Mei often says as a catchphrase “ロマンだろう” (“Roman darou”).
This Roman isn’t actually talking about Rome, instead it’s the way Japanese use the word Romance or Romantic… but likewise, this “romance” has nothing to do with love stories… uh… kinda. Basically: All love stories are romantic by nature, but not all romances are love stories.
So if you’ll indulge my literary nerd self for a bit, this’ll make sense. And keep in mind that I’m gonna oversimplify in order to lead to one specific point and also I’m gonna skip a lot. So to anyone with any knowledge about the topic concerned I skipped this or that: I know, I want this post done in my own lifetime.
So let’s go back to the late 18th and early 19th century for a moment. The era of exploring the planet is almost done, and the era of exploring what we have available is upon us.
The industrial revolution has made life easier for everyone and the scientific revolution has given way to the era of Enlightenment, where reason and what can be perceived is seen as paramount as summed up by the maxim “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am)… or to put it another way, the industrial machine keeps consuming the land and people, and science has started to kill the mystical things in life.
The world is changing at a worrying pace and you have no say in whether you want to participate or not. The value of the individual is measured just as its value as part of the bigger machine as humans keep distancing themselves from nature.
In its early stages this sweeping wave of lifestyle revolution accross the globe led to Nihilism… or at least to Nihilism as understood by its contemporary term since you can argue Buddhism had explored the same concepts milennia before.
After all, when the biggest minds of your time start solving all the small mysteries in life, people are gonna wonder how to deal with the idea that there’s nothing beyond the perceptible.
Leave at least one extra generation after this and people start fighting back, they’re no longer coping, they’re asserting themselves and what they believe in. They start protesting that individual is important beyond their value as part of the collective, the spiritual is important no matter what science says, and you know what? Nature is nice and humanity is worse off for not caring more about it.
Thus, Romanticism was born.
While it’s really dang difficult to sum up a literary movement as a whole, much less how different regions explored its themes or how it affected their societies and polititcs, there ARE certain trends that you can pinpoint about romanticism.
To me, the most interesting change you see when romanticism rolls around is the value of the character as an attraction unto itself, and also a boom for more personal tales. That’s not to say that such things didn’t exist before Romanticism rolled around, but take for example Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
In Frankenstein the story is more concerned about the emotional and psychological effect that the whole premise has on both doctor and monster than it is about any specific social commentary. It’s a narrative where the cautionary tale about humans trying to play god is overshadowed by a creator horrified by what he has made and said creation feeling betrayed by the world itself.
Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, the Bronté family, Goethe… as the names might make you feel, Romanticism is a very European movement.
And do you know who loved European literature? Japan in the late 19th Century and Early 20th Century.
Modern Japan pop culture has a very clear and deliniated influence in this specific era of literature, it’s also one of the many reasons why Japan has had a traditional love for the idea of France, of Paris. Think… the average western Otaku idealization of Japan because of Anime, but with Japanese people looking up to France.
You can draw a line that goes from Revue Starlight to Utena to Princess Knight to Takarazuka Revue, the latter of which started playing almost exclusively European plays since its whole basis was the idea that women weren’t allowed into Kabuki so a new kind of theater with newer (by 1913) plays was created.
So when a Japanese person describes something as Romatic, as Roman, they’re talking about the affirmation of the self, the drama and joy that comes from trying to assert yourself against the world through all those adversities.
Sakura Taisen‘s slogan is “太正桜に浪漫の嵐” (“Taisho sakura ni roman no arashi”, “A romantic storm over the Taisho cherry blossoms”), Persona 5 was described as Roman by its developers in a bit that was really tricky to translate. Hell, Monster Hunter‘s Gunlance is known by Japanese fans as the “Roman Cannon” because it’s very tricky to use but when you can pull its crazy moves you do absolutely insane damage.
Oh yeah, Roman is stylized as “浪漫” in Kanji. Fittingly the Kanji can be read as “wave” and “despite oneself” but it was most likely chosen because you can literally read it as “Roman” rather than the meaning of each Kanji.
It’s actually a very interesting bit of linguistics at play if you think about it.
In many European languages (and derivatives) it was common for young men to try and woo girls by dressing up and acting as Werther from famed novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, or for girls to be attracted to these more emotionals and individualistic displays, thus something that was “romantic” was something that was done in a love context.
Hence: All love stories are romantic, but not all romances are love stories.
But Japan got exposed to the term in a different way and its cultural effect was different, thus the term evolved to be more associated with the literary movement and its philosophies rather than with love exclusively.
And all of this sounds quite a bit like Uma Musume, don’t you think?
Not just Project L’arc specifically, but the franchise as a whole. What makes it so appealing is that canonical victories are dictated by real life, where we might not have convenient clean narratives by design but god damn if we humans aren’t gonna try and see it through those lenses if we can.
It’s something that you can extend to sports as a whole. Unlike battle manga where defeat can often mean literal death, in any sport defeat is part of the process, the bitter pill to swallow, the thing where you need to think about what you do as your next step.
Mei calls herself a romantic because while she wants to prove the power of Japanese horsegirls, she ultimately wants people to see the value in that eternal push and pull. That the narrative in defeat is as valuable as the narrative in victory and that winning isn’t the end of the line.
The scenario itself explores this. If you lose the first L’arc it makes you face the adversities of pushing through that bitterness to try again, and if you win, things don’t end because you’re now on the other end of that narrative with people wanting to win against you, and you needing to defend your title.
THIS is the core message of Project L’arc.
Just like Aoharu Cup uses team racing to explain that freedom of method means freedom to have a strict curriculum, just like Grand Live uses Live Shows to craft a love letter to fan support, just like Grand Masters uses the idea of goddesses to explore the idea that we’re all standing in the shoulders of giants. Project L’arc uses Japan’s quest to win a specific French horse race as the means to explore the intrinsic value of the struggle rather than just dismissing it in a binary of victories and losses.
Which is very to the core of Romanticism if you think about it. Glorifying the struggle and those involved instead of dismissing everything as just a victory or a loss is not unlike people in the 1800s making stories where they hoped people remembered the value of the individual beyond what that individual could do while being grinded by the machine of society.
Speaking of Mei, next one we’ll focus on the characters of the scenario.