racing careers eventually end. This only makes sense, most athletes retire eventually. You can’t push your body like that forever, and even the best will have to pack it in someday, as the alternative is usually much worse.

In the context of Umamusume, retirement is a peculiar thing. It’s almost never addressed directly. When it is, it’s sometimes accompanied by mention of the Dream Trophy League, a wholly fictional second racing league that we know little about, which existed as a background detail in some of the earlier, no-subtitle Umamusume anime seasons. Whether the Dream Trophy League even exists at this point in Umamusume‘s vague, shifting, and sometimes self-contradictory timeline isn’t clear—if it’s ever mentioned in Cinderella Gray at all, I must’ve missed it, and honestly even asserting that Cinderella Gray and those other seasons take place in the same continuity at all requires some squinting—but I bring this odd relic of the earlier Umamusume anime seasons up here to point out one thing in particular. It doesn’t actually come up in this episode even once, which feels notable.

Why? Because this is the episode where we finally learn what, exactly, has been hanging over Tamamo Cross’s head for the last while. You may recall that she seemed oddly hesitant to commit to racing in the Japan Cup again next year back when Obey Your Master asked. Here, we learn why. The Arima Kinen is going to be her last race.

This episode actually opens on a bit of backstory for Tamtam, showing us how she met her trainer Komiyama Masami. That “old man” whose sake she’s run some of her races was in fact her landlord, implicitly a former umamusume trainer himself, and introducing Tama to Komi was an act of kindness where it’s easy to understand why she’d hold him in such high regard. We aren’t directly told precisely why Tama is retiring, but with the juxtaposition here, we can infer any number of reasons.

Regardless of the “why,” when the two of them meet at a press conference, Tamamo breaks the news privately to Oguri Cap, who does not take it well. Whatever reason Tamamo might have, this means that she and Oguri will only have one more race together, the Arima Kinen itself. Oguri is actually in a fairly good mood up until this point in the episode, and her sharp downturn in demeanor here is quite startling. Moreso when she realizes, as she tries to argue with Tama, that she is now essentially in the same position Fujimasa March was way back in episode six. Tamamo Cross’s ultimatum to Oguri is the same as Oguri’s was to March; if she really wants to settle things, she has to beat her here. There will be no do-overs.

When the actual press conference starts and Tamamo Cross breaks the news to the press that the Arima Kinen will be her final race. We actually get a rare bit of narration from Oguri here, where she admits to not even remembering what she tells the press when they turn their mics to her. We don’t hear it, either, all of her thoughts have been blotted out by the specter of Tamamo Cross’s retirement.

Between the prospect of her greatest rival retiring and her own failure to reach the Zone, Oguri’s in a pretty tough position here, mentally. Some time after the conference, we see Oguri training at night to blow off some steam, and it feels like an open question as to whether the self-doubt, anger, and disappointment might actually snuff out her competitive fire forever. This is a real danger to someone like Oguri Cap, and she’d hardly be the first Umamusume protagonist to let her own hangups psyche her out of a victory.

Enter Dicta Striker, the Chestnut Bullet.

Dicta, based on one of the real Oguri Cap’s contemporaries, the horse Soccer Boy, has been a background presence in the anime since Oguri relocated to Tracen, but this episode is the first time we really get a good handle on her as a character. We get some of her backstory, including how her early career as a young prodigy gave way to a streak of losses that broke her confidence. She rebounded, though, at one point partly inspired by Oguri herself. By the time she calls out to Oguri for a late-night practice race, she’s long since reached the elusive Zone herself.

The training race, then, is as much a direct conversation between these two as it is actual practice. Dicta lightly needles Oguri as they run, saying that as she is now, she’ll never reach it. Privately though, Dicta thinks that Oguri is actually on the verge of breaking through this mental barrier. Dicta pushes her further; what compels her to race? Who does she want to beat? What, at the end of the day, is driving her?

This seesawing tension, between the joy and the fire Oguri Cap feels from running itself, from surpassing her rivals—once Fujimasa March, now Tamamo Cross, perhaps someone else in the not-too-distant future—from surpassing her own limits, and the persistent fear that she won’t be able to, will remain an underlying current for the remainder of the series. Cinderella Gray really leans into the Beast part of Oguri’s nickname in scenes like these, illustrating an underlying, boiling primality at the heart of her character, something fiercer and deeper than just competitiveness.

In a way, it’s unsurprising to see the anime render her in these terms—at the end of the day, this is a sports anime, after all—but the elemental distillation of it here is still a pretty rare thing, and it’s one Umamusume has made an art of over the years. Perhaps because of this, the nighttime practice race between Oguri and Dicta is the episode’s best scene, with most of its best shots being moody, windy cuts of Oguri’s running figure against the night sky.

Oguri comes close to making the breakthrough she needs to—very close, we get that visual effect of gray smoke leaking out of her eyes again, and a shot of a wall of glass cracking but not yet breaking—before Dicta abruptly calls the race off just as Oguri is about to pull ahead of her. Whether her explanation that she doesn’t want to push either herself or Oguri so much before the real race that they hurt themselves is what she really believes or a small bit of saving face is hard to say for sure. Either way, it’s clear that this run helps Oguri a lot.

Directly helping her rival out, even in such an oblique way, may seem contradictory with the goal of actually winning the Arima Kinen for Dicta. But, afterward, when her trainer, a hulking oak tree of a man, lightly chastises her for it, Dicta just wryly replies that she doesn’t want anyone to say that Oguri wasn’t at her best when she beats her.

Dicta isn’t the only one helping her, either. As all of this is going on, Belno Light, who by this point is essentially Oguri’s co-trainer, has been handling the more technical and strategic aspects of planning the race. An early scene at the press conference sees her inspired by how well Komi takes care of Tamamo Cross, and she gets a particularly great showcase here where, as an umamusume herself, she’s actually able to imitate Oguri’s running gait and analyze the specific ways in which the Arima Kinen’s track will affect her.

As with the Tenno Sho, the Arima Kinen features an inclined section, something that can’t be overcome with brute force alone and requires actual strategy to handle. Belno’s scenes in the episode, devoted to tackling this problem, are less dramatic than those with Tamamo Cross or Dicta Striker, but they’re no less important, and I think the story does a great job of making her seem just as important to Oguri’s growth as Oguri’s rivals are. By the time she’s finally come up with a good solution, she’s effectively run a version of the race herself. She may not be a preternatural talent like some of her contemporaries, but Belno’s tenacity here can stand up against that of any other umamusume in the series.

Of course, whether that growth equals success is another question. The episode ends on Christmas Day, at the Arima Kinen, a bright and sunny winter day as the runners take the field….

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 19 – “A Zone Yet Unknown”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience. The descriptive blurbs for these articles are taken from those of REMOW’s Youtube uploads.

Hello, Umadacchi. This week’s column arrives to you several days late. In my defense, I spent most of the past weekend being jabbed full of about a thousand vaccines I was behind on, and have been a real mess in the days since. I’m still not fully recovered, but I figure I’m well enough to do a little light writing. Luckily, this is a fairly light episode. There’s some important character work done here, to be sure. I also want to touch on the visual aspects since the first half of this episode is brilliantly-directed, but compared to the adrenaline burn of an actual race episode, we can afford to relax a little here.

Someone else who could maybe stand to relax is Oguri Cap herself. Stuck with the bronze medal in last week’s episode, the Gray Monster has entered a period of genuine burnout and self-doubt. While her chibi slumping about is pretty funny to witness, it is also genuinely sad to see our protagonist lose her confidence in such a major way.

It’s not subtle, either. Her classmates pick up on it pretty easily, since she’s been doing things like walking into walls and whatnot. The concerned include Mejiro Ardan, Sakura Chiyono O, and Dicta Striker, who Oguri is slated to race against in the upcoming Arima Kinen. Black Ale, still evidently a bit bitter over her loss to Oguri a whole anime season ago, is less sympathetic, but perhaps describing her as a baby or what-have-you is just the unruly horsegirl’s way of showing concern. (Probably not, but hey.)

I would love to know how many of you thought Black Ale would ever come up in this column again.

Oguri’s problem is that she feels that the two rivals who have bested her, Tamamo Cross and Obey Your Master, have something she doesn’t. Worse, she feels like she almost knows what that is, but not quite. Oguri isn’t the only one frustrated by her failure, either. Belno Light blames herself and, indeed, this is the most Belno-heavy episode in a good while, as she spends a large chunk of it trying to figure out what she can do to help Oguri train for the Arima Kinen. When Oguri meets Belno and Musaka to discuss the race, she seems almost disgusted with herself for what she says, but she’s honest nonetheless: she doesn’t think she can win.

We get a nice bit of scene interweaving here as Oguri’s rivals prepare for the clash at the Arima Kinen in their own ways. Dicta Striker runs, Super Creek boldly proclaims that with her trainer beside her, she can’t lose no matter who she’s running against, and Tamamo Cross….seems oddly reticent about the entire thing. She asks to talk to her trainer, it’s clearly serious, but what exactly is said is left as a mystery this week.

It’s Tamamo Cross who’s clearly on Oguri’s mind as she explains that, without that something that she and Obey have but Oguri doesn’t, she can’t imagine winning. This is more serious, even, than it might sound. Umamusume has a long history of dialing in on the mental state of its athletes as an indicator—maybe the indicator—of their performance. If Oguri Cap can’t conceive of herself winning, it’s difficult to believe she actually will. She’d hardly be the first character in this series to be psyched out by her own regrets.

Talking with Belno, Musaka ponders the intricacies of the Zone, in a very nicely-directed conversation that takes a SHAFT-y visualized-dialogue approach to keep things interesting. The result is some of the nicest looking moments in the entire series, and also a very telling one.

Musaka doesn’t entirely understand the Zone either—it’s been all but said that nobody really does—but what’s certain is that it’s the rarified territory of the racers who define their times. If Oguri Cap is shut out from this exclusive group, what can she really do?

Well, she can train. Musaka, who hilariously comments that this “isn’t an anime”, rejects the notion that the Zone is some kind of cheat or sure-shot victory card. Indeed, over the course of the rest of the episode it’s clear that his main strategy here is reigniting Oguri’s passion for the sport in the first place. If she can remember why she’s running at all, maybe all of this will seem less insurmountable.

To that end, this is the obligatory “everyone from Kasamatsu shows up” episode of the cour. And it’s genuinely great to see all of these characters again, especially Fujimasa March, last seen in the adaptation of “The Mermaid Left Behind” that was the first episode of this cour, and Kitahara Jo, fresh off from flunking the URA national trainer exams. (Better luck next year, Jo.) Musaka’s strategy seems, by the end of the episode, like it’s more or less worked. Oguri’s back in good spirits because she’s been reunited with and training with her hometown friends. There’s even a terribly cute moment where March and Oguri challenge each other in the exact same way they did back toward the start of the first cour, with Oguri directly calling back to her pose and “I won’t lose to you!” declaration. But there’s a lingering question over the entire thing: does that actually mean she can win the Arima Kinen?

We’ll find out on Sunday, I suppose.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 18 – “WILD JOKER”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience. The descriptive blurbs for these articles are taken from those of REMOW’s Youtube uploads.

Umamusume‘s very best episodes are, perhaps unsurprisingly, largely those defined by its best races. Its best races have one thing in common: they’re true free for alls. If you don’t know the outcome of these competitions beforehand, a good race in this series keeps you guessing until the very end. Victory is never a sure thing, and to assume it is is dangerous.

Last week’s episode ended with Obey Your Master making her play, shedding the mask of faux-friendliness which she’d maintained even a good ways’ into the actual race itself, and going all out in an attempt to make her mark on history. It’s not hugely surprising that this episode begins with another of Umamusume’s favorite tricks, one we’ve already seen in Cinderella Gray, the mid-race backstory reveal. On its face, Obey’s story is extremely straightforward. She was an initially-promising racer back home in California whose attempts to compete at the G1 level ended badly. (A gaggle of derisive onlookers actually mock her while she’s training, Umamusume does not seem to have the highest opinion of American horseracing.) The Obey we see here looks, frankly, miserable, and some condescending advice from a fellow racer*—who sports a very familiar combo hairstyle and stars in her eyes—doesn’t exactly help. But, she latches on to that advice anyway; if she’d just done a little more studying, the other girl suggests, she might’ve performed better. This dovetails nicely with her trainer’s suggestion to run in the Japan Cup, as Japan’s turf is different and, perhaps, better suited to her running style.

She combines the two ideas. Obviously, she did enter the Japan Cup, but in the leadup to it, she also deliberately ran races that didn’t play to her strengths, while at the same time completely reinventing herself in terms of persona and appearance. (That’s the context of that fucking scary screenshot I’ve used as the header here, in as much as that image has context, anyway.) The overall goal of this is very simple, if everyone overlooks her, no one will expect her to be a serious threat. If no one thinks she’s a real threat, no one will prepare against her specifically. And if no one does that, someone like Obey, who is perhaps not ostensibly “G1-level talented,” might have a shot.

As far as strategies presented in Umamusume go, it’s surprisingly crafty and underhanded. It is for this reason that, against the loose playing card themes of several of the other competitors—most notably Toni Bianca, the “king”—she identifies most with the joker. It’s easy to make a million jokes, in of itself, about this, given that the playing card is forever associated nowadays with a certain Batman villain and the accompanying memes about him, but if we take Obey on her own terms, it’s pretty obvious why she would feel this affinity. It’s not just that the joker is, in games where it’s allowed, a literal wild card, it’s that a joker is not properly part of the deck. Most games remove it. So beyond the obvious, it is also a subtle indication that despite her burning drive to win, Obey doesn’t think she really belongs here. But, in games where a joker is present, it’s often one of the best cards you can draw. Obey, in her own mind, has stacked the deck.

Perhaps that is why it’s her, not Oguri Cap or any of the other Japanese umamusume we’ve followed over the course of this series, who gets the show’s second proper Zone. It is from this that the episode takes its title.

Some people call her the gangster of love.

Is all this enough to win? For most of the episode, that’s actually still up in the air. Tamamo Cross is still a massive threat, and Obey does everything she can to minimize her. She rightly picks up on the fact that Tamamo runs much better when she’s directly “dueling” someone (running right alongside them, neck in neck). Obey wildly swerves away from Tamamo—a dubiously legal maneuver—to avoid this. Toni Bianca is a problem too, and seems like she might ready up a Zone of her own to crush both Tamamo and Obey Your Master right up until she loudly, painfully, fucks up her foot on her final spurt, putting her out of the competition. No amount of ambiguously-magical super saiyan stuff can overcome a fracture, it would seem.

Oguri Cap actually puts up a surprisingly good performance, too. Michelle My Baby spends most of the back half of the race stuck behind Tamamo and Obey as they battle for first, but just as she decides she’d be content with the bronze medal, Oguri overtakes her, despite her earlier loss of stamina, falling back on a promise she’d maid to Musaka about switching back to her usual strategy if anything unexpected happened. The roughness of some of the international racers, combined with Obey Your Master’s whole thing, definitely qualifies.

There’s a very promising moment where a gray smoke effect starts leaking out of Oguri’s eyes, a visual effect that usually signals a Zone is about to happen. But she doesn’t get all the way there, and her impressive comeback is still not enough to actually get her ahead of either Obey or Tamamo. The last we see of her during the race itself is a despairing, grasping hand, extending itself toward her rivals as she wonders why she just can’t reach them.

So, it does end up boiling down to Obey vs. Tamamo. It’s close, not quite a photo finish but close nonetheless. When they reach the last few meters before the finish line, both deliver essentially the same monologue in their heads. With absolutely everything on the line, body and spirit, both of them, at the end of the day, just want to prove themselves.

But, if I can fall back on the oldest cliche in sports commentary. It really seems like Obey just wants it a little more.

Obey Your Master takes the victory by what looks to be about a length, with Tamamo Cross right behind her, and Oguri right behind Tamtam. The All-American Underdog has done it, the flush with the joker takes the pot.

The moments immediately following this are some of my favorite bits of character animation in the whole franchise. Obey, despite how much of herself she just gave for her sport, simply looks stunned. Like she can’t believe she actually pulled it off.

And once it actually hits her, she starts crying tears of joy, because who, in her position, wouldn’t?

It wouldn’t matter if the episode wasn’t so fantastic—because make no mistake, it is. It’s the best episode of Cinderella Gray so far and one of Umamusume’s strongest ever—but it does also warm my heart a little, as an American who’s had an on-again off-again interest in horse racing since I was a kid, to see one of ours win in Umamusume. I am of course wholly aware that Americans are hardly starving for representation, but still, it’s nice. Even without that bit of bias, I think Obey is one of the best one-arc characters in recent memory.

The episode doesn’t end there, of course. The aftermath of the race is a harlequin quilt of joy and despair. Oguri, who finished a length and a quarter behind Tamamo, grasps at her knees and wonders what, exactly, she’s missing, looking for all the world like she’s about to break down in front of them. This arc, and particularly this loss, marks an inflection point for Oguri Cap’s character, a shadowy substrate seeming to creep in to Oguri’s normally agreeable personality as she deals with her second major loss.

Tamamo Cross handles things better. She and Obey Your Master have a bit of banter before the winning live concert, wherein Obey completely drops her persona and expresses genuine gratitude toward Tamamo wholly as herself.

Ishigami Shizuka’s voice acting work must be commended here, as Obey genuinely sounds completely different here. And, as Tamamo gently suggests that she’s better like this, Obey smoothly transitions back into her “joker” persona mid-sentence, jumping pitch and completely changing inflection in one of the most subtly-brilliant bits of voice work I’ve ever heard.

As she takes the stage to give her victory concert, we see her greet the audience. We hear the roar of the crowd, but not the music.

The last minutes of the episode are spent seeing off various pairs who ran against each other in the Cup. Toni Bianca and Moonlight Lunacy get a nice little scene when Toni is in the hospital (and covered under a mountain of roses from her Japanese fans).

It’s sweet, and gives a little more color to the characters. Similar could be said of Ellerslie Pride and Gold City, who have become friends despite both of them placing quite poorly (8th and 12th respectively). Ellerslie says that she’s glad she came despite the loss, and knows her home country of New Zealand will keep sending racers to the Japan Cup until one eventually wins.

After all of these scenes there is a brief, melancholic epilogue of Tamamo Cross circling a date on her calendar. This, and her demeanor after losing the Cup seem to imply something is going on with her, but again, we don’t quite know what. It’s a question for future episodes we must imagine.

The last pair sent off—technically before the Tamamo scene, in fact—is Michelle My Baby and, of course, Obey Your Master. Michelle takes the loss in stride, but when a reporter asks if she plans to return to run in the Cup again, she declines. Obey Your Master, though? Well, one of the things she said to Tamamo Cross was that she wants to race against her again, this time without her “mask.” Tamamo’s answer was evasive, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Obey.

Cinderella Gray is off again next week, so like Obey Your Master, I’ll see you when I see you, umadacchi.

*: A Youtube comment informs me this is probably meant to be an umamusume of Sunshine Forever, who Obey’s direct inspiration, Pay The Butler, lost to in the 1988 Man o’ War Stakes. I have no way of confirming if this is true, but the true horseracing diehards in Umamusume comment sections are usually right, so I’m including it here as a fun fact.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – EPISODE 17 – “THE JAPAN CUP”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience. The descriptive blurbs for these articles are taken from those of REMOW’s Youtube uploads.

We open with Oguri on the practice track, remembering the sting of defeat at the Tenno Sho. Today, she swears to herself, is the day she closes that distance. Is it really? Can our ash-haired champion make a comeback?

One of the lovely things about the relatively curt episode titles that Cinderella Gray has used so far is that they point out certain reflections and repetitions within the story. Each of the episodes we’ve had which are directly named after a race—of which this is the third—have marked major inflection points in the series. “The Japanese Derby” showed us Oguri at her most dominant, a competitor so good that her absence overshadowed the race that was actually run. “The Fall Tenno Sho” focused on Tamamo Cross, Oguri’s strongest rival thus far and the first since her transfer to actually defeat her. This episode, then, seems to promise at least the possibility of a comeback story for Oguri.

In typical Oguri fashion, she’s not content to simply run. She wants to try something new and a bit daring. Specifically, she asks Musaka if she can run in the pace chaser style as opposed to staying farther back as she usually does. Her idea here being that Tamamo Cross mainly won due to being able to spurt farther ahead on the last leg of the Tenno Sho. If she’s in a better position, Oguri reasons, she’ll have a better shot at actually outpacing her. It’s a pretty sizable switchup, but Roppei agrees. Again, the elements for a comeback are all here.

Except, of course, the fact that Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap are not the only two people running in this race. A walkout sequence quickly brings in all the competitors we met or met again last week, saving two in particular for last: Tamamo Cross herself, and Obey Your Master, who meet for the first time on their way out to the field.

Obey, apparently not above taking the low road, makes a psychological play. We know from earlier in the series that Tamtam is normally pretty nervous before a race, but, as with the Tenno Sho, she seems calm here. (We don’t know who exactly, but Tamamo Cross was on the phone with someone, evidently someone important to her, earlier in the episode. Perhaps these two things are related.) So it certainly seems like she’s in great shape both physically and mentally, until Obey tries getting under her skin. It’s not hard to conclude, following on from last week, that Obey is deliberately attempting to psyche her biggest competitor out. She’s surprisingly good at it, too, initially leading with a bit of fake buddy-buddy talk that Tama immediately catches on to, only to hit her with this.

Mood down?

This doesn’t seem to properly rattle Tamamo Cross, but it definitely at least ticks her off. A more stabilizing presence though is, unsurprisingly, Oguri Cap herself, and it’s cute to see the two of them do the whole “I won’t lose to you!” rival bit.

Once the race starts, Oguri actually seems to be doing rather well right up until she finds herself next to Michelle My Baby. Michelle, being American, does not have the sense of decorum most of the Japanese racers—Oguri included—are necessarily used to. What I mean by this is that when Oguri finds herself in a spot Michelle wants, Michelle has no problem attempting to take it by literally elbowing her out of the way. (Similar things play out up and down the pack, including between Ellerslie Pride and Gold City towards its back half. Noteworthy, as the two got a bit of banter in before the start of the race.)

Aside from being pretty borderline in terms of whether or not it’s actually allowed, this is also terrible news for Oguri in general. Already lower on stamina than she’d like to be given that she’s pace chasing (and thus having to run harder to stay near the top of the pack), Michelle’s rough tactics sap her of most of her strength entirely, and she falls back to the second half of the pack in the last few minutes of the episode.

It’s a pretty disheartening showing for our protagonist, and it’s hard to imagine her coming back from it. Though, as Musaka points out, the race isn’t over ’til it’s over.

At around this point, Toni Bianca, the favorite of the overseas racers and, as we established last week, really the smart money to win this thing in general, stops playing around. Bianca has up to this point been biding her time in the dead middle of the pack, so this is her going for the win. As she does so, she remarks that Tamamo Cross—coming in from the outside to avoid the physical contact stuff from the foreign racers—must be very arrogant to think that that kind of recklessness is going to help her against someone like Toni.

Here’s the thing though, it absolutely does help her against Toni. For the second time, we see lightning strike the racecourse.

About “the Zone” (almost always written in quotation marks, from what I’ve seen): it’s a natural question to ask whether what we’re seeing is “real” within the context of the fiction—regardless of whether anyone who’s not an elite racer can actually see it—or if this is visual metaphor presented for the sake of us, the audience. I think, though, it’s an imperfect and incorrect question. Umamusume likes to play coy with whether or not “magic” (or at least something sufficiently close to it) exists in its universe beyond the obvious conceit of the horsegirls themselves. I think the honest answer is that leaving it open to interpretation actually makes these scenes more compelling. Is this merely Tamamo Cross breathing rarified air, giving it 110% with whatever powerful but still mundane techniques she’s learned, or is there actually some kind of Horsegirl Domain Expansion thing that she has access to? I personally lean more toward the former, since I think it’s largely more interesting. But I also admit that there’s part of me that practically vibrates in my seat at the thought of umamusume with superpowers, so it’s not a clear-cut case of one being better than the other. Hitting both sides of that internal divide is one more stylistic thing that makes Cinderella Gray so great.

Everything, then, seems primed for Tamamo Cross to take another G1, which would put her at a ridiculous seven such wins in a row. Here’s a question though, about the “Zone” and about Cinderella Gray in general; is there any reason at all to believe Tamamo Cross is the only umamusume who can do that?

And that’s the note we end the episode on! Tamamo Cross a streak of lightning across the track, suddenly staked to the ground by a sinister, all-seeing eye. What the finale of the race holds, we can only guess. See you next week, umadacchi.

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