Category: Let’s Watch

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch BANG DREAM YUME∞MITA – Episode 4

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

For the BanG Dream Yumemita column, new entries will be posted either on each Thursday an episode airs, or as soon as possible during the week thereafter.

It’s an interesting move to make the first “regular” episode of BanG Dream! Yumemita as much about Ritsu and Viola as any of the girls in the actual main band, but it does make sense. Ritsu is our little lost lamb. We get further confirmation in this episode that she is, mainly, a victim under Viola’s thumb and, accordingly, Viola gets to do her whole evil vizier regime up and down the entire episode. She’s the real star of the show here, and I think she’d be thrilled to hear me say that, because in this episode we get some indication of why she does what she does.

As I said in the first impressions article, it’s fairly rare for an anime in this genre to have an out-and-out antagonist. But there are some logical extrapolations you can make from how the music industry works—especially the very online digital space that Mugendai Mewtype work in—to craft a compelling villain. Viola’s is just that she’s a complete fucking clout shark. Viola wants big views, she wants the number to go up, and she wants the attention on her specifically. Much of this episode details the brief history of the LaLaLaLaGirls, her previous group with Ritsu and Arale. (There are two other girls but, bluntly, they don’t matter. One of them is literally named “A-ko.” The only thing you need to know is that one of them was the group’s center.) This is also scaffolded with the very specific way that she wants to tailor herself for her audience. In the context of the LaGirls’ group dynamic, she’s the imouto, the cute little sister that everyone’s supposed to want to dote on. She’s pretty insistent about this from the word “go” and is all the more so when the LaGirls actually get signed to a proper agency. The contrast between this and how much of a complete snake-in-the-grass she actually is is both obvious and absolutely delicious. This is a real kind of person! I think anyone who’s on the internet enough has tangled with at least one person who puts up a paper-thin façade of obnoxiously twee cutesiness to hide an inner core of jealousy and venom. I’m not the first person who’s made jokes about Viola posting Google Docs, and I surely won’t be the last.

You know this girl runs the absolute gnarliest antiship blog you’ve ever seen in your life.

The villain cred-building reaches its apex during the episode’s climactic story beat. Where we actually see the real conversations that Viola clip-mined for the edited-together “erea01” video from the premiere. I have to admit, I actually assumed myself that Arale really was being that blunt—I didn’t think she was being mean, mind you, but it’s not crazy for someone so forthright to occasionally stick her foot in her mouth—but no, even that much isn’t true! Viola straight up “Coolsville Sucks!”‘d her. Of course, when the video actually hits the group’s page and the consequences roll in, she plays ignorant and makes with the crocodile tears, all while being absolutely thrilled just offscreen.

Did I mention that the only way she even could do any of this is that cameras were set up to film the LaGirls hanging out together basically whenever they were around each other? And that earlier in the episode, the previous center of the LaGirls mysteriously and suddenly resigns, almost as if Viola had a bunch of dirt on her too and was jealous that she wasn’t the main focus of attention on the group? (She’s definitely the main focus of her new group. Which, incidentally, the other two girls in that band seem to be just fine with Viola’s open displays of domineering behavior toward Ritsu. Birds of a feather, one supposes!)

In any case, the video results in Arale being outed from the LaGirls, and Ritsu, in a moment that seems to really haunt her, does not do anything to help or offer support. After all, Ritsu’s image within the group is that of the perfect model student, and model students, as Viola is keen to remind her, don’t associate with troublemakers. (Never mind of course that Viola is the one causing the problems. To her, the image matters much more than the reality of the situation.) The episode ends with Ritsu once again meeting Arale by chance back in the present, and attempting to apologize. But Arale, who seems understandably hurt by Ritsu’s lack of support back then, smacks her outstretched hand away. This is not something that’s going to be resolved quite that easily, it seems.

There’s more I haven’t gone into here, of course.. Yuno, for example, seems to have a hunch that something is up with Arale (she saw her and Ritsu meet up in one of last week’s episodes, so she knows something is going on) and is doing a bit of investigating near the episode’s start. The preview for next week also seems to imply that the full band might be in the same place as Viola next week, which would certainly be interesting. Viola, it must be pointed out, is obviously being set up to either undergo some sort of comeuppance or one hell of a redemption arc. I think both options are interesting, although she’s so fun as the gleefully evil fame glutton that I’d almost prefer the former. We shall see what the weeks ahead bring us.

I’m going to be keeping these Yumemita writeups pretty casual. I love the show so far, but that has more to do with it being extremely fun to watch than me necessarily thinking I have a ton of deep insightsTM to offer, so I will be keeping things breezy. See you next week, Girl Band Fans.

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, Anime Orbit Weekly, Let's Watch, The Weekly Orbit

Let’s Watch: OSHI NO KO – Season 3, Episode 11

I have lost any semblance of consistency when it comes to labelling these columns. I promise I’ll go back and fix them all eventually. Eventually.

This past Tuesday, Chainsaw Man ended. The wildly popular shonen manga had been going on in its second part for quite a long time, and I think to some extent no ending could’ve really satisfied the fanbase at large. Nonetheless, the ending we actually got seems to have really pissed a lot of people off. You can find reams of posts complaining about it of all shapes and sizes, and your standard suite of video essays and the like as well.

Someone who did not hate the Chainsaw Man ending was yours truly. I want to re-read the whole series before making any big proclamations, but I think it wrapped up the emotional arc of the story in a way that felt both hard-fought and worthwhile. It stung, but it meant something.

Now, will I still think that after having re-read the series? I don’t know. But! It did get me thinking about the array of popular anime and manga widely considered to have “a bad ending” and the various things they may have in common.

Oshi no Ko, anyone who is even tangentially aware of manga discourse at large already knows, is widely put in that category. (I myself have been exposed, just yesterday, to a Youtube thumbnail that loudly proclaims CSM’s finale “worse than Oshi no Ko, THE END!” Such dramatic proclamations not even a week out from the last chapter, my goodness!) And the reception to CSM honestly made me want to reevaluate my own opinion on this series, despite their otherwise lacking really anything in common, because I never want to be the sort of person who just declares that something is ruined forever because it didn’t head in the exact direction I wanted it to.

This in mind, and being honest with myself, I actually think the final episode of Oshi no Ko‘s third season is mostly pretty good.

A lot of the episode’s forehalf is devoted to Ruby trying to come to terms with the absence of both her former mother from her previous life, Tendouji Marina [the legendary Inoue Kikuko], who made a somewhat unexpected return to the narrative last week, as well as that of her current later mother, Ai. And honestly? It mostly works. We get to see Ruby repeatedly stumble over a bit in the 15 Year Lie script where it dictates that her character let her mother, who, in the fiction of the film never loved her, go. Predictably this absolutely tears Ruby apart, and she can’t get through the read, despite Kana’s attempts to coach her.

Name a time a friend gave you advice that made you look at them like this.

In a general sense, we probably should’ve gotten to this earlier—maybe toward the start of this season, rather than the cosplay episodes? Just a thought—but it does matter that it’s here at all. I was beginning to worry we’d never get to see Ruby’s side of things at all. By consequence, if there’s a standout star of the third season it is unquestionably Igoma Yurie, Ruby’s voice actress, who delivers some of the best work of her entire career here. Most of her dialogue, especially the strained rants about how her former mother must have loved her (until of course she finds out that that wasn’t really the case), is delivered in a pained, strangled yelp that really sells the character’s sheer despair at her situation. And once the episode hits its first big bombshell, where Aqua reveals himself as the former Dr. Amemiya Gorou, she starts full-on blubbering/ugly-crying in the best way possible. (You can literally hear her sniffling through the line-reads. That’s called commitment where I’m from.) Igoma doesn’t have a ton of other credits to her name, so if nothing else, I hope her performance here opens some doors for her even more than being Ruby in the first place likely already has. I would love to hear her in things more often.

As for Aqua finally revealing himself as the former Dr. What’s-his-name? I think around now makes sense, if he was going to hold onto it this long in the first place. (Narratively, that is. From a What Would You Do? sort of viewpoint he should’ve done this ages ago, but that’s not a terribly insightful statement.) So does the way their relationship entirely turns on a dime when he drops that piece of info, as she immediately lets go of her hatred of the brother that she thought had selfishly sold their mother out. Arguably, this stuff is way more manipulative of him than any of the more overt cases with Kana or Akane. (And the series knows this, too, because it makes sure to have the death goddess crow girl character who’s been present up and down this season wink and nudge at us about it. Keep her in mind, in fact, we’ll be coming back to her.) Still, it’s a solid beat, and while the flashback montage about time that Aqua and Ruby spent together as Gorou and Sarina is definitely pretty cloying, it’s still sweet enough to mostly work.

(There’s also this brilliant piece of comedy buried in the montage. I’m not a medical professional, so maybe I’m missing something here but you’re not supposed to do that, right? You’re definitely not.)

Now does all of this make this whole bit, this whole sequence, automatically a good piece of storytelling? No, an emotional beat working on a craftsmanship level is different from it being the right choice for the story. And honestly, I think the episode’s structure works against it here. A cut after the scene where Aqua reveals his past identity, and us being left to sit with Ruby’s bounceback for a week, would’ve done wonders. Especially when she drops this little line after reminiscing about Gorou’s “promise” to marry her when she came of age:

A black screen blinking the words “THEY FUCKED” in all capital letters would be more subtle.

It is absolutely hysterical, and probably inevitable, that we’ve ended up at incest. If the show simply ended here, the movie in production and Aqua and Ruby abandoning their revenge quest to be left to their presumably torrid reincarnation incestuous love affair, I would have nothing but respect for it. Sadly, we don’t live in a world where anime are allowed to end—or even end episodes—on heavy implications of incest. It does also very much feel rather rushed, like we’re getting this all out of the way so we can say that Ruby had a full character arc—something perhaps true but only on a technicality—so we can rush headlong to the show’s conclusion. Oshi no Ko has of course been announced for a fourth season, probably its last, so I will need to wait until then to evaluate how right I am about this. (I could of course also read the manga, but if I’ve held off for this long, what’s the sense in doing that now?) But I suspect I am. Akasaka has just never seemed terribly interested in Ruby as compared to Aqua, and while this episode has some of the best material the character’s ever been given, it really does seem like it’s supposed to put the bow on her development. Granted! There is still the unresolved business with her former mother, so maybe that will complicate things in some worthwhile way. I’d love to see more unhinged Ruby, it feels like we barely got to know her. I nonetheless remain skeptical.

That said, I can complain all day, but for what it sets out to do, I think the first half of the episode more works than doesn’t. The only real contention is how worthwhile what it’s trying to do actually is, and I remain undecided on that front. (As I’ve said, I really do just keep going back and forth on this show.) The second half of the episode is also good, and unlike the first, is so in pretty straightforward ways. In large part, it’s a character study of Miyako, the boss of Strawberry Productions, a constant background presence throughout most of the series but who never really got an episode of her own up to this point.

It is probably the only focus she’ll ever get, but the series makes the most of it, walking us through Miyako’s arrival in Tokyo, and her early career as a model. It’s very broad-stroke, but it’s solid stuff. Made all the stranger by how she chooses to express some of this.

Miyako latches onto an extended video game metaphor while explaining her life. Bluntly, in-context, this is one of the weirdest rambles of its kind I’ve ever heard a character go on. Aside from the central simile of “fame is like a video game” seeming like something a Republican-era Nicki Minaj would come up with, it’s kind of a stretch in the first place? For whatever reason, this whole rant gets the full visual metaphor treatment and we get to see Miyako fight the men she seduced in her youth as an RPG encounters and the like. This makes it no less bizarre, but it’s an admirable amount of committing to the bit.

This all concludes with her reuniting with Saitou Ichigo, Strawberry Productions’ former owner and her own ex, when “randomly” running into him at a bar. (This was, of course, orchestrated by Aqua, actually.) And leads to Miyako herself recommitting to her obligations to Aqua and Ruby. There’s a broad motherhood theme that runs through all this, an idea that Miyako is more of a mother to the twins, perhaps especially to Ruby, than either of her own mothers ever were. (And she outright calls herself their mom more than once.) There’s something there, but for a show whose premise is so entwined with family, Oshi no Ko‘s ideas about it have always been its weakest thematic expressions. Still, it’s a worthwhile thought and I hope the show does something with it in the long term. That Kana line from the rehearsal scene does feel an awful lot like foreshadowing.

Beyond these two main plots, this episode just also has a genuine sense of fun that’s been missing (or at least not as present as I’d like) in the show for a good while, now. The show’s main issues have always been its hypocrisy and the inescapable sense that it’s kind of didactic, the comedic leanings help take the edge off of both of those things. Aside from the usual bevy of Good Kana Faces, we also have, for example, Pirate Yuri??? Why not, right? That’s a good thing, even if it does still make me wish the show just leaned into its strengths more.

In-universe, this is a commercial for body wipes. Yes, really.

Aside from a brief post-credits scene, the very last thing to happen in this episode is actually, deliberately, quite funny! Gotanda, the film’s director, laments that the casting has been squared away with the exception of the child actors, to play a young Ruby and Aqua. This is where the character officially known as just Crow Girl [Kino Hina], who I’ve been calling the death goddess in my columns—since, you know, that’s what I thought she was—re-enters the picture. Crow Girl shows up in the closing minutes of this episode to do what she does best, be vague and portentous and deliberately needle Aqua. Aqua, in the rare bit of scheming from him this season to actually have an impact beyond being eyeroll-inducing, gets an idea. He asks her if she’s, you know, physically at least, a normal human with parents and a government ID and all that good stuff. She smugly responds yes, that her “vessel,” just like his, is on the surface a normal human. Aqua then drops his funniest line of the entire season by asking her a simple question.

The anime adaptation of hit narou-kei series Reborn As a Portentous Death God in Another World That’s Actually Just Modern Japan Again, I’m Forced to Become A Child Actress by The Teenage Boy I’ve Been Tormenting?! is coming to a TV station near you sooner than you think!

And from there we cut to credits! That’s literally how the season ends! This is a good thing, of course. It’s entirely the kind of bold audacity that made me interested in this series in the first place. Does this episode alone being pretty good mean that all is forgiven and we are guaranteed a satisfying conclusion? Of course not, but it’s a good sign from a show that’s been short on those for a while.

In any case, any final judgment of Oshi no Ko as an anime will have to wait until after it’s complete. So I leave you with this: I’ll see you when I see you, B*Komachi fans. Because I’m me, it’ll probably be back under the Let’s Watch banner, too.

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 23 – “A New Era”

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.

One of Umamusume‘s recurring fixations is on the changing of the guard. This is part of its larger ideas about the nature of the competition and, as we discussed last week, transience. New racers debut, greenhorns become veterans, veterans become legends, and those old contenders go out in a blaze of glory or otherwise retire. Rinse, repeat, the cycle never ends. In a meta way, this is even true of this episode’s title, which is a phrase that echoes up and down all across Umamusume, most notably appearing in the title of its movie from last year. That’s a tale for another time, though, perhaps.

This episode, the Cinderella Gray anime’s finale (at least for now), is a very direct demonstration of this concept. We tie up the few remaining threads of Tamamo Cross’ story, but perhaps more importantly, we are reassured that Oguri’s is still in progress. She’s at the top of the mountain now, everyone knows her and everyone loves her. Not for nothing is one of the episode’s opening shots of a young girl standing next to not the real Oguri Cap, but a cardboard cutout. This is cute, but also just the slightest bit dehumanizing perhaps, showing us that Oguri is already being flattened into an icon as opposed to a person.

Stronger than anyone, loved by everyone.

Of course, all this means that Oguri is no novice anymore, and she’s been at it for long enough that others are chasing after the comet trail she’s carved on her way from Kasamatsu to the Nationals.

Enter Inari One [Inoue Haruno].

In the many (maybe too many) times I’ve compared Cinderella Gray to a battle shonen anime, I’ve largely avoided making too many specific attempts to slot characters into specific archetypes. There are a few examples where you can do this, but largely it doesn’t work, so I’ve held off until now. I say until now because Inari One is a pretty straight example of the whole hothead rival trope. She’s a good one, don’t get me wrong, but they did not break the mold when casting girlie. She calls herself “Inari-sama” when sufficiently riled up. She sometimes lets her own emotional outbursts get in the way of her success. Her temper is enough of a difference to be notably offputting at times, especially to her fellow racers, a strong contrast to Oguri who is mostly pretty affable. She’s literally associated with fire. Because she’s hot-blooded. (And also she has a vague fox motif and “foxfire” is a whole thing. That too.)

A character this broad would maybe be an uneasy fit for Cinderella Gray were it not for a few things. For one, as with every other character we’ve had to get to know quickly in this series, her debut episode is populated with brief flashbacks and asides that color her in and give her some depth. For another, when we meet her, she is very much in the midst of a “letting her emotions get in her own way” slump, which, to skip ahead a bit, makes her victory at the end of the episode feel earned in a way it wouldn’t if we hadn’t started here. For a third, she is very directly zeroing in on Oguri Cap herself. She says as much, and it makes sense for a couple of reasons.

Having won the Arima Kinen, Oguri Cap is pretty indisputably the strongest umamusume in Japan at the moment. Like Oguri, Inari One is from a relatively minor area in the context of racing, and also like Oguri, she’s aiming to challenge the nationals. Inari One is perhaps not the first person to explicitly aim for her head, she’s the first we’ve followed at any length, and certainly the first whose own rise mirrors Oguri’s so closely.

Of course, she has to actually rise first. Which at the top of the episode seems like it’s far from a sure thing. She looks like she’s about to win the race that opens her part of the episode, but at the last minute, one-off character and owner of a truly ridiculous hairstyle Face No More* passes her by. Inari throws a pretty hilarious temper tantrum about this in the locker rooms after the race, getting in some really great expressions while she does so, as No More insults her by pretending to not remember her name.

Some time after the race, she blows off steam while tearing up a practice track. But in doing so she risks wearing herself out, and it’s down to her trainer to remind her that, hey, that’s not really a great thing to be doing the day after a major race. As with a lot of the girls we’ve met over the course of this series, Inari and her trainer seem to be pretty close. A flashback sequence confirms this, showing us that they met when Inari was lost at a festival when she was very young.

It’s cute and it provides some evidence of a nice dynamic between them, Inari as a loose cannon who can only be reminded to keep herself under control by her firm, but even-handed trainer. In any case, Inari has a shot at truly proving herself; her trainer has entered her into the Tokyo Daishoten.

The Daishoten is the final race of the season. I have to admit, as someone who’s now current on the manga, I was never quite as in love with Inari One as I have been with some of its other characters, but I think giving us a full episode to get to know her was a good pacing decision. She’s fantastic here, and despite the nominally lower stakes of this race as compared to the Arima Kinen of the last two weeks, the presentation is action-packed and stylish enough for that to not really matter. Doubly so when Inari starts losing her cool and we get some outright scary visuals to illustrate that.

(This is a tangent, but it’s also fun that in the half dozen or so lines they swap between them, Inari’s two main competitors here, one-off characters Romance Bubbly and Fuyuno Nakasumi, seem to have a rivals yuri thing of their own going on. That’s called good worldbuilding, folks.)

Like Oguri, Inari is also being observed during her last important regional race by a veteran of umamusume racing. Not Symboli Rudolf, but one of her contemporaries, Japan’s third triple crown winner, Mr. C.B. [Amami Yurina]

Being a horse girl named Mr. C.B. is an admirable amount of gender. I have said this any time I’ve ever spoken about C.B. anywhere, and I will continue to say it, because it’s true.

Despite the pressure, Inari keeps her head on straight until the last spurt, where flames wreathe and nearly consume her, clearly signaling, along with the signature cracked glass effect which also pops up here, that she’s about to hit her Zone. Yet, just as she reaches out to grab ahold of that fire, she crosses the finish line, overtaking Fuyuno to win the day, and it disappears. A tease, sure, but the message is clear, this is absolutely someone who can go toe to toe with the Gray Monster.

Our last scene with Inari One here is during her victory concert where, in a move mirroring episode six (tellingly, where the show started associating Oguri with her “Ashen Beast” nickname), she explains that she’s moving on up to the nationals. Like Oguri’s fans, Inari’s are initially a bit reluctant to let their star go. But when she bids them farewell, cheers go up, and one gets the sense of what the “new era” promised by the episode title might entail. Oguri Cap will not stand at the top of the mountain alone for very long.

Inari’s story is just starting, but Tamamo Cross’s also comes to an end this episode. She’s present in just two brief scenes, where she departs on a plane and arrives at the hospital room of that old man she cares for so. He’s sitting up in his bed, and this sign of wellness alone is enough to make her break into tears. It’s a simple, sweet, and understated end to the White Lightning Arc. This is Tamamo’s exit, but the path she burned through the sport, and our hearts, isn’t going to be forgotten so easily.

It’s not all bittersweet moving on and flaming-hot new blood, though. Spliced in between all of that, there are a few short scenes of a Christmas party at Tracen organized a few days after the holiday. Oguri actually misses most of it, and she spends a good chunk of the season’s last episode sporting some truly impressive bedhead.

The party itself is cute. There’s a small aside of Dicta Striker attempting to cheer up Super Creek after her disqualification (she mostly succeeds), and also what is, to my recollection, one of the very few examples of straight-up fanservice in the whole series, wherein Black Ale has been tricked into wearing a slightly revealing Santa outfit by….someone. No names are given, so in the absence of evidence I’m going to assume it was Dicta Striker. It seems like something she’d do.

I’ve literally read the manga and even I am surprised at how many times Black Ale has managed to appear in this column after her single episode of any actual story relevance.

If there’s a note to end all this on, it’s probably what Musaka says to Oguri after she wakes up. Leaning on the fourth wall more than a little, he reminds her that, while she’s reached the peak of the proverbial mountain for now, her story is far from over. Challengers new and old are already coming for the crown.

“For the road was the rim of the Wheel, which encircled infinity.”

* I am 99% sure this is supposed to be “Faith No More”, as in the metal band, but F-a-c-e is how it’s rendered in REMOW’s subtitles, so it’s how I’ve written it here.

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 22 – “Gray Phantom”

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.

Native Dancer was an American thoroughbred racehorse. Without getting so into the nitty-gritty that this turns into a column on actual horseracing, the very short version is that he was one of the best. It’s hard to beat 21 victories in a 22-race career (although some have done so). To list just one accolade, the AP’s list of the best racehorses of the 20th century places him at third, behind only Man O’ War and Secretariat. For our purposes, though, his actual career is less important than two other things you need to keep in mind about Dancer. The first is that he had a nickname, the Gray Ghost. The second is that one of his children was Dancing Cap, a horse who, himself, we are primarily interested in here because of one of his children. You’re reading a column about him right now: Oguri Cap.

There is little reason to suspect that any version of Native Dancer ever existed in Umamusume. In general, lineage plays far less of a role in Umamusume than it does in actual horse racing, and the closest Umamusume has ever come to acknowledging any of the legendary racers who fill in the strange, fuzzy area outside of its immediate characters of focus is the vague insinuation that Manhattan Cafe’s mysterious “friend” might be the metaphorical or literal ghost of Sunday Silence. (As always, I recommend IronicLark’s blog if you want Umamusume analysis from someone who really knows their horseracing as opposed to someone with a mere passing interest in it like myself.) Nonetheless, watching this episode today, I thought about Native Dancer and his nickname. I have absolutely no way of proving this, but I think one of the most important aspects of this episode, and indeed the episode itself, takes its name from that epithet. In doing so, Cinderella Gray asks broader questions about what Umamusume actually is. Not as a franchise but as a story.

First, though, let’s pick up where we left off last week. The back half of the Arima Kinen is, to put it as simply as possible, nuts. After entering her Zone and blitzing past most of the playing field, Tamamo Cross duels it out with Oguri Cap for first place in the final leg. I repeat myself, but it’s worth repeating, it’s not merely that there are impressive action scenes here—though there definitely are—it’s that the raw emotion on display here is a very rare thing.

In literal terms, what happens here is the race’s four strongest competitors angling for the lead. Super Creek puts up a surprisingly strong performance, banking on pure stamina as opposed to anything flashier. Dicta Striker’s shotgun final spurt is a spectacle to behold as well, earning her probably the single most impressive cut of animation in the entire episode and deservedly putting her name in the conversation with the other greats here. Between the fierce showdown between rivals and the fireworks animation, I fall back on my old standby comparison: this is essentially a battle shonen anime, and the earlier half of this episode comes complete with plenty of “oh my god, the ultimate technique!”-style commentary from characters like Symboli Rudolf and Sensuke Fujii. This stuff is fantastic on even its worst day, and if that were all the episode was, it would still be great.

But, let’s be serious here. One of two umamusume are going to win this race. It’s either going to be Tamamo Cross or Oguri Cap. One of Cinderella Gray‘s favorite storytelling techniques is to dot an important race episode with little dollops of backstory or reflection from the runners. Previously, this has been used to characterize Oguri’s rivals. In the penultimate episode of the first cour, Tamamo Cross got that treatment, where the show strongly suggested that despite a thwarted crossing of the paths when they were both children, Tama and Oguri were, in some sense, always meant to run together. This episode reinforces that connection, but also reminds us of something else.

We see flashbacks to Oguri Cap’s childhood, a tiny gray puffball of a kidlin enraptured with the lightning-fast running she sees on TV. Her own legs, though, are weak, and her mother1 bandages them as she tries to stand and move around. The young Oguri asks her mother if she’ll ever run like the girls on TV, and her mother hugs her tight.

Of course she will.

And as Oguri’s mind turns to her gratitude toward her mother, it flows to everyone who’s helped get her where she is. The Kasamatsu gang, Fujimasa March, Belno, Jo, Musaka, every one of her rivals, all of whom have asked her, why do you run? Who are you aiming for?

And the answer, of course, is that Oguri isn’t trying to surpass anyone but herself. To whom running at all is a miracle, something fought for rather than given. She’s doing it because she loves it.

As soon as she realizes this, it all clicks into place, and we get to the episode’s namesake. The payoff, the gleefully cool-as-hell ultimate technique, Oguri Cap’s very own Zone.

A ghost, one might say.

Oguri and Tama continue running the final stretch neck to neck. But we actually see only relatively little of the literal events of the race from here on out. Instead, we’re transported to an emotion-driven image space, where the two talk. They reminisce, Tamamo Cross speaks of races come and gone and races that will never come, wistfully talking about how she owes Obey Your Master a beating at the next Japan Cup. But, she knows this won’t ever happen. Together, still in the shared mind space, Oguri and Tama begin running again. Tamamo Cross complains about how short the race is, even here, the finish line is in sight.

Nothing, not in sports, not in life, lasts forever. Every story has an end. There are no perpetual dawns, and any time the Sun rotates around our humble planet, it’s one day closer to going out forever. Here, in what they both know is their last dance together, Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap bond for one final time over what keeps them going in spite of that, their love of life. Running more specifically, sure, but it is worth seriously understanding that finity and transience are two of Cinderella Gray‘s main thematic ideas.2 This, which is also what I was alluding to at the top of this column, is the first time we see those themes really underscored in a major way. It will not be the last.

Tamamo Cross’s story ends in defeat. Oguri Cap, reborn within the Gray Phantom, manages to edge over the finish line by just the slightest bit. This is not a sad ending, the victory and defeat are less important, perhaps, than who they are experienced alongside.

After the race, they have a talk that is heart-achingly sweet, and they embrace each other. To paraphrase the great Miko Iino, I am someone who enjoys hugs probably 50-70% more than the average person, this one here is one of the best anime hugs ever. I’m honestly jealous. Put it on the accolade board.

The end of the Arima Kinen is not a happy story for everybody. Dicta Striker gets properly fired up when she notices Oguri entering her Zone, but, the combined blood loss from her injury last episode and perhaps just general fatigue mean her body betrays her, and her legs give out as she attempts another shotgun surge. She still takes third, with Super Creek behind her taking fourth. Or at least, she would have taken fourth were she not ruled to be obstructing another racer’s movements after the fact, disqualifying her. It’s sneaky as hell to slip in the start of Creek’s upcoming arc here. But the nature of how Umamusume is written means it’s also a necessity, and it’s handled pretty well, juxtaposing as it does Creek’s embarrassment and loss with the overwhelming warmth of the rest of the episode’s final third.

(There are some other, smaller good bits as well, such as Symboli Rudolf heaping praise on Oguri, a really nice followup from that conversation she and Maruzensky had back in the first cour.)

That warmth truly is the dominant feeling. In what is by now a relative rarity for the series, we get an actual winning concert performance in place of the episode’s usual credits. Oguri Cap, Tamamo Cross, and Dicta Striker—patched up after her injuries, including breaking a tooth! which is perhaps why the concert seems to take place that night instead of immediately after the race—perform “Next Frontier”, one of Umamusume‘s standards, and a swelling, triumphant note to close out the episode.

Except there’s actually one more thing. After the concert, Oguri Cap takes the time to thank everyone who’s inspired her, who made her the racer she is today. She thanks her trainers, her rivals, and the crowd. That includes us.

Overall, “Gray Phantom” probably surpasses “Wild Joker” as Cinderella Gray’s best episode, and it’s one of the best in Umamusume on the whole. It also got me thinking, though, about the series’ overall nature. For a while now, I’ve been workshopping an as-yet unpublished article about a different piece of the Umamusume franchise. In that article, as I am about to here, I propose that despite its ostensibly “silly” or “very anime” premise, Umamusume is actually part of a very long lineage of work that seeks to anthropomorphize the minds and lives of non-human animals. I don’t have an answer as to whether that instinct is selfish, a bad habit of seeing all things as reflections of ourselves, or selfless, a genuine desire to connect with minds very different from our own.

Regardless of which side you fall on, it is fascinating to me that Oguri Cap, in some form or another, continues to inspire people 33 years after the end of his career and 15 after his death. (To float another conspiracy theory, I have wondered if the real Oguri’s epithet of “The Idol Horse” is how the premise of Umamusume was come up with in the first place.) If I can show my hand a little, I do think there’s something beautiful about the ideas that Cinderella Gray puts forward here, even the sad ones. Ultimately, though, these questions are a bit beyond the scope of this column, and I’ll save any harder arguments for another day. Tamamo Cross’s story is over, and while Oguri Cap’s will not last forever either, we still have a good, long time with her, assuming the anime gets renewed for another proper season (here’s hoping).

This isn’t the end of this season just yet, however. See you next week, umadacchi.

Now where have I heard that before?

1: It’s interesting that what little we know about Oguri Cap’s mother in Cinderella Gray doesn’t really fit the profile of either of the real Oguri Cap’s parents. Nonetheless, I usually refer to her as Narubi in my notes on the rare occasion she shows up, since it’s shorter than writing “Oguri Cap’s mom” every time.

2: There is a reason that, despite being “just” the last time we will see these two specific characters compete, this whole scene feels an awful lot like a depiction of some kind of afterlife. Tamamo Cross thus joins the storied ranks of sports anime characters who are being treated vaguely as though they’ve died when they’ve actually just retired or graduated or what have you. Sempai will be furthering her education, no doubt.

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.

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Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 21 – “The Arima Kinen”

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.

In a way, the episodes of Cinderella Gray that feature an actual race are usually the easiest to write about. This is where the series’ theory turns into practice, where the character work that it winds into a tight coil finally springs. This is where the excitement and the action are. Everything else in the show leads up to this.

It is perhaps a little surprising then that the first half of the episode is devoted to reinforcing all of those stakes. Even so, it’s actually quite effective. The Kasamatsu squad show up in person to witness the most important race of Oguri’s career, leading March to marvel at her first rival and reflect on how her growth has spurred on her own (something we saw in action back in episode fourteen). Kitahara Jo, as Oguri’s first trainer, is immensely proud that she’s here at all. There is a sense here that Oguri runs not just for herself, but for everyone who believes in her. This has always been true, but it’s meaningful that the show seeks to restate it now, right before the big race.

It’s not true of just Oguri, either. The three other major contenders in the race, Tamamo Cross, Super Creek, and Dicta Striker, all get at least a little screen time with their trainers before hitting the field. Tama’s fails to hold back her tears. Super Creek’s reminds her that this is not a clash of three titans, but four, and to not discount herself. Dicta’s, silent hulk of a man that he is, merely offers her an approving nod as she makes her way to the starting gate.

It’s Dicta Striker herself who notes that it’s not just the big four, everyone at the Arima Kinen is a monster in their own right. (Including characters who are essentially background faces to us, like say Lord Royal, also here to avenge her loss at the Fall Tenno Sho.) If it seems like I’m talking in circles about this a little bit, I’ll admit that I am, but I do just think the way Cinderella Gray is so intent on making sure we understand exactly what these races mean to the girls who run them is one of its strengths. (Sometimes this extends even to girls who aren’t presently running. A brief aside tells us that Japanese Derby champion Sakura Chiyono O is currently tending to a foot injury. She, Mejiro Ardan, and Yaeno Muteki get a brief, but sweet scene together in the stands.)

This is reinforced even further with our protagonist’s pre-race activities. She runs into Symboli Rudolf, who congratulates her on how far she’s come and the two more or less make amends from that whole spat way back in episode seven. Oguri Cap’s most important conversation before the race though is, of course, with Tamamo Cross.

Initially, Oguri’s attitude seems almost apologetic, and she’s clearly still kind of stunned that this will be Tamamo Cross’s final race. She talks about how Tamamo Cross, faster and stronger than even her, was once the goal she sought to surpass, but, as Tama’s own sepia-toned flashbacks play across the scene, Oguri hits a nerve when she says that she can tell that Tamamo Cross loves running as much as she does. As Tamamo’s thoughts flash back to the sickly old man who has been on her mind this entire time, she flips.

The brief back-and-forth here is certainly the angriest we’ve ever seen either of these characters. But, in a twisted way, it’s also them at some of their most charismatic. There’s a very raw vein of bitter anger running in both directions here, and this brief scene is one of my favorites in the entire series for managing to say so much with so little, I’m glad the anime was able to capture it this well. Even Tamamo Cross’s parting remark is captured perfectly, owing as much to Oozora Naomi’s performance as anything visual.

The Arima Kinen, both the race and the episode, is thus set up as the most important of the series thus far. Here, on a bright, cold Christmas day, Oguri has to settle her score with Tamamo Cross. She won’t get another chance.

Oguri shudders and shakes as she enters the gate. There are trumpets, and then, there’s a long, lead-heavy moment of dead silence and raw tension.

And then, they’re off.

As front-runner Lord Royal takes first place in the earliest part of the race, we follow our four “titans” one at a time. We focus, first, on Oguri Cap herself. Belno Light’s study of running form, a major component of last week’s episode, is here revealed to be the sole actual stratagem that Oguri is bringing to the Arima Kinen. The idea is simple: by leaning even lower than she normally does, Oguri offsets some of the difficulty of the track’s inclines. Other than that, she is, at Roppei’s encouragement, running mostly on instinct here. (In an amusing bit of prodding at the fourth-wall, he even dismisses the whole pace chaser / late surger dichotomy as a simplification for the sake of “the viewers.” He means the viewers of the races, in a Watsonian sense, but it’s funny nonetheless.)

Super Creek gets only a little focus as the race begins, although we can see how her large, bounding strides might help her with a track this tough even without the show directly calling attention to such. It’s really Dicta Striker who gets the lion’s share of the focus in the latter half of the episode as the race really gets started.

We haven’t known Dicta for nearly as long as Oguri or Tamamo Cross, and it’s fair to say she hasn’t been characterized quite as much as Super Creek either. What we do know is that, all else aside, she seems like a bit of an adrenaline freak. She actually bashes her head against the starting gate as the race starts, and it takes her a bit to realize just how badly she’s hurt herself. To my recollection, this is the first-ever depiction of blood in an Umamusume anime, which is not exactly shy when showing other kinds of injuries.

There is a lot of it, enough to be genuinely pretty worrying! But Dicta soldiers on, her rapid, kicking gait not letting up as she tries to ignore the amount of blood she’s losing and keep herself in the race.

While she does, at least for now, valiantly keep herself up and running, her thoughts of strategy, where to time her last spurt, and so on, turn out to be for unintentional provocation to another racer in the back. Our fourth titan, so to speak, gets annoyed at how slow and conservative the race has been so far. She didn’t come here to coast to an easy victory. She came here to win.

In one of the wickedest cliffhangers Umamusume has made use of to date, a streak of white lightning strikes the racecourse for the third and final time. Tamamo Cross will not go quiet.


Next Week: The Lightning Legend vs. The Gray Goliath, for the last time!

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 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.

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 16 – “The World’s Best”

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. Your beloved blogger is a bit under the weather this week, but luckily, this particular episode of Cinderella Gray is mostly one of laying groundwork and doing some character introductions. As such, it’s pretty simple to cover.

Plainly, this episode serves to introduce (or reintroduce, in a few cases) Oguri Cap’s competition at the upcoming Japan Cup. The episode is actually structured as such that it largely introduces Oguri’s foreign rivals first—which makes sense, there’s more to cover there—but we’re going to flip that around and talk about her domestic competition to start with. There are just fewer umamusume in this category, and one of them, Tamamo Cross, is essentially the show’s defending champion. Tamtam gets a nice little practice vignette with her trainer, who warns her against pushing herself. A gentle reassurance from someone who cares, or foreshadowing of something greater? We can’t yet say, but it’s good to see Tamamo around, and it also gives us the delightful treat of seeing her with her head ornamentation removed. Cute!

Oguri’s other main competitor from Japan is Gold City, who actually practices with her at Musaka’s behest as they try to build Oguri’s stamina, given that the Japan Cup, at 2400 meters, is longer than any race Oguri’s yet run.

Oguri and Gold City, in a nice change of pace from some of Oguri’s more serious rivalries, hit it off pretty much immediately, and the episode’s penultimate scene is a funny exchange between the two of them wherein Oguri asks Gold how she keeps her hair so nice, leading to a whole bit about shampoo.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the international competition is given a bit more focus. Umamusume doesn’t get the chance to feature horsegirls from anywhere but Japan terribly often, so when they do, they tend to go all out. It is also worth noting that this is another case where the umamusume aren’t named directly after the real racehorses—rights issues, one imagines—and it’s fun to compare whose legally-distinct name is an upgrade and try to imagine how they might have gotten from one name to another.

Easily the most prominent of the umamusume featured here is Toni Bianca [Kaida Yuuko, based on the real horse Tony Bin], presented as a genuine menace. Enough so to merit an at least passing comparison to Symboli Rudolf (herself the last Japanese horsegirl to win the Japan Cup). She has an impressive record, too, most notably, she’s the most recent Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe champion.

Of the girls introduced here, Bianca is perhaps the most classically in the ‘arrogant rival’ mold. When our good friend the reporter Fuuji, a recurring presence throughout this episode, asks her what she intends to accomplish by running in the Japan Cup, Toni replies nothing. She intends to win, and she will win, and that’s that. Fuuji is impressed by this of course, but there’s the subtle implication of something more complex going on when later, on her own, she contemplates that the upcoming race will be her magnum opus. What that could mean, we don’t yet know, but it’s enough to raise some intrigue about a character who is otherwise a bit broad.

Even more so is the UK’s representative, Moonlight Lunacy [Sekine Akira, based on Moon Madness. I’m honestly not sure how they got away with that one].

She has a refined and elegant design, and some banter with Fuuji reveals that the two have at least some prior history together—she apparently competed in the last Japan Cup, only to come in fifth—and she kicks him for being tactless when he brings up her previous defeat in the race. Still, I’d say she’s firmly the least interesting of the umamusume introduced here.

Contrast, for example, Ellerslie Pride [Tomita Miyu, based on Bonecrusher, easily the biggest name downgrade here], the sole Japan Cup runner from the southern hemisphere and representing the hope of not just her home country New Zealand, but that entire half of the globe in general.

Her somewhat tough appearance (and the straight-up intimidating name of her inspiration) belie a horsegirl who is clearly a little desperate to put her country on the map. She actually visits a shrine as her first order of business in Japan, apparently praying for her own success. (Fuuji bothers her, too, and gets a giant shrine bell dropped on his head for the trouble.)

And of course, there are the Americans. Michelle My Baby [Takagaki Ayahi, based on My Big Boy] is incredibly tall compared to almost every other character we’ve seen in the series so far. We don’t learn terribly much about her—although on a fact-finding mission for Musaka, Belno Light describes her as having the strength of a bulldozer—but when you’re introduced by slam dunking a basketball from across the court, maybe you don’t need much in the way of complicated character motivation.

Which leaves us with one last character to meet. The other American umamusume is an apparently utterly unremarkable racer, no G1 wins, no record of really any note at all, and she’s also rather hard to get ahold of. Fuuji tries to find her but doesn’t succeed. Belno does, though, although one gets the sense it might be because she wanted to be found.

This is how we meet Obey Your Master

[Ishigami Shizuka, based on Pay The Butler].

When Belno finds her, Obey is literally face down, ass in the air, sniffing the grass. Why is she doing this? Who knows! Belno asks her, and her response is that it “smells amazing.” So at first, one might reasonably conclude that Obey is just weird. Weird girls are not new territory for Umamusume—see Gold Ship, a generational cryptid sort of girl, as just one example—but Belno, and indeed Oguri Cap, are not so lucky. Obey seems to immediately cotton on to what Belno is doing (and jokingly calls her “James Bond”). In fact, Obey knows all about Oguri Cap, starting from her career as a regional star in Kasamatsu up to the Fall Tenno Sho where she lost to Tamamo Cross. But actually, Obey even knows who Belno is, and it is with some sense of alarm that Belno Light processes that the last girl she’s been sent to find is not normal.

We can just say it. Obey is a freak. I fucking love her, she is one of my favorite charcters from Cinderella Gray in general, but she is an odd, odd character. The combination of everything we see here; her wild eccentricity, the star-shaped pupils, her encyclopedic knowledge of the competition, and of course the episode’s instantly-infamous final scene where she dances alone in the dark, Oguri Cap and Tamamo Cross’ race playing on her television and her rivals’ photos plastered all over her walls, brings to mind nothing less specific than Kurokawa Akane from Oshi no Ko. In fact, despite some obvious differences, she comes off as an outright interpolation of the character into a radically different context. I can’t prove that the inspiration actually worked that way—if it did, mangaka Kuzumi Taiyou would have to have been pretty quick on the draw, as Cinderella Gray and OnK started serializing around the same time—so if that reference point seems improbable to you, we can also just say that Obey comes off as a bit serial killer-y in, especially, that final sequence. This is, of course, fantastic, and it implicitly suggests that the true showdown in the Japan Cup will not be between Oguri Cap, Tamamo Cross, and—as one could be fooled into thinking from the start of this episode—Toni Bianca, but between those two and Obey.

Obey explicitly identifies Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap as her “enemies” for the Japan Cup. And they both, it seems, will have to be careful to not be her next victim.

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.