Uma Musume’s conceptual evolution is a fascinating thing to see.
For those that don’t know, the “project” was first announced in 2016 with a concept trailer that feels absolutely dettached from anything you see nowadays.
Between that mess of a trailer, a personality quiz they released ages ago, the drama CDs, the manga based on said drama CDs, and the anime’s first season, you can easily track the franchise’s evolution on concept and execution.
Be it the shameful mess of a race of the concept trailer with a girl doing a Naruto/Sonic run for no reason, the quiz making constant mentions of the girls helping their trainers’ goals (instead of the other way around), Starting Gate’s (the drama CDs’) characterizations being more “idol-like”… Hell, you could easily argue how they’ve been figuring things out even in the final game.
But today I want to focus on one specific example of this evolution: Silence Suzuka.
If you were to ask me what Suzuka is like nowadays, I’d actually say she’s the Kaede Rukawa of the cast. Cool-looking, a prodigy on the sport that has all eyes on them… and also an obsessed idiot with zero skills outside their one obsession and the exact same kind of dumbass that the main character is (in this case Special Week/Hanamichi Sakuragi) but they get more of a pass because they don’t speak as much so statistically they show their ass less times.
But if you knew of the real Silence Suzuka or only had the anime’s first season or Starting Gate as reference this assessment might sound weird.
“Battlefield Casualties” as I call them (Horses suffering an injury in the middle of a race that requires them to be put down) are sadly not an uncommon thing. Thoroughbreds basically give up the resilience of other horses to maximize speed, which results in any number of conditions from muscular issues, to brittle bones, to any number of random diseases.
Just in the currently-implemented cast we could point to K.S. Miracle who suffered a fracture at the 1991 Sprinter Stakes, or Rice Shower who had a fracture at the 1995 Takrazuka Kinen. But in these cases we’re at different ends of the scale. Rice Shower was on its fifth racing year and should’ve by all measures, have stopped in 1993 (where the game actually ends her story) but was pushed further in hopes that a bigger record would improve interest in breeding with it. Likewise, K.S. Miracle was a really fragile and sickly horse that always seemed to recover from their problems only to fall back down.
The tragedy of Silence Suzuka lies in how even with all the hindsight in the world it’s still an unexpected freak accident.
Silence Suzuka was conjuring up a massive storm around them. He was an impressive horse with a “Big Escape” strategy that, while not unseen in the past, wasn’t seen with its level of success. Sure its debut year of 1997 was one of highs and lows, but as soon as 1998 started it went into an undefeated tear through the ranks. First place against Horse’s Neck in the Valentine Stakes, First Place against Rosen Cover in the Nakayama Kinen, First Place against Tsurumaru Geisen in the Kokura Daishouten, First Place against Midnight Bet in the Kinshachi Sho, First Place against Stay Gold some random horse in the Takarazuka Kinen, First Place against El Condor Pasa in the Mainichi Oukan.
And they weren’t just victories, Silence Suzuka’s victories were flashy as all hell, with the horse taking a MASSIVE lead from the start that it wasn’t gonna let go for anything in the world. People were noticing Silence Suzuka a LOT, wondering what other confrontation they might see. That newcomer Special Week in particular would surely make for one hell of an interesting match-up.
But it wasn’t meant to be.
1998’s Autumn Tenno Sho, the 118th Tenno Sho to be held. Ominously, the forecasts said that the only way Silence Suzuka could lose that race was if there was an accident because otherwise there was no way they would lose. Even the physical checks before the race showed no issue. whatsoever. And Suzuka was on possibly its biggest tear yet, by the third corner it had a lead on the second place of about 10 horses’ length.
Then the 4th corner happens, Suzuka breaks a leg and the race has to be stopped. By all accounts, Suzuka was a really kind horse outside of the track, and Jockey Yutaka Take is convinced that Suzuka actually made sure to angle himself so that when he fell, he didn’t fall on his Jockey.
Among the many theories of what happened, it was said that Suzuka literally ran faster than his body could take and all the shock absorption that is built into the legs of a horse wasn’t able to take the stress. It should also be noted that normally jockeys don’t push horses to this extent, much less Jockeys with the track record and years of experience as Take, but since Jockeys need to work WITH the horse for the race because horses are living creatures that WILL rebel and buckle if they feel threatened it’s often speculated that because no rebelling happened, Suzuka really just wanted to see how fast it could go, how far it could push itself (which is the angle Uma Musume media has taken).
To understand how hard this hit people, Silence Suzuka has its own Memorial Song: 天馬のように (Tenma no Youni, Like a Pegasus) by Yutaka Hoshino and Akira Inaba.
Oh yeah, Jockey Yutaka Take would come back to the Autumn Tenno Sho of 1999 and win with Special Week, but that’s a story for a different day.
So how do you adapt this story? What sort of character can you use to-
Chihaya Kisaragi.
It’s very obviously Chihaya Kisaragi and they weren’t subtle at all about it holy shit.
So for those that aren’t familiar with the original Idolmaster series (not Million Live or Cinderella Girls but the original Xbox-era game) let me explain.
In Idolmaster Chihaya is only interested in singing, she’s a prodigy at singing (and she better be, being voiced by Asami Imai) but also that’s all she can think about and all she does on her free time. The only reason she became an idol was because it was a platform to make it easier to improve in her singing, and she dislikes all the dancing and self promotion elements that come with it.
Chihaya is also a character with a tragic cloud looming over her. Her little brother Yuu died being run over by a car, her parents divorcing and her taking singing as a means to escape from all that. This tragedy is enhanced further by Idolmaster 2 where it’s revealed that Chihaya’s singing days are counted because of a chronic condition that is making her lose her voice.
So just… take “singing”, replace it with “running” and done! Chihaya and Suzuka are also both notoriously flat-chested, with the former being a meme and the latter being even an explicit note in the anime’s model sheet (that the GBF collab didn’t heed but that’s not for today).
Oddly enough we never hear much about Suzuka’s family… but we’ll go back to that later also.
If you read/listen to Starting Gate, the Chihaya comparison is even less subtle, with Suzuka having a melancholic and sad demeanor all over that only Special Week (fitting the Amami Haruka parallel here) can get through in some way. But Starting Gate, being set as happening “before” the game (a topic for another day) doesn’t actually have races, so Suzuka’s fate is meant to be For Those That Know. You also see this character evolution if you compare her Main Story chapter or the first story event (which chronicles Special Week arriving to Tokyo) and compare it with her voice in her training campaign.
Cut to the anime’s first season, where the moment finally hits and the plot pivots into, instead, giving Silence Suzuka a second chance to her last victory, shipping her to the US for a tour afterwards in the grand tradition of moving away being the Kids Anime equivalent of killing a character off.
But this moment marked a shift in Suzuka’s character.
They couldn’t hold the “twist” of her surviving anymore, so instead they rebuilt her character into one of hope. Where “Silence Suzuka had a tragic death” is as much entry-level knowledge as “But in the game they make her survive”. And so, ever since, the game has had fun exploring this message of the girl that won’t give up running and will do anything to be able to keep doing it.
In the anime, her recovery happens in parallel to Special Week’s rut. In the game’s Main Story her story is ALL about her recovery, opening up with the 1998 Autumn Tenno Sho and dedicating all its chapters to everyone helping her recover, and in the traning mode, you can get “Big Escape” a skill that upgrades Suzuka’s Escape Strategy proficiency as if to say “Here’s your reward for outrunning death”.
And there is something fascinating about this character evolution, especially because it honestly makes Suzuka all the more compelling when her tragic tale is used as a tool for hope with an airheaded girl rather than the looming fate of a cold character.
But there’s… something else.
You see, there’s another character that fits the Chihaya Kisaragi mold even better now. One that has an even more sour and anxious demeanor than even early Suzuka, one that takes racing itself seriously rather than just wanting to run a lot, one with a mainly blue motif to her character, and one where they can even weave in a broken family and dead sibling plotline…
But that’s a story for another day.