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.
Oguri Cap faced her first major defeat on the race track at the hands of her rival Tamamo Cross in the finale of Cinderella Gray‘s first cour back in late June. Since then, the world has appreciably changed for Umamusume as a series. Perhaps most notably, the Global (read: English-language) version of the mobile game this is all meant to promote finally launched, and I know for a fact I was hardly the only person there on launch day to redeem my 3* voucher to get Oguri herself. This is relevant because, due to the game’s success, there is a very real possibility that this column going forward will have a much larger potential audience than it did back in Part 1. To that end, I’m gonna go ahead and say that if you’re not caught up with these columns, I, a completely unbiased source, think they’re pretty worth reading, and you can do so here. Also, welcome aboard.
I’ve also read the manga, or at least, what exists of the manga fan translated into English. I won’t spoil any twists before they come, but it has given me the confidence to say that Cinderella Gray not only remains as good a powerful sports shonen narrative as it was in the first cour, but it actually gets even better over time, right up to the present. There are stories I can’t wait to share with you all, and characters I can’t wait for you to meet. But we’ll get to those as they happen.
What’s not a spoiler, or indeed a surprise to anyone who’s been watching the trailers ReMOW has been putting up, is that this upcoming arc focuses on the Japan Cup, a prestigious international race that will see Oguri and some of her domestic rivals compete against umamusume from all over the globe. That Cinderella Gray returns today, on the day of the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe—a different prestigious international horse race that Umamusume as a series is somewhat obsessed with (it was a plot point in Umamusume‘s third season, in fact. This despite the fact that a Japanese horse has never won it)—feels significant.
Interestingly though, that’s not where Part 2 starts. Instead, it makes the rather interesting decision to adapt the one-off spinoff The Mermaid Left Behind. What this means is that rather than diving straight into the Japan Cup stuff—what all of Part 2’s trailers were about, mind you—we instead return to the setting of the first half of Part 1, Kasamatsu, and the first story of the second cour is not about any of Oguri’s current rivals, but her first: Fujimasa March.
As Umamusume goes, what unfolds here is a pretty simple tale of rivals whose emotional bonds are unaffected by the physical distance between them. March is fresh off a haircut and a major loss at the Tokai Derby. We saw her conversation with Oguri Cap back in episode ten, where it seemed to reignite her competitive fire and give her renewed confidence to try again.
Yamano Thousand, the umamusume that March actually lost to in the Tokai Derby, does not see things that way.
Thousand is offended that March keeps trying to chase after someone who isn’t even here, and accuses her of running after ghosts. (She also insults the Norn Ace / Mini the Lady / Rudy Lemono trio by calling them Oguri’s “groupies”, which is admittedly pretty funny.) But if this seriously shakes March in any way, we don’t see it. It’s Mini, funny enough, who assesses Thousand accurately; her bark is worse than her bite, and her end closer strategy is a poor fit for a track with corners as tight as the ones here. In the end, March’s renewed passion perhaps as much as any strategic consideration lets her win handily, and she explains to Thousand—and implicitly to us as well—that she’s not chasing Oguri’s ghost. She’s chasing the real thing. This is the same March who first lit Oguri Cap’s competitive fire, and Thousand failing to understand that the glint in her eye and the blush on her cheeks are both because of Oguri Cap is part of why she loses. I don’t believe we’ll get another check-in on Fujimasa March like this, so this episode is, in a way, a nice sendoff to a Oguri’s first rival. A promise that her story is still being written, somewhere just out of view.1
The second half of the episode returns us to Tokyo. It largely focuses on Oguri’s national rivals but, once again, opts to refocus on who we already know instead of rushing headlong into introducing new characters. Most of these little vignettes focus on the umamusume preparing for their next race. For Oguri, that’s the Japan Cup that’s the center of this arc. Some of her rivals will be there too, but others, such as Dicta Striker [Hanamori Yumiri] have different aims. The latter in particular leads to a very charming scene where Striker attempts to do the old “intimidating rival challenging the protagonist on a level playing field” bit, talking about how she wants to hand Oguri her second loss in the Mile Championship, only for Oguri to promptly explain that she isn’t actually running in that. (She’s tailing Tamamo Cross, of course: the Japan Cup and the Arima Kinen, best known to players of the Umamusume game as where careers go to die, are her next two destinations.)
If there’s a unifying theme here, it’s that Oguri Cap and Tamamo Cross’ showdown has inspired everyone with an eye on the scene, from Oguri’s hometown friends to her rivals in the nationals, to greater heights. Even Sakura Chiyono O, the actual winner of the Japanese Derby that really was haunted by the ghost of the missing Oguri Cap, gets a scene here to show off that she’s not resting on her laurels. Nor is Yaeno Muteki, another of Oguri’s rivals and a perpetual underdog. Dicta Striker will get to run against her eventually, as well: she’s aiming for the Arima Kinen, too.
This even applies to Oguri herself to some extent, as Fujimasa March looks toward her, so does Oguri look toward Tamamo Cross. Each serves as the proverbial new peak to climb for the previous racer. (We must naturally assume that there is, thus, also some fresh-faced new student at Kasamatsu who thinks of Fujimasa March as an ideal to aspire to.)
All told, this is an odd and transitional episode and, generally speaking, a bit of a strange choice for Cinderella Gray‘s triumphant return. Still, it’s nice to see Fujimarch again, and the strong thematic throughline makes it make emotional sense as a returning point. Plus, the few crumbs we get here are going to feed March x Oguri fans for the next several months, so it certainly isn’t a bad episode by any means. It’s hard to deny though that the real lightning-in-a-bottle moments from this arc are very much still ahead of us. Part 2 is short—just ten episodes as opposed to the thirteen of the first cour—so I imagine we’re going to be getting into the main body of the arc relatively soon, within a couple episodes at most. We’ll see what that looks like in the weeks ahead.
1: Interestingly, March’s race against Thousand is also done in full racing silks. This goes against the series’ usual conventions as I understand them, where only national G1s are run in silks. Still, I’m not going to complain. March’s snazzy blue outfit is lovely.
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