Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray Season 2

Episode 18

One driving question of this Japan Cup arc, and the big one breaking through at the end of last week's episode, is "What is Obey Your Master's deal?" Sure, she seems to be a jovial troll at odds with the serious-minded focus of so many of the other international guest-horses here. But she's also got that whole stalker setup for Tamamo Cross going, and this storyline has been none-too-subtle about gassing her up as the one to watch out for. And so, in the interstitial between the race's turning point in the previous episode and the rest of the run, Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray takes viewers back to show how Obey Your Master…decided she was going to become the Joker. How very American.

The jokes basically write themselves, but Obey's wild-card status is the sort of thing Uma Musume was made for. This is the sport where the term "dark horse" originates, after all. Obey Your Master is based on American racehorse Pay the Butler—renamed like all the international horses as they seemingly weren't able to secure the likeness rights(?) the way they do for Japanese Uma Musume—whose pretty much sole claim to fame was this huge upset victory in the Japan Cup. Cinderella Gray's take is to make her win not some fluke, but a thoroughly intentional, calculated move. This series is very much about the strategy, after all, and Obey's method, upon learning that the turf in the Japan Cup just happens to be optimal for her racing style, sets about engineering everything in her favor.

Uma Musume has so often been a series about sheer vibes and the spirit of never giving up winning races that it's wild, and refreshing, to see Obey Your Master subvert that specifically to win her own way. They call out her bending of horse racing rules with her swerve late in the run, but overall, she's breaking the "rules" of this series' sports storytelling. Her trolling was specifically to get Tama to drop her guard for a moment; she blows past Oguri's own place in the story at the moment, and she even concedes that this isn't going to be the start of a turnaround in her career or win record. Obey knows that she's not overall talented enough to define her era, but here, in this specific scenario, she can win now. It's pointedly the opposite of how a Joker works in games, since she absolutely wasn't pulled in here by chance, but sowing chaos in the ranks by seeming like she did is part and parcel to her plan.

This means, in a story as carefully calculated around its strategies and setups as Cinderella Gray, seeing it all come together makes for thrilling television. The push-and-pull between Obey and Tama keeps viewers on the edge of their seats just enough to be shocked when Oguri roars back from near-irrelevance. That's its own level of shocking strategy swerves, as it turns out that the condition Oguri agreed on with Musaka was to fall back on her regular running style if the race got too out of hand—the exact point that people in and out of the anime were making last week! It invites the question of how much of a contender Oguri could have been had she just run that way from the start, as opposed to trying to play catch-up at the end while everybody's already going Horse Super Saiyan. And even then, maybe she only gets up to the place she does because of missteps like Tony Bianca breaking her leg. This is why it's important to run in sensible shoes.

The Horse Super Saiyan effects are the easy part of the episode to point to in terms of polish, but the whole thing is playing at the top of Cygames Pictures' game with Uma Musume. Design flourishes follow everyone as they work through this race, paying special attention to how Jokerized they can make Obey Your Master in any given moment. Uma Musume's never been too precious about how it portrays the horse girls, but I like to presume that not being a direct depiction of her real-world inspiration gives Obey the leeway to get even more unhinged. Special recognition must also go to her voice actress, Shizuka Ishigami, for thoroughly nailing the difference between her facade personality and her true self. It absolutely hits the way it needs to in convincingly unnerving Tamamo and making clear how calculated her whole plan was.

Those layers of calculation in this episode are atypical for Uma Musume, but the message and theme remain true. The idea that everyone has their own story is a real-life point of sports that the series has always engaged with, and that's seen in how Obey's plan intersects with the efforts of Tamamo, Oguri, and others. This is Obey's moment, which she worked extremely hard to get, but it is, in turn, propelling the plots of other athletes that will pay off in their own way later. This comes back to the point this season about Oguri Cap seeming like she's been sidelined a bit in her own show: the wider world of horse girls and their interactions, to say nothing of adhering to real-life race records, means she can't be the focal winner every time. But the series can still hone in on how the stories of others shaped her story, and the rest of the world she writes that story in. It's recursive.

Even as Obey Your Master isn't the character the audience is conditioned to root for, and even as I said last week, I wouldn't be crazy about seeing an American win, having gotten her full story, it does make me feel happy for her, at least a little bit. Without just streaming my in-the-moment reaction, I can't directly convey the kind of jumping, "Oh my goooooood!"-shouting levels of hype this show inspires when it shows races like this. It is sports in its truest form, regardless of the candy-colored anthropomorphized anime horse girl designs, and regardless of the outcome being prescripted at least twice over due to real-world results and the fictional writing process. Placing Obey's planning over all of that just makes it even more of a setup, but this, too, is fine since her whole thing is keeping up kayfabe anyway. It's a huge victory for this storyline, and another win for this whole show.

Rating:

Uma Musume: Cinderella Gray Season 2 is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Chris backed the horse girls before they were cool, and he's so happy they've spurted off the way they have now. You can follow him reskeeting fanart of Vodka, Michelle My Baby, and the other cool ones over on his BlueSky