Growing up as a “Smart Kid” was a weird experience.
Every adult is impressed with the stuff you can say or do, to the point that they parade you like some sort of attraction, like a pet that knows one very cool trick and want to show it to their friends. And this is something that I saw even deep into young adulthood. I remember that when I did my college thesis one of the teachers immediately said that she was impressed by my clear and confident way of speaking to them in the presentation.
But I’ve always hated the label in a way. I already had a really hard time socializing with other kids because my tastes didn’t align with anyone’s and I just had a harder time socializing to begin with, so being labeled a “smart kid” (or any other number of terms that came in vogue like “Indigo Child” “Crystal Child” “Aspergers Haver” etc. That last one particularly when the term gained traction and everyone wondered Who Had It) felt like it was ostracizing me even further when all I wanted was the opposite.
Normally in these cases kids tend to turn to media to try and find some footing in their identity, some starting point where they can start wondering “maybe this is who I am”. Aaaaaaand I was shit outta luck there too.
Every “Smart Kid” or “Gifted Kid” in media was uncool, had good grades, had a hard time socializing, liked Star Trek, and was basically meant more to evoke relatability with a certain kind of person rather than actually be something to look up to.
I didn’t like Star Trek and even if I did it was basically impossible to catch on TV for me, I had good grades (in elementary) but I hated homework so I wasn’t really even trying to get those, I had a hard time socializing but not for lack of TRYING I wasn’t excluding kids because I thought I was above them or whatever.
So if I looked into my life everyone called me smart and if I tried to look to media for some relatable character that was also “smart” I’d only find what people THOUGHT I was like (emotionless, ultra-logical, good at school work) and how they basically forced me to see myself and then felt like an absolute failure for not being.
So now, on the verge of my 30s, where the label of “smart” has still stuck despite me trying to not enforce it, with this rambling blog about a mobile game, I can’t help but wonder sometimes… What if Mayano Top Gun in Uma Musume existed when I was a kid?
From the outset, Mayano’s design might evoke a very specific feeling. If you’ve consumed enough anime and manga, the tellings of the “precocious loli” type might jump at your face, from her design to her casual outfit, to her racing outfit, to her talks about wanting to be more adult-like, to how she treats her trainer, to her friendship with the Marvelously Dangerous Marvelous Sunday.
Now, if this what appeals to you, you won’t find any judgement here. This isn’t a callout, I am a filthy sinner too. But if you were to ONLY take this out of her you’d be missing on a lot more. In fact, I’d argue that her design clearly evoking this archetype so blatantly actually adds ultimately to what makes her character compelling.
I know how weird that sounds, but bear with me. Let’s go from the start.
The idea of Mayano Top Gun being represented as a precocious child genius is actually evocative of two key aspects of the original: Being a late bloomer and being able to shift strategies through its career.
Racing strategies during a race aren’t something that can be just adjusted on the fly, they’re related to the horse’s temperament and inherent skills, that’s why most girls have at best two running strategies they can plausibly use. But if you check Mayano’s stats, you can see that out of four running strategies she has two at A and two at B.
Likewise, Mayano started its debut at Age 4 instead of Age 3 like most racehorses. They could’ve gone the way of someone that repeats years in school to represent this, but treating her as a late bloomer to whom puberty is still yet to hit like her other classmates (which we see in Mayano having many “little kid” traits like being unable to stay awake late a trait shared with Riko-chan) is another interesting way to make this clear.
To explain Mayano’s brand of “child genius” I should probably use a famous joke that uses Dungeons and Dragons stats to illustrate it.
In Dungeons and Dragons you have Intelligence and Wisdom, two stats that sound very similar but actually cover two different things. Intelligence is meant to evoke the idea of academic and practical knowledge while Wisdom is meant to evoke less direct types of knowledge like instinct and empathy.
This dichotomy is a fun way to explain how someone might be smart and still very dumb, or how someone that might be unassumingly blunt might be more perceptive than the rest.
Pics completely unrelated.
In this context, Mayano is someone with really high Intelligence… that became a Rogue or a Barbarian. She has the brainpower, she has the capability, she can know who the murderer was in a mystery movie almost immediately, she can solve math problems in her head but can’t write the process because… why would she? But she’s not a nerd, she’s not hyper-logical, and she’s still childish.
In fact, when you see her introduction you see her (future) Trainer mentally think about how the girl in second place behind Narita Brian might be able to overtake her, only for Mayano (who isn’t a trainer that has studied this sort of thing in order to support whoever they train) to basically say the same in simpler terms because she doesn’t know the vocabulary and even calling when the attempt at overtaking will happen.
Mayano herself explains that she doesn’t really “train” because she gets things the first time around, so why repeat what she already knows? But because of this she can’t get into races. And when she finally gets into one because she started following her new trainer, she’s so excited about learning so much while running that she doesn’t even mind that she lost to Narita Brian, and she gives such a good fight to Brian even in this rookie state that her introductory scene ends with Brian making a mental note of the weird child that was able to keep up with her.
And while all of this happens, Mayano is fantasizing about her meeting with her trainer being like her being hit on, blushing because a screen showed a movie preview with a kiss scene, causing issues because she wants to run in a race she wasn’t registered to and just running around like a kid in a sugar rush.
This is why I say her design as-is contributes a lot to what makes her character work. Anyone else would’ve made Mayano look like Zenno Rob Roy, the actual meek bookworm of the cast, they could’ve given her a hyper-logical attitude like Air Shakur. And yet they decided to make the “genius” look like just a young teen that wants to look cute and has very child-like fantasies about what adults are actually like.
Mayano is a character that you see a lot because she’s one of the Gacha’s low rarity pulls so she’s most likely in your roster since early on. And in that, she’s always stuck out to me. She’s really chatty, she’s constantly asking questions or pondering about the world around her, she wants to be treated like an adult because everyone keeps talking down to her and yet she cannot stay awake too late into the night and has difficulty waking up early.
The moment where she loses against Brian but is so elated at having learned so much just from the practice makes me feel called out because I’ve been going through singing lessons and those end up being me talking out loud why the latest technique “makes sense” for half the session.
What made me think about her so much lately is one of the Second Anniversary stories they released into the game, where Mayano is looking for Marvelous Sunday who went wandering god knows where and Mayano tries to rope Brian in telling her “But Mave-chin is really curious! What is she ends up in outer space?!” and she looks like she believed it herself as she said it (The scene used as the cover for this post).
No “that’s not logical”, she’s looking for one of her many friends, by “child genius” standards Mayano is dumb and “cool”, but in her context she’s still the more child-like of the bunch, to the point where even Nishino Flower (who explicitly skipped grades) ends up more mature than her sometimes.
The game is full of “she’s just like me” moments, but with Mayano I get that dose of “smart child written by a ‘smart child’ that wasn’t the kind to get straight As and be an overachiever”, and even that element of “speaking big but still being a child in the end”.
Hell, as I’ve grown up and managed to carve my own identity through punching and kicking that only makes Mayano’s character and arc all the more relatable even as an adult. Which makes me wonder if maybe growing up would’ve been ever so easier knowing that Mayano Top Gun was there to say that being “gifted” didn’t mean being a pencilneck pointdexter with good school grades and you could still be an overexcited romantic that gets stuck because you got bored with what the world seemed to offer really fast.
And I haven’t even talked about how Mayano likes planes so much because her dad is a pilot. But I guess in the end that’s just a testament to character depth, where she can be so many things at the same time without one undoing the other.
