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.
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