Tag: Obey Your Master

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.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 15 – “Our Story”

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.

Let’s talk about Super Creek [Yuuki Kana].

Actually, before we talk about Super Creek, let’s talk about characters, and how Umamusume handles them. Full disclosure, I’m going to be pulling extensively here—both in this column specifically and, honestly, probably whenever I talk about Umamusume going forward—from IronicLark’s excellent Umadacchi Densetsu blog, a fantastic resource for all things Umamusume and, so far as I am aware, easily the most thorough exploration of the series and its various components available in English. I highly recommend diving into it yourself sometime if what I am doing in these columns interests you even a little bit. Frankly, Lark is significantly more knowledgeable on the subject than I am.

So, characters. Most things I cover on this blog are either standalone anime projects, or they’re anime adapted from some single specific source, a manga, a light novel, etc. Umamusume belongs to the other category of things I cover here, and has more in common structurally with, say, Love Live, than most other anime I write about. What I mean by this is that it’s a media mix1 franchise. Without getting too into it (because that distinction alone is worth having a long conversation about) what this essentially means is that rather than one component of the franchise being the “primary” unit that all other adaptations pull from, there are many distinct components given roughly equal weight. Now, this isn’t strictly the case with all or even most media mix properties, as in the case of Umamusume and many others, there is a “central” project—the game—but the distribution of influence is much more horizontal than it is in something like, say, the Yano-kun anime airing this season, which is a straight one-to-one adaptation of a single specific story.

This approach changes how a series handles many things, but most relevant here is how it handles characterization. Because, if you primarily know Super Creek from the Umamusume game—and I’m betting that describes at least some of you—you might wonder how that character and her doting, motherly personality fit in to the generally fairly serious ‘sports anime’ tone that Cinderella Gray has going on. The answer is that Umamusume, as with many media mix properties, tends to emphasize or scale back different character traits depending on the needs of the story. As such, different iterations of the same character can feel pretty distinct, even if the “core” remains the same. (As a complete tangent, the most extreme example of this approach I can think of is actually Transformers, a series in which this guy, this guy, and this guy all have the same name, at least some of the time, despite being nothing alike.) Nothing so extreme as that example is present in Umamusume, but I bring all this up just to say: when we see Creek here, she is somewhat different from the Super Creek you’ve seen people make all those googoo babies jokes about on the internet. (Although, elements of that doting characterization do remain, I don’t want to overstate the differences.)

Creek is formally introduced here after having kicked around in the background of Part 1, and—not to spoil anything—we are going to be following her, at least intermittently, for quite a while. Her introduction is actually relatively low-key at first, though. We see her training. We see her trainer, Fumino Nase [Yū Shimamura2] apparently a prodigy who’s brought her trainees pretty significant success even early on in her career, beset by reporters. Nase seems to find all the media attention annoying at best (and particularly bristles at an offhand mention of her father, evidently also a trainer), but she’s willing to throw them a bone by telling them that she intends to have Super Creek compete in the Kikuka Sho, one third of Japan’s Triple Crown and, importantly, the longest race of the three. This comes as a surprise to the reporter interviewing her as, to hear that reporter tell it, Creek’s race results haven’t been that impressive, and she’s actually not even a sure thing to so much as run in the race, as someone would have to drop out first. Nase is of course aware of all this, though, and explains that as a trainer, she considers it part of her job to believe in miracles, no matter how unlikely they might be.

Naturally, just then, word comes down the line that one of the other competitors has had to drop out. Super Creek has an in.

The actual Kikuka Sho race follows both Creek and one of her main competitors. Yaeno Muteki, whose name you probably remember. It’s hard not to feel a bit bad for Muteki, who keeps getting put in these situations where she’s trained so hard and has good prospects only to end up facing a rare, generational talent.

And make no mistake, Super Creek is one of those. For a race as long as the Kikuka Sho both physical stamina and clarity of mind are important, so while Muteki holds the most promising position for a majority of the race, Creek is eventually able to angle her way from the middle of the pack straight to the front, and she ends up not only winning but winning by a pretty large margin. (A quick reference check on the real race that this episode is based on shows that the real Super Creek overtook the second-place horse, Gakuten to Beat, by five lengths. I am choosing to assume a similar margin here, in the absence of any other evidence. I suppose he really did beat Gakuten.)

Creek’s strength, as emphasized here, lies in her incredible endurance. Something she and Nase have evidently been working on for some time. A brief flashback between the two invokes the Cinderella metaphor once again.

Apropos of nothing, it is worth pointing out that Creek and her trainer seem very close.

It’s worth going over again, the term “Cinderella story” refers to, in sports, a longshot victory by an underdog. Usually several such victories over the course of a tournament or the like. In the context of Cinderella Gray, well, the second part of the title spoils that this mostly refers to Oguri Cap. But it can, just as easily, be taken to refer to many of Oguri’s contemporaries, including Tamamo Cross and, yes, Super Creek as well. (Given her chestnut brown hair, she’s an almost-literal dark horse.) Her victory here is clearly hard-fought, and the fire in her eyes on the final spurt is really something to behold. I’m probably not going to surprise anyone by saying I absolutely love Creek, especially this incarnation of the character. I am hoping this episode might turn at least a few more people in the world into Super Creek fans. Fingers crossed.

(On the note of “beholding”, it’s worth addressing the elephant in the room at least briefly. There has been some amount of discourse about the show’s somewhat reduced animation prowess from the first part of the first season, the Kasamatsu arc. There’s some truth to this, probably related to staff being shuffled around, but the highlights of this race stack up to anything else in the series so far. We’ll see how the rest of the season plays out in this regard. I feel the need to give a good amount of credit to the show continually paying attention to how the racers run, though. Even in the weakest moments of the race, Creek is consistently drawn as taking long, comparatively slow strides. Right up until that final spurt, where she starts really putting the pedal to the metal.)

In any case, while Yaeno Muteki takes her loss hard, she and her master keep up their training. Muteki has an endurance of her own, in this regard, and as I’ve gone through this story she’s become one of my favorite supporting pieces of Cinderella Gray‘s cast, which is not exactly lacking for strong characters.

And as for the Ashen Beast? Well, this arc does mark the point at which Cinderella Gray goes from being largely about Oguri Cap to being something of an ensemble piece, and I suspect we’ll get a lot more of these focus episodes in the weeks (and hopefully, years) ahead. But, she is here. The entire time Super Creek is making history on the racetrack, a pair of distant eyes are on her, and they are those of none other than our very own Gray Monster. She, Belno, and Musaka make a number of comments during the race, in fact, but what sticks out to me most are the ice-blue bullets Oguri stares into the screen when she senses she has gained yet another rival. Truly, our girl is a monster.

Super Creek will not be the last girl to give Oguri a hard time this arc, by a long shot. A brief post credits scene introduces us to Toni Bianca [Kaida Yuuko], the Italian umamusume who stands as one of many international racers Oguri and all other Japanese racers competing in the Japan Cup will have to face. Toni is wildly dismissive of them, time will tell if she can back up that talk.

Oh, and there’s another umamusume from abroad who arrives as well. Some blonde girl with tacky stars-and-stripes leggings. Probably no one important, in any case.

Famously a thing us Americans say a lot.

But! We’ll get to find out together. See you next week, Umamusume fans.

1: While the Japanese term “media mix” is quite similar to the English phrase “mixed media”, I’m rendering it as-is here, because “mixed media” has a different connotation in English, whereas a “media mix” is something a fair bit more specific.

2: As with the Sirius Symboli case in Part 1 of the anime, my usual sources are not helping me here, but I found a few stray references indicating that she’s voiced by Yu Shimamura, and am taking those at their word.

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