Back when Buena Vista was first implemented my first thought was “this sure feels like what Special Week tried to be…”.
I kept this idea on the back of my head because I thought it was just me trying to put the circle in the square hole, just me forcing a line of thought like “oh it’s Special Week’s daughter so they MUST be rethreading Special Week”. Except… Cesario was added earlier and it didn’t feel that way with her so it couldn’t be just that association. Hell, I still remember people making jokes that Cesario’s design was “Spe-chan Alter” just to drive home that the similarities were strong enough.
But this set of replays to make the last post gave me reassurance that I might be onto something with that line of thinking. Specifically, her introduction. The first thing we see Buena Vista say is “Thank you. I’ve always waited waited for you. Trainer-san!”.
And it jumped out to me, because early on the franchise made a whole big deal about Special Week’s fateful encounter with her trainer, to the point that it’s the ending of Starting Gate.
Granted, the context of this scene was that it’s handing over the plot from the comic and Drama CD to the game (metaphorically, since the game got delayed). But even if we set that aside, let’s think about the traits for a moment:
Innocent-type heroine, devoted and kind, whose looks belie her potential, surrounded by rivals from all walks of life, deliberately set as the centerpiece of the current era, slightly airheaded as a charm point. It’s a very specific set of traits that, shockingly, nobody else in the cast has to the same extent. There’s plenty with at least one of those traits (Rhein Kraft being the centerpiece of her peers, Victoire Pisa for the devotion and kindness, Dantsu Flame or even Air Shakur for the many rivals, Fine Motion for the airheadedness…) and I’m sure you can think of more examples, but that specific combination for that very specific “main heroine” vibe, that Grab Bag Of All Traits, is only present with these two.
Now, I’ve gone in plenty of detail in the past about how much Special Week has changed and how her evolution has been a measuring stick for where the franchise is, so this thesis isn’t about current Special Week. I like current Special Week a LOT and as we’ll see she really enhances what Buena Vista is about. This whole thought exercise is specifically about Special Week in her early stages, that specific Season 1-ish version of her character that still informs a lot of newcomer opinions of her as they discover the franchise.
The first element that immediately jumps out to me is their backstory. Buena and Spe-chan couldn’t be more opposite in this front. Spe is from the countryside, was raised by humans after her biological mom died, and arrives at the academy with everything to prove. Meanwhile Buena comes from a normal family and has the sort of natural talent that immediately has everyone with sky high expectations of her that she has to live up to.
Spe’s backstory is perfect for a sports underdog, Buena’s backstory is perfect for the cover girl of a galge or even an idol story. The problem with early Spe, then, is that they tried to grab a compelling sports drama premise and somehow make her fit in what was, at the time, a more idol-leaning project.
May I remind you, back in the day they had “units” like “Biko, Bakushin and Tamamo”. It was dire man, show me someone that says Uma Musume was better before and I’ll show you a poor liar.
Anyway, you can kinda see this dynamic in season one, where Spe’s position felt very arbitrary, like she was positioned as a main character just because she was the newest kid around or something. This is conversely why current-day Spe works so well, because she’s not forced to hog the spotlight, because others in her periphery get to shine and we see her grow from that.
If you needed to put the spotlight on a Designated Main Character, then it better be someone that thrives in said spotlight. Which is why Buena’s School Idol charater works for it.
The biggest irony of this whole thought exercise, however, is that another element that makes Buena work better in the role than Spe… is Special Week herself.
Back in the day, it kinda felt like the whole setting started to exist from the moment Special Week entered the screen. While her countryside upbringing was a means to introduce the player/viewer to concepts, they were all… new concepts basically, in the sense that there was little to convey that feeling that she was entering a world that had existed long before she perceived it.
In contrast, Buena Vista enters a racing world where others have paved the way for her, not just in direct inspirations with Special Week but even with trailblazers like Vodka and Sweepy, after her tiara days all her rivals are veteran racers with their own story behind them. Even when Orfevre is introduced it’s already as a double crown winner.
In fact the whole point by the ending is that she might be the center of an era but that era will pass and a new one will come. Dare I say, it’s a Theme.
It’s very noteworthy how when the topic of the Nihon Derby comes up as a prospect there’s no resistance because “Vodka did it”. Even without that “introduce to new people the concepts” element, it causes a similar effect of inspiring curiosity as you realize there’s a lot that’s been going on in the world that influences Buena directly.
Ultimately, however. The biggest issue with this line of thinking is that I’m thinking retroactively while also seeing things for the franchise as it is right now with a more defined identity. Buena can only feel like a perfected version of what they seemingly tried to achieve with Spe because they’ve had years of finding out what works, how to refine what they had, and how the cast evolved as new additions came in. Special Week evolved as she needed to, and as the franchise has gone along there’s been plenty of rethreads of old characters with newer lessons learned.
Early on they had to make do with what they had and the plots were proverbially walking on eggshells as to not upset potential licensors (or so it seems, there’s never been any official word on this matter that I can remember), now they’re able to make a scenario straight out of a mid-2000s galge where trainer and trainee are Essentially Married by the end.
Which takes me to the next point and the other half of the title: Buena Vista feels like a “Perfected Special Week” because she’s drawing from a different fictional genetic pool that has more precedent as frontwoman instead of “default heroine until the gacha pool grows”.
Special Week is very clearly a Cygames Heroine. I’ve mentioned this plenty and to be fair it’s not Cygames-exclusive but they sure like them. The precious cinammon roll with a lot of hidden plot-relevant power/potential, airheaded and innocent but always aggressively platonic towards the player, also eats a lot to the point it’s arguably their only tangible personality trait. They’re not the main character, but having a POV main character that’s mostly mute forces them to BE the de-facto main character but be as inoffensive as possible while at it.
It’s not something inherently bad, but it IS a pattern you can point at.
Meanwhile… well, there’s a reason I overlayed Shiori Fujisaki at 71% opacity over one of Buena’s initial scenes.
So let me tell you a bit about media trends. Depending on the subgenre we’re talking about, there’s a lot of trends that have come and gone with time. For example, if we go to romcoms, the use of nosebleeds as a shorthand for arousal has gone away, the focus on panties is so out of date that nowadays it’s the most surefire way to make you look like a perverted old man specifically, likewise Literal Sexual Harassment and accidental perversion has gone the way of the dodo (and thank fucking God for that).
When it comes to Main Heroines, it’s always been the norm to make the candidates effectively a Pick Your Flavor situation, though mind you this isn’t exclusive to romcom or even anime-adjacent matters. However, how deep the characterization goes has been the matter that fluctuates. Sometimes it’s conveyed through exaggerated characterization, and sometimes it’s conveyed through the Fetish Grab Bag approach.
For the record: I’m not complaining, but I’m just stating it as a point. When the judgment of sinners is passed my ass will be first in the line.
There was a period, however, in Heisei-era media, where this sort of story had a girl that was… for lack of a term that hasn’t been co-opted by the scum of the earth, “out of your league”, usually (though not always) the one girl that takes traits from all instead of being too much of anything specific either to entice as many players as possible or to put her as the proverbial pinnacle of the cast. This was also achieved by putting an emphasis on the girl’s charisma, her charm, her achievements. You WANTED to be with her, not just as a symbol but because she was juuuuust accessible enough to make it feel possible.
To be more specific, Buena Vista is fittingly carrying overtones from the kind of bishoujo game that was popular around the time the real horse was born in 2006. Specifically the “new crop” of these that were starting to lean more towards cute scenarios in what’s basically the preamble to the moe boom that properly exploded not too long after (though moe as we understand it now had been spreading since the early 2000s). Keep in mind though that I will equate her with characters from other periods to further my point.
If I wanted to reopen scars I keep closed with duct tape, I’d put the example of…. whatever the blonde’s name was in Ichigo 100%, on the slightly more sicko side of things this is the role Kotonoha Katsura from School Days fills in, there’s Haruka Lovely Morishima from influential hit game Amagami, and of course the example I put forth at the beginning: Shiori Fujisaki.
In fact, Buena’s plot is essentially a study on that Shiori sort of dynamic. Normally the way things play out in this sort of situation is that you’ve got a boy and a girl (♪couldn’t make any more obvious♫). Their dynamic is very level in childhood as there’s no extra social elements at their age. But then comes teenage years and up, and while the girl has continued to improve in social standing, the boy has been a bum. The boy has an existing relationship with the girl, but the gap will only grow unless the boy in question fixes themselves up.
As the years went on this dynamic turned into “fuck the idea of self-improvement, let’s just make contrivances that push them together anyways”, and then in more recent years it has turned into “the boy is still just as much of a nothingburger, but now he’s just Nominally Hot instead of Nominally Dull”…
OPINIONS ASIDE, BACK ON TRACK.
What makes the dynamic between Buena and her trainer so compelling is that when it begins you think you have it figured out: Reliable boy and crybaby girl and they switch places… except it remains the same but the participants have mutated into different-yet-recognizable forms. We’re also not dealing with same-age characters, there’s always been a gap of what can’t be more than like… 2 or 3 years, I’d be shocked if it’s 4 or 5 (based only on how youthful Aoi Kiryuuin seems to be), which does make a difference the younger you are.
Though if we assume Buena is at least 15 (being in middle school in Japan), and the trainer can drink that does set them at minimum at 4 with birthday overlaps, though it’s hard to tell if going to a nomikai is the same drinking at a nomikai, so… hm…
Anyway, it’s inferred that they still lived near each other up until her neighbor got accepted into Trainer Training, after which there is a gap of a couple of years and they meet again after Buena has entered Tresen. The sort of gap that when you’re an adult and enter Society feels like a lot cummulatively but starts to blend together as the years go along… but when you’re a kid it makes it look like 10 years passed in a third of the time.
So while Buena might’ve become a school idol, her trainer is an adult. Even if Buena is a star student and reliable, she’s still younger, less mature. Her trainer provides her with a reliability she couldn’t find with her peers even before taking into account the whole Trainer part. And so, we don’t really have the situation of “the main character (for the sake of dynamics discussions meaning: The Trainer) is with the girl from arbitrary entitlement”. There isn’t even an element of “get to her level”, the story, if anything, makes it a recurrent point that the trainer is already at her level (or constantly making sure they are) and the only difference was that others had to see it.
We thus end up with a study on the “star childhood friend” dynamic, where the non-star has nothing to prove nor do they need to get on the girl’s good side (if anything the plot goes to lengths to show how and why Buena is infatuated), but rather just has to externalize it more. The fact that as the story goes on everyone starts liking the trainer too to the point that they wanna see them more in media and consider them an essential part of the Buena Vista Experience is testament to this.
I didn’t bring it up in the last post, but the kizuna episodes after Buena’s introduction (basically chapters 5 to 7) have a plotline where Buena sees her trainer in their natural habitat, commiserating with other trainers, going to nomikai (after-work drinking meetups), and all of that Adult Stuff and she feels left behind not unlike how her trainer felt left behind by her as she matured as a runner. Driving home their inherent gaps and different worlds, the things that are usually glossed over with how strong the bond is but still sting as they show up because you don’t know if it might be the thing that ends up separating you both.
What I really like about those episodes is that they reinforce one detail that’s present through the whole franchise but particularly here. The plot is always cognizant about the fact that the cast is full of teenage girls. When they’re with each other in their own world they have their own levels of maturity as is often the case, but the moment The Real World is involved the story goes out of its way to not fetishize their youth nor their perceived maturity and protect them accordingly.
Reminder again, I’m a self-admitted sinner so this doesn’t come from a place of puritanism. I just can’t help but respect fiction that stands their ground internally like that on that front.
So as Buena faces the fact that her trainer is now an adult, that they were once upon a time both children but now there’s a whole category in between them, she begins to feel some bitterness. They can go to drink meetups while she has curfews, they like sweets that she remembers years ago they said were too sweet. But with the story progressing this turns into an admiration, there’s a depth now to her neighbor’s character that she finds compelling, as an adult they can do things like buy tickets for a cruise to watch fireworks. By the end Buena’s bitterness turns to excitement, what else happened in the years they didn’t see each other? She knows they’re fundamentally, at their core, the same kind neighbor, so the fear of the unknown becomes the excitement of the unknown.
Buena will become an adult in due time, it’s the inevitable reality we all live with and have gone through, but now she’s not afraid that she might be left behind in the meantime.
When you take it as textually platonic as it is without the extra overtones and undertones, it’s a very down-to-earth story that I feel many might find relatable. I’m sure we’ve all known someone older or younger we used to play with (family or otherwise) and then from one year to another suddenly “let’s play house” is less appealing, and then there’s a point where they somehow feel like they’re stuck as a child while you grew up, and then it’s not until you’re both adults and things evened out that the parity from long ago seems to return.
And here’s the thing: This is shit you don’t see anymore… not in mainstream-published manga at least. If you’ll allow me to get even more anecdotal and opinionated than usual for a moment, my biggest pet peeve with anime and manga between… at least 2004-ish to at least 2018-ish and even the mainstream stuff to this day is that a lot of it doesn’t feel like it was made by people with real life experiences, they always had this… smell (for lack of a better word) of being made by kids who got basically pushed into the mangaka lifestyle without building any of the social experiences that makes for compelling writing. The reason I still hold early Bleach as one of the best stuff out there is that the interpersonal relationships in that manga felt made by someone that had an actual social life rather than a loner who wrote what having friends surely must be like. And I say this as someone that has always been a loner but one that loves to watch people but also fantasized about hanging out with people I actually enjoyed the company of.
I say 2004-ish because that’s roughly when the explosion of Akiba-kei trends started to happen and there was a wave of geek is cool going on with anime that lasted until AT LEAST 2010. And I say until 2018-ish because that’s when I roughly remember I started to see more manga that was published on twitter and pixiv first and was thus started by people not actively chasing a career and perhaps drawing from a bigger pool of experiences, see: the surge of workplace romcoms and manga about TEACHERS rather than students.
SIDENOTE DONE, sorry.
Long story short, while Buena Vista’s character is a nostalgic callback to a long gone type of heroine, it’s also seen through a more modern lens that respects the autonomy of everyone involved and the context they exist in.
All of this actually makes Buena Vista the polar opposite of Still In Love. In Still’s case the tragedy is that she and her trainer brought out the worst from each other in a self-destructive loop that both enjoyed, but with Buena, she and her trainer bring out the best in each other instead.
Buu-chan wants to be reliable for her neighbor, her neighbor steps up their game to be deserving of Buu-chan. Buena runs really well, so her neighbor studies to become a trainer, so Buena tries even harder to enter Tresen. When the trainer is nervous Buena makes a silly face, when Buena is anxious her trainer guides her into breathing exercises. When the trainer is under fire for almost not making it to the Hanshin JF Buena intervenes, when Buena loses a race due to obstruction her trainer is the one that goes out to take the heat.
Neither of them feels worthy of the other so they constantly try to improve themselves to see the other happy and how the fuck is this all allowed?! Even if it’s all textually platonic and I’ve just played the romance element up for effect, I’M NOT REALLY DOING THAT MUCH TO ACHIEVE THAT EFFECT!!! THESE TWO ARE BASICALLY MARRIED, I’D BE WORRIED ABOUT THE LEVEL OF FRATERNIZING WERE IT NOT FOR THE FACT THAT THEY DO KEEP THINGS CLEAN, ARE KEENLY AND EXPLICITLY AWARE OF THE POWER DYNAMICS AT PLAY, AND HAVE A LONG STANDING RELATIONSHIP. BUT HOLY FUCK THIS WAS APPROVED BY THE PARTIES INVOLVED WITH BUENA VISTA THEY SAW THE MARRIAGE ANALOG AND EVEN THE VOW-REAFFIRMATION PARALLEL DOWN TO EXCHANGING PRECIOUS OBJECTS AND SWEARING EACH OTHER’S ALLEGIANCE FOR LIFE AND THOUGHT IT WAS FINE IT MAKES ME SICK IT MAKES ME WANNA PUKE AND I MEAN THAT IN THE BEST WAY POSSIBLE!!!!!!
By the way, change your in-game gender to female and have all of these things I’ve raved on about happen with Buena calling you Onee-chan for a nice third-eye-opening experience. I didn’t do it for this playthrough because I wanted to finish it within my lifetime instead of stopping to sob every 3 screens… again.
Anyway, I did have a point by going on all those tangents believe it or not, so allow me to spell out the conclusion that this mental exercise led to.
Buena Vista isn’t really a “perfected early Special Week”. What’s happening is that Special Week was designed to be in the same vein as other gacha main heroines, while Buena Vista was designed to be like leading ladies of the sort of story Uma Musume draws more from. In fact, the qualification of “early” Special Week is extra relevant here, as Special Week too had to adapt to the format as things went along.
However, to make Buena Vista into such a character is only possible after the franchise has evolved from simply being Another Gijinka-Idol-Thing into its current iteration AND years of different characters testing the waters to see how people react to more deliberate callbacks to other eras of media.
Moreover, she was released in a period where the game seems keen to reevaluate old archetypes with all the newfound lessons and freedom, and as such it’s only natural to explore the concept of a Main Character with a descendant of the earlier Designated Main Character.
My initial impression wasn’t wrong, but it’s more happenstance than I initially thought.