A Review of Umamusume: Pretty Derby

Part 2: The Characters

If you aren’t wired to seek out goofy bullshit, you may wonder what exactly draws people to this series. The premise sounds like a bit of a joke. Even as a purveyor of weird media, my immediate reaction was “why does this exist, and who is this for?”

The first, and most obvious, appeal is the girls. And umas are all very distinct and have really appealing designs. Each one is carefully and deliberately designed to capture their personality, and, owing to how weird horses are, all have larger-than-life personalities. They are also oddballs, the lot of them. Each one comes with a core motivation, some specific hang-ups or neurosis that either motivates them or is getting in the way of their goals (usually a bit of both), and at least one or two friends and rivals whose personalities mesh and contrast with their own. In some ways, they align with established tropes (the rival conflicts almost always have some element of enemies-to-lovers going on, for instance), but since they’re based on real critters who had some stranger-than-fiction behavior in their own rite, these girls end up being really fascinating to follow. Folks have quickly gotten attached to them.

The Umas

Some of these characters are really compelling! One great example is Haru Urara. A dimunitive, pink-haired uma that’s dumb as beans, she makes up for a lack of intellect through pure pluckiness and positive attitude. She’s also notorious for being manifestly incapable of winning anything. Her real life counterpart literally never won a race, recording 113 losses in a row, for which she is crowned and celebrated as “the shining star of losers everywhere.”

Urara desperately wants to win, and her trainer tries to move heaven and earth to help her achieve her goals. Along the way, she regularly no-shows at practice, instead helping the local shopkeepers when they need assistance. She soon becomes a mascot of sorts for those businesses, as her spunky exuberance naturally draws in customers. Those folks form the core of her fanbase, who are frustrated by her race results but find her undying effort inspiring. She wavers in her steadfastness at some point, before community support inspires her to give everything she has, with the hope that a win would give them joy and return the favor for their undying support.

Other umas have much more complicated stories. Some have family legacies to uphold, others struggle with self-image or self-confidence. Others are in school council roles and carry the burden of representing the academy through their demeanor and performance. One struggles with a hidden disability and fights like mad to keep it from holding her back from her dreams. Every girl has her reason for being at the academy, goals she wants to accomplish, and sacrifices they must make to reach their goals.

Some of these girls are pretty buck-wild too. One, for instance, is Matikanefukitaru, or Fuku for short., is a fortune teller with a god complex and a massive dollop of magical thinking. Her goal is to become a great racer and ascend to godhood. Another, Manhattan Cafe, is a spooky goth girl with freaky yellow eyes, straight up sees ghosts, and is rivals with a mad scientist who wants to borrow her for experiments.

Another wild character is Super Creek. She has gotten a great deal of notoriety, was based on a horse who proved to have an oddly nurturing relationship to its jockey. To adapt that character trait, they basically gave her an non-sexual age-play fetish, regularly wanting to play the role of doting mother with everyone she’s close with, including her friends and her trainer. At one point, she dropped her matronly front and is real with the player character, explaining:

“You said before that I’m considerate, but that’s not true. Whenever I see someone getting hurt, I’m overcome by a wave of sadness that makes it hard to breathe. I hate feeling that way. . . So the reason why I want to help is really because I’m selfish.

I have no desire to be thanked, nor do I want anyone returning the favor. As long as people just accept me for who I am, that’s honestly more than enough.”

Girl. This sounds like a cry for help if ever I heard one. She’s absolutely the sort of person, err, horse-person who would break down crying as soon as someone shows her any TLC. Someone please give her a hug and make her some soup. People online regularly call her Super Freak and make goo-goo baby jokes about her, but man, I feel like she just wants to be accepted and have a defined role in her friends' lives.

A personal favorite of mine is Nice Nature, whose whole schtick is feeling insecure about being kinda normal and unspectacular while her peers are actual anime protagonists. She has resigned herself to being a secondary character in their stories. In the game, your trainer player-character spends most of their time trying to convince her that, if she applies herself, she can achieve great things. Though she is flippant about it at first, she finds her way.

Another character that I cannot stop thinking about is Agnes Tachyon. Her persona is that of a mad scientist, who puts her full energy into research in an effort to "find the outer limits of speed." She explains that Umamusume are utterly mystifying in their capabilities, displaying strength and speed that should be physically impossible for their physiology and muscle mass. She is compelled to try to understand that further, and is willing to involve those around her in her experiments, whether they want to or not. In the game, she refers to the player as her guinea pig, regularly making them try her concoctions to see what effects they have.

She's nuts. I love her.

I will share more about her in my discussion of the anime adaptations, as she's a key antagonist in the movie Umamusume: Beginning of a New Era, where they really played up her unhinged persona. She's a great foil to the protagonist, and as you learn more about her, her erratic behavior and intellectualizing starts to make sense, seeing the challenges that she's attempting to overcome.

Turns out, her compulsion to research is to overcome her own limitations. Go watch Beginning of a New Era if you don't want this spoiled, but I promise she's got interesting stuff going on. It's also a really fun movie with big feelings, incredible animation and a satisfying conclusion.

All that to say, the girls are the load bearing column for the whole franchise. They have fun designs and unique personalities, and their issues and interpersonal relationships are intensely compelling if their characterization hits you just right. This also drives the game's economy, ratcheting up the FOMO of missing out on an uma during her banner period when she's first introduced, since the odds of winning her later is dramatically lowered. If you start seeing people on social media with horse girl pfps, there’s a real chance that the user played through her story, cried at least a couple times because that uma’s story hit way too close to home, and have decided that she’s now their daughter and they will go to the ends of the earth for her.

Shipping

One aspect of these characters that makes them compelling is their interpersonal relationships, and in the anime, the relationships between these girls had some romantic subtext. The game is not shy about turning subtext into outright text, with thinly-veiled innuendo abounding. Most often, there is dramatic and romantic tension between rivals, whose rivalry grows from the way they compare and contrast to one another. One uma is shy and uncertain? Have a more self-assured uma challenge her in the leadup to the big race, who sees her potential and demands she leave it all on the track. They both want to crush each other on the track, but come to admire each other for who they are, both during and outside competition. After their arc concludes, they are often in some middle ground between respect as equals, admiration as friends, and outright adoration.

One hilarious example is the relationship between Daiwa Scarlet and Vodka. The former strives to be the ideal honor student, and is portrayed as a bit snooty. Her roommate, Vodka, is a delinquent who is obsessed with being percieved as cool. She is chasing after the image of a past racer that she looks up to, and is constructing her self-image to match. She's brash and uncouth, and the two are always at odds.

The game's official website gives these two the "historians talking about 'close friends'" treatment, saying that "[Vodka] and her teammate, Daiwa Scarlet, are always fighting because they're polar opposites. . . however, Diawa is her best friend, comrade in arms, and the one she understands the most."

So yeah, the "Vodsca" ship is a pretty established thing.

They're the most in-your-face duo like this, but like the loading screenshot shows, there's a lot of this going on. And these girls are weird and complicated, so their dynamics are a lot of fun to see. It's not surprising that the fandom has produced industrial quantities of fanfiction around different ships.

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