Tag: Super Creek

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.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

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 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 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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