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.

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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.

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^{*: 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.}

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