Following in the steps of the last two posts, I want to illustrate the way that the franchise has evolved by showing how the depiction of Special Week has evolved.
As I was talking about last time, one of Special Week’s strongest and weakest points simultaneously is how much of a traditional heroine she is. And to be honest, this hasn’t changed in any meaningful way as far as character base goes, but the way the franchise treats her and conveys everything else has changed in such a way where Special Week is both exactly the same and completely different both.
In short, Special Week started like a combination of Uzuki Shimamura from Idolmaster and Lyria from Granblue Fantasy, but as things have evolved she’s nowadays more akin to a non-delinquent Hanamichi Sakuragi.
That comparison will make sense by the end, trust me.
So let’s start at the top and set our baseline.
Starting Gate
This is What You See Is What You Get Special Week.
There is honestly no twist nor depth to her at this point. Whatever you think when you hear “naive heroine from the countryside doing her best to be Number One in Japan” is probably what you’re gonna get.
I’m just realizing writing this that the intent of having her not know anything about the ways of the Uma Musume world was probably so she could be the players’ introduction to it all, huh…
Aside from that, there’s honestly… not much to say in this specific stage. She’s the precious inoffensive cinammon roll. Passionate but not too intense, slightly tragic but not too cool, she loves to eat but not to the extent of Oguri Cap. It’s the sort of heroine that lies so aggressively in the middle of everything so you can be like “I like her, but I’d wish the lesbic overtones with Suzuka were stronger… eh? Who’s Daiwa Scarlet and who’s Vodka?”.
I will grant Starting Gate one thing though. Despite the character work being spotty at best, you can tell that even at this stage they were putting care into the world that surrounds them. Not only that but if you take it at face value it has a great command of timing, drama, and tonal balance. It never feels too heavy because there’s always leverage around the corner.
In a way, I’d say that both Starting Gate and Special Week in Starting Gate had the elements that would make things shine later.
So let’s skip to said later right now.
Season 1
In Season 1 we see the same character, but we also notice something different right off the bat.
Special Week is being jumpy about cityfolks, being alert to any of them city perverts her mom warned her about. She’s also really cocky about her running prowess only to realize that she ended up second to last right before Haru Urara.
So Special Week is still a naive country girl, but now this has been given a new layer of depth. Her naiveté isn’t just a random trait to make you go “d’awww…”, it’s a thing treated with consequence and physicality, it’s there to inform and guide the growth her character will go through.
She still feels very protagonist-y. While the story tries to give weight to other characters, from Suzuka to the rest of the Golden Generation, to put simply: Their stories exist for the benefit of developing Special Week.
Sure, you can see Suzuka’s recovery as its own thing, but more importantly Suzuka injuring herself and then recovering is a way for Special Week to not be in top shape against Grass Wonder and then get over her own concerns.
Season 1 is also notorious for ramping up the clowning, but I mean that in a good way. Uma Musume is now better known for the many over the top antics that happen and this is where you see the seeds of that as far as episode one.
What happens when those seeds bloom though?
Season 2
So special Week is now DUMB.
She was already a dummy before and that was treated as an endearing trait, but now she’s not a dummy but a dumbass.
And honestly? We’re all unironically better off for it.
You see, I cannot remember any particularly iconic Special Week moment on Season 1. I remember things that happened TO her, but not many that she did herself.
In season 2 though? There’s her distracting McQueen’s training with painful results for Gorushi, there’s her being part of the group kidnapping Rice Shower, there’s her crying while doing carpentry over Teio retiring and then crying the same way with McQueen’s retirement like a gag that’s gone way too long and it’s the funnier for it, there’s her failed attempt at getting Rice Shower’s attention…
And of course…
What makes that scene extra funny is that it’s Teio imagining things, so it’s basically how Teio sees Special Week.
This is all a symptom of arguably the biggest shift to happen with Season 2, however: Special Week is no longer the main character.
And you might be thinking “well duh, this is the season where Teio and McQueen are the protagonists”, but think about this for one second. Ever since the beginning the franchise was clearly centered around Special Week. The horses added to the cast were Special Week contemporaries or characters that would make for a good supporting cast, the material was always putting her front and center and designing her to be a means for the player or the viewer to get more familiar with the world from scratch.
Now they weren’t focusing on her and I shudder to think about the shakeup that this shift caused internally… though maybe it’s that same shakeup that made them realize the fragile foundation they were building things on.
It goes both ways too. On one hand you need to start reconsidering every character as both the centerpiece of a story AND someone that can be interesting on their own out of focus.
So remember how I said that Season 1 was all in service of developing Special Week in the end? Who is the main character of Season 2?
Is it Teio because she has the first and last race? But she’s also out of comission for most of the season. Is it McQueen? Rice Shower is such a big factor in her story that you could easily argue it’s a season about both of them. But also Canopus has its own arc that arguably peaks with Twin Turbo’s victory in episode 10 that just happens to tie into Teio’s story. BNW is also having a blast in the background to build up to the final race between Hayahide and Teio.
Hell, you have so many other minor arcs that you wanna see to the end, even background NPCs who through a whole story, from Kita-chan and Dia-chan with the other two horse racing nii-sans, to the trials and tribulations of a hair dresser and her client that start when hearing about one race makes the hair dresser botch what she was doing.
Season 2 is the point where the franchise realized that they couldn’t focus too hard on Special Week and that Special Week needed to be better to stand out on her own.
So what shape does this take?
The Game
There’s this one minor caveat: you can tell as the game has been online that there’s an evolution they’ve been going through that you could easily trace from before Season 2 to the current day, but that’s a story for another day.
This tale is one of going the other way around, because not only is Special Week not the Main Character, she isn’t even the main focus on launch.
The story of Team Sirius (a tale for another day) goes through highlights of Japanese horse racing through the 90s, and in case you forgot: Special Week is famous for being in the Classic Generation of 1998.
Sure, she’s been in the gacha pool since day one, but also we’ve gone from Special Week being the entry point to Special Week being the climax of the story.
Alternatively, you can think about it this way: We’ve gone from Special Week having one season dedicated to her to having TWO chapters of the main story to herself because the rest of the Golden Generation became just as important and more time was needed.
And what does Special Week character look like at this point?
Well, on paper she’s the exact same. The unassuming naive and dumb girl that would go on to make it big. However, we now see that from an outsider’s perspective. She’s not so much the “kinda clumsy endearing heroine” as she is the “Really??? Her???? SHE won the Nihon Derby????????” sort of character.
It’s like when you learn that Agnes Digital was so impressive while pointing at the brainrotten otaku girl.
Special Week always had a bit of an ego and an attitude problem here and there in Season 1, never a delinquent but always just… her same naiveté showing up in different ways, and it’s now a more prominent part of her character.
This is where the Sakuragi comparison I brought up at the start comes into play.
Hanamichi Sakuragi, for those that haven’t read Slam Dunk (if so, what’s your problem) is a delinquent through and through… but he’s also a very innocent boy nonetheless. The story opens with his friends teasing him because he’s gone through his latest rejection by a girl, he joins the basketball team because a girl told him he looks like he’d be good at it and he thinks he can get away with just being really tall until he eats shit by everyone that actually practices.
Special Week in the game reminds me of a Sakuragi that never became a delinquent. That odd combination of naiveté and an ego. Also, Special Week literally tries in season 1 to join Rigil because Suzuka was in the team.
The other thing is that by not being the Designated Main Character, Special Week is no longer immune to clowning. In season 1 the clowning happened adjacent to her because we can’t have our precious MC be a clown, in season 2 she became one of the clowns, and now in the game she’s both a main character AND a clown. If something comical happens to her it doesn’t need to be framed like something others caused onto her.
In fact let’s add one more to the pile of “how did Special Week first meet her trainer” plots. In the game Special Week is just… lost because she has a poor sense of direction and her future trainer helps her. That’s it. The player’s (chronological) first impression of Special Week in the games is Spe-chan getting lost. And not lost puppy lost, not lost child lost, but the sort of comical “AH SHOOT AH CRAP I’M GONNA BE LATE FOR CURFEW” lost.
I keep wanting to say that current Special Week is like how Shiro is in Carnival Phantasm Vs how he is in the mainline Fate games… but that feels too reductive even for me.
Special Week is more like plain white rice. Unassuming at first, she needs other things to truly shine through, and it takes a lot of effort to make it the centerpiece of the meal. But without it the full meal wouldn’t be as filling…
Now if you excuse me, I might be hungry.