So if I say “tomboy”, what comes to mind?
Sporty girls? Girls that act like boys?
Would this be the first thing that comes to mind with the word “Tomboy?”:
As far as the game is concerned, Daiwa Scarlet is a “Tomboy”, it’s even in one of her evolved skills’ name.
おてんば (Otenba) is the word used, and while it’s TECHNICALLY right to translate it as Tomboy, since it refers to a girl with a rough and non delicate side to herself, it’s not quite right to use it in the context of a girl with a more masculine streak. For that there’s loanwords like ボーイッシュ (Boyish) or the more direct 男っぽい (Otoko poi, masculine in style). There’s even 男役 (Otokoyaku, Male Role) for the Takarazuka fans out there. Amongst many others.
In fact, this dichotomy of “boyish” and “tomboy” existing in two different axes of a character instead of being synonims is the reason why “Manly girl with very delicate tastes” is so prevalent, because the “masculinity” of the design is treated as its own scale outside of rough vs delicate.
This isn’t the “Scarlet’s career and deep dive” article, because to properly illustrate that I’d need to write Vodka in parallel and that’s gonna take a bit of time. In fact, one of the things that makes Vodka and Scarlet’s dynamic so fun is the fact that you have a rough girly girl and a delicate boyish girl, further proving how these two things exist in different scales.
Rather, I wanted to illustrate how pondering about the use of “Tomboy” to refer to Scarlet in in one of Christmas Scarlet’s skills, led me to properly appreciate the extent that her character homages a specific kind and era of character. Because I say many times that Scarlet is “Like an early 2000s Tsundere”, but what does that mean?
“Tsundere” is one of those terms that you learn when you first get into anime “properly”, and like many gratuitously general terms you learn at that stage you eventually realize how narrow and arbitrary they might be. In theory it’s a combination of “Tsuntsun” (rough, aggressive) and “Deredere” (Loving, lovey-dovey). “Hot n’ cold” is often used as an english approximation.
These days we live in an era where older character archetypes like the Tsundere have been iterated upon and riffed on so many times that the term can only be properly applied to characters that deliberately evoke the image on purpose. But before the 2010s, “Tsundere” was a more indentifiable term that saw its own evolution.
More specifically we can focus on Scarlet and to a lesser extent Sweep Toushou for this comparison. If you look at any scene with Sweep and you lived through the era where Rie Kugimiya was at the peak of her popularity, her character would be self-evident, the petite and petulant child that selectively and eventually only shows her more gentle side to the main character… and no, the main character here isn’t the trainer, it’s Kitasan Black, if you’re her trainer you’re shit outta luck.
So compared to her, you can tell Scarlet has the “Tsundere vibe”, if nothing else, her hair style is very obviously being a shout out to the style you saw back in the early 2000s, from the very spiky bangs to the big twintails associated with the archetype at that point.
The problem is that if you try to measure Scarlet as a Tsundere by any “modern” measure she doesn’t quite fit as neatly. This is because she’s meant to evoke a very specific point in time. The perfect honor student that gets all the good grades and is the favorite of every teacher, the girl that is marked for greatness by all the adults near her, so dilligent, so kind… until you get personal with her and realize she has a clumsy side, a rough side, and she isn’t actually as perfect as she looked.
It’s a concept that I associate a lot with 2004 specifically but that’s because 2004 was one hell of a year where SHUFFLE!, Fate/Stay Night, CLANNAD, ToHeart 2, Planetarian and Remember11 released TO NAME BUT A FEW.
But among those examples I could easily pull Rin Tohsaka from Fate/Stay Night who fits the role of the perfect student that’s not so perfect once the main character gets to know her, or Kyou Fujibayashi in CLANNAD who’s more upfront about her rougher side while still being the Class Representative. You could even go back earlier to the year 2000 where Tsukihime had Akiha as a sort of Proto-Rin character-wise and I’m going to stop before I derail myself because I just remembered Narcissu is from this particular era and I’m already derailing things enough as-is.
And that’s just in Visual Novels, don’t get me started on anime and manga. But you get the image by now.
Of course, the fun thing is that like many things in Uma Musume, Scarlet isn’t like that Just Because. Rather, she has a full inner world where you can see a complex individual that just so happens in practice to come out as a seemingly stereotypical Tsundere from that era. To the point where, ironically, calling her just a “tomboy” no matter the definition or just a “tsundere” no matter the definition would be awfully reductive.
But that actually ties in some funny ways to how it adapts the real horse and… that’s not the topic of this one post.
I REALLY wanna talk about her, I’ve wanted to talk about her since I started the blog because she’s been in my profile since I started playing and I have a lot to say, but I cannot talk about her without giving further context with Vodka, and then that’s just on the career side and there’s a lot to say about their personalities and relationships outside of racing, and then there’s all the possible extra notes that crop up on the way…
We’ll get there.
