Anyone familiar with my work outside this blog might get the impression that I’m the kind in love with down-to-earth narratives that focus on the often-unseen masses.
That impression would be spot on.
My love for Uma Musume should be evident by now, but as much as I love it, there’s always that elephant in the room of those that don’t make it.
Sure, the game might feature “losers” like Haru Urara and Twin Turbo, but they’re featured because even in defeat they were impressive. And it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that for every named character there’s 7 others without the same level of story. “The hope for the 87.5%” isn’t as catchy though.
How do I know this? Because whenever you win your Make Debut race, that’s 7 other girls that lost their introductory race, that’s 1/8 that make it past that initial line, a line that gets thinner and thinner with each race. Even though in gameplay it’s just a convenience for the player, in-universe being able to join many of the G1 races isn’t just a matter of being good enough, but having enough people think you’re good enough and vote for you (hence why they’re locked behind fan counts).
At the end of every race there’s a Live Show, and in that live show the three first places take the stage with the rest being backup dancers. I always took the backup dancing as an element of the collectiveness that Japan enforces in every structure, like students that clean their classrooms, or (to grab something closer to Uma Musume) wrestlers that make sure to clear the ring when they’re not the ones fighting.
And by simple necessity of the competitive element, the percentage of these backup dancers is staggering. Not everyone will leave their school years a legendary runner, not everyone will be remembered as a tragic hero, not everyone will be part of a rivalry spoken about for years to come, not everyone will find their tale be impressive in how low-profile it was.
The vast majority will live a quiet school life, doing their best only to find they weren’t the main character of the year or even the day. They will graduate and then enter society…
…but is that bad at all?
Is the school life the end of the line? If everything goes well and they live to the 80 year average, that’s basically 60+ years after school to live a life and build something. What if they weren’t able to leave a mark on the school or break a record? Perhaps they weren’t meant for that, perhaps their calling was medicine, or teaching, or business, perhaps it took them until their 30s to figure things out.
The school life is the framing of the whole game and where most things take place, but it’d be dumb to say, even inside the context of Uma Musume, that there’s nothing beyond it.
Light Hello is proof of that.
When we first see her, we meet Light Hello through a flashback (a fitting thing that mirrors how many girls’ trainings start), a flashback where a younger student-age Light Hello is crying to her senpais, who themselves are crying in frustration at being backup dancers yet again. But Hello is crying because her senpais are crying, especially because, even if they were backup dancers, she wanted to see them on stage.
In the present day, Light Hello is an event producer, and thinking about this in her past, she wanted to try reviving the old practice of the Grand Live. Grand Lives are like any other live show in any other context, except that the roster is specifically girls in smaller rosters practicing their choreographies.
Grand Lives were what came before Live Shows, and Hello speaks about them because her grandma spoke a lot about them, and how tough things became once the format changed. But Live Shows are as much a sign of status as they are show… and therein comes the main resistance that Hello finds. The 10% doesn’t want to change a format that works for them, but also the 90% sees the move as one of pity, as if saying “sorry you can’t make it to the podium, here’s a free gimme where you don’t have to even try”.
I feel like I wanna explore this more in detail together with the concept of the Live Shows on its own separate post, but for now let’s go back to Hello.
Light Hello is the first adult (explcitly so, looking at you Maruzensky and Ramone) Horse Girl (that is explicitly one, looking at you Tokino Tazuna). She’s a glimpse as to what life has in store after graduating and her tale is a really heartening one.
She joined the academy because her grandma and her mom were really good at running but she just couldn’t live up to those expectations. So she fought through the bitterness, graduated, and next thing you know she’s working as an event producer, one so good that local TV shows are made about her, one so passionate she’s trying to bring back a lost practice just to make sure the kids don’t go through the grief she did.
And it’s clear that she has moved on, but like anyone, it’d be silly to assume that scars don’t remain even after moving on. Hello looks back at her student days with bittersweet memories, with feeling like she disappointed people while also still managing to build some good memories on the way there.
But she isn’t just the professional producer or the background NPC that rose above her station. What makes her character so compelling is that when I say that she’s an adult horse girl, I mean that in as many ways as this 12+ game allows.
When not on the clock she loves to go get drunk and watch idol shows and watch idol shows while drunk, she loves to rope the trainer into things like a new year escapade where they sing karaoke until dawn or pass out from eating too much. She has a really dorky love for an amusement park mascot, you might even find her INTENSELY analyzing a burger while scouting places.
Her scenario’s drama is reminiscent of any other girl’s story but with the battlefield going from successful races to successful live shows, and her personal side can remind anyone of any other girl showing all the facets of her personality in the most dorky ways. It was legitimately hard to shift to the new scenario and leave her behind because seeing her in parallel to whoever I was training became part of the joy for me.
Utimately, though, her tale is probably one of the parts of the game that will resonate the most with any adult, especially in Japan. Where it might feel in the moment that your school life is where it all begins and ends and not making anything of yourself by the time you hit college means that you failed at life from the start… except that’s obviously bullshit.
You can enter an academy with aspirations for running and instead make it as an event producer even if that was the last thing on your mind while studying.
If you only truly die the moment your name is forgotten… what do you call it when suddenly your name is uncovered and now more people than ever know it? Forget life after school, sometimes it means life after more than one kind of death.