I joke all the time that time in Uma Musume is a mere suggestion, but how does canon and continuity work exactly when you have a game, and different manga, and different anime?
The best way I can express this very specific thing is that Uma Musume always shares the same “base” but then that base can diverge or evolve retroactively. The worst way I can explain it is that time moves forward on the outside, on our world, but in the Uma Musume world it only exists as the story at hand needs.
That is, aside from the real life races… kinda.
Let’s take for example Mihono Bourbon.
Bourbon is a character that from the outside gives off a robotic vibe but has a kind and soft (if slightly clumsy) interior. She races against Rice Shower and eventually loses. This is her “base”.
However, Bourbon in the game and the anime are very different. In the anime she has a strict edge to her but learns quickly how to communicate better. Meanwhile in the game she’s DUMB and I mean DUMB dumb, she’s a black hole of intelligence and the whole point of her acting like a robot and following instructions so literally is the fact that she feels like it frees her from the anxieties of making a bad choice on her own.
Also, Bourbon in the anime can ride a Segway, in the game bourbon cannot touch machinery or it will immediately decide working properly is cringe.
Inari One is another fun example. In Cinderella Gray she’s “Tamamo but angrier and with bigger boobs”, she’s the sort of girl that won’t punch your lights out on a whim but by god is she gonna scare you that she’s gonna do that. Meanwhile, in the game she still a fiery personality but the whole gimmick with her is how she calls her trainer “Danna” as in “General” but it’s a word that also means basically “Darling” (as in, significant other, usually a husband).
Why do these changes happen? Well, the first one is because of tone. The game has a different tone from the mainline anime, which has a different tone from Road to the Top, which has a different tone from each individual manga. Also there’s a difference when you write a story where the Trainer needs to be someone you see Vs a story where the Trainer is a POV.
The game, by its premise of training requires a more Slice of Life approach to things, the anime by virtue of being animation with a runtime requires more focus on individual characters with secondary characters needing to exist more as “one scene wonders”, which isn’t dissimilar to how each manga approaches things but the manga can afford itself attention in a different way that is going to affect the tone.
So the characters work on a “recognizable base, divergent specifics” basis. Gold Ship in the anime is more of a butch while in the game she’s more of a femme. In the anime she’s a cryptid while in the game she’s a menace to society. Both are recognizable as “Gold Ship” but you can make further distinction between “Game’s Gold Ship” and “Anime Gold Ship”.
This actually extends to the character dynamics too.
In the mainline anime there’s Team Spica (Special Week, Silence Suzuka, Toukai Teio, Mejiro McQueen, Daiwa Scarlet, Vodka, Goldship, and later Kitasan Black). If you check Starting Gate, this was the main group of girls that the story focused on. And if you play the game, the girls will hang out together a lot too.
Likewise, while the game doesn’t have “Team Canopus”, the quartet of Nice Nature, Machikane Tannhauser, Twin Turbo, and Ikuno Dictus are still inseparable even without a “team”.
Races are the main thing that’s basically immutable… so long as gameplay isn’t a factor. If you’re training, then Mejiro McQueen can actually win against Rice Shower, but if you’re dealing with something more fixed like anime or manga (or the game’s story mode) then the defeat will always happen.
There are a fair few breaks from this, but the general rule is that they shouldn’t take away from an existing girl. Silence Suzuka actually surviving the Autumn Tenno Sho is often set up in specific circumstances where she isn’t stealing someone else’s thunder for example.
Now, continuity is where things get dicey and where you should not think too hard about it.
Overall it’s safe to assume that whatever the current story is saying is the canon thing. In the game the continuity dictates McQueen’s races come before Special Week’s, in the anime they come after… while McQueen already has the sort of fame that her having those races would entail.
In season 2 Hayahide is described as a “New Generation” while racing against Teio because it’s being pulled from the actual real life commentary (where Hayahide was indeed basically fresh blood compared to Teio who was in his retirement race), but inside the story Hayahide has been racing for a while and her threat comes from that expertise.
The game’s story events sometimes pull the characters at a really early stage and sometimes they assume they’ve gone through any number of developments. Like how the game’s first ever story event is the game’s version of Special Week arriving to the academy for the first time, while the Summer 2023 event has Suzuka in a state and personality that belie at the very least all of Team Sirius and/or the anime and then some.
And of course this isn’t counting all the evolutions in a meta level. Rice Shower as seen in Team Sirius’s second chapter is markedly different from Rice Shower in season 2 which is markedly different from Rice Shower in training, Aoharu Cup, or even the story events.
Is this confusing?
It’s kinda fun, actually.
If you approach Uma Musume with the mindset that it’s an ever-evolving singular thing, where every piece feeds and develops the next, these discrepancies are really fun to think about and theorize.
For example, it’s known that McQueen has been there since the start, and Rice Shower got teased with Bourbon at the end of season one, in the BNW OVAs. If you investigate further, you can find really early character profiles that included Rice Shower from around the time season 1 premiered.
Then, in the game, there’s one Support Card that depicts BNW with Winning Ticket’s old design, and if you play the story you can tell a marked shift in tone starting from chapter 3… where if you complete said chapter you get a different Winning Ticket support card depicting the same event in a different way.
This has led me to my own personal theory that they had the first two chapters ready before they decided to delay the game after season 1 (as I explained in another post, it looked like the intent was for the anime to precede the game, like it did with Season 2). So they’re this odd leftover, this vestigial post-starting gate pre-season 1 stage of development.
I call it “The Kenjiro Tsuda Line” because there’s a marked difference between a moody start of chapter, and starting a chapter with Kenjiro Tsuda narrating things. He also narrated the intro to Make A New Track which wasn’t too far behind release-wise… and then dataminers discovered that Grand Live was originally meant to come as the third scenario (which was further proven by remembering they had to buff up Grand Live, which would make sense if it was originally designed for a lower powerlevel).
So if you watch season 2 and then season 3 or even Road To The Top. You’re going to see two very different Rice Showers. One the meek friendless girl and the other the quiet and gentle one surrounded by a lot of people. I always think of how in Rob Roy‘s introduction, Rice Shower calms Rob Roy’s anxieties by grabbing her hands and reassuring her, a gesture that the more… antagonized Rice Shower probably wouldn’t have done… but a move that you CAN see the “fundamental” Rice Shower do regardless of stage.
So if you look things up and see the timeline of events you see a parallel evolution where Rice Shower as a character got more defined, not only by herself but as part of a massive cast. Not too different from how Admire Vega basically carries all the angst that Silence Suzuka left at the door after coming back from America.
Time is still more of a courtesy than an actual thing though, and shouldn’t considered beyond “this is reality now”. A third-year student can race for 3 years and not graduate, Kitasan Black can grow up and join the academy and everyone is still the same year.
So enjoyment on a base level and then extra enjoyment if you decide to research further, a research that’s not necessary for the base experience but will enhance it regardless.
How very meta.