Uma Musume is good.
Bold statement from someone that dedicates a full blog to it, I know. But the thing is… it almost wasn’t AS good, and you can see it very clearly in something readily available still.
I mentioned before that Uma Musume was announced in March of 2016, and that a very weird Haru Urara manga suddenly happened around May. Now, the intent was to have something that would tide people over until the game came out in winter of 2018, with Starting Gate being the “Prelude” to everything, detailing the “before the game/anime” events in some way.
And you can definitely tell they had the timeline of release set down: Starting Gate started as a Drama CD series in November of 2016 and ran until June of 2018. It ends with Special Week finally meeting her trainer in the cheesiest and most faceless way ever. In June 2018 was also when the first season of the anime started, though the anime already followed a different way to tell things.
In fact, let’s start with that just now.
This is the moment right at the end where Special Week meets her trainer in Starting Gate.
And this is her first meeting with Spica’s trainer in season 1.
Am I saying that the anime one is superior because it’s more violent? Only partially, let me go from the top now that I’ve set up the level of dissonance I’m gonna try to explain.
As I said before, Starting Gate is meant to be “the events before the game”… which is already a can of worms that’s hard to open because past racing experience doesn’t factor into the characters meaning that if you see Oguri Cap, who is always depicted as having retired by the time Special Week enters the scene, it’s not really clear if she’s already a veteran.
…except when it does like flashes of Nice Nature running, and Rudolf already being a veteran. I know I joke linear time doesn’t exist in Uma Musume, but it also doesn’t mean time is in a blender.
ANYWAYS, the story opens with Special Week entering the academy and having a hard time getting used to everything, at one point she thinks Silence Suzuka hates her but actually she was trying to fix a misunderstanding where Oguri Cap was challenging Special Week to a race and ACTUALLY I LIED, LET’S MAKE ANOTHER DIVERSION REAL QUICK.
This is Oguri Cap being “Scary” in Starting Gate.
And this is Oguri Cap standing up for herself in Cinderella Gray.
Just keep that in mind.
After this part, Starting Gate is just a series of vignettes that introduce characters. You get introduced to Scarlet and Vodka via one of their usual fights, and uh… yeah, that’s it? Just repeat until they run out of characters to introduce and move onto the anime.
They don’t really develop them too much, the conflicts are always the sort of low stakes conflict where you can have something engaging and get their deal but no real development happens in the end because, again, it’s supposed to be a prologue.
It runs everything from McQueen defeating Teio at a school’s festival to Rudolf and Teio finally running together. The last one sticks out a bit more because Teio and Rudolf running against each other is always treated as the ultimate showdown for Teio everywhere else, including the anime.
But here they… blow their load early so to speak.
It feels almost Checklist-y sometimes, just a hype machine where a horse racing fan can go “OH HEY HERE’S TM OPERA O!!!” and then the story has her being all “IT IS INDEED I!! TM OPERA O!! HERE I AM BEING A THEATER KID FOR FIVE SECONDS! GOOD BYE!”.
That’s something the first season of the anime is guilty of too, now that I think about it.
This is the part where I properly explain what the “problem” and the most dissonant part of Starting Gate is: The girls exist only in service of an unseen viewer.
I don’t wanna say the characterization is “idol-like” because even though that’s the first idea that always comes to mind, the style isn’t exclusive to idols. Not to mention that Uma Musume still has protections for their characters that you’d see in idol-adjacent stuff. However, the problem of things existing for an unseen viewer IS something prevalent in idol things.
There’s this scene in Starting Gate where Nice Nature is crying into Maruzensky. Aside from the can of worms that is early Nice Nature characterization that even the first season didn’t get right, the scene exists in a way where its goal is to make the audience go “d’awww…”.
Now let’s compare that to the latest episode of Road To The Top as of this writing.
Topro isn’t crying in a way that’s meant to look cute to the viewer (even if it DOES look a tad cute on principle), she’s crying in a way that’s trying to evoke the deep and layered frustration and confusion she feels in defeat, for herself, to herself.
She’s crying for her own sake is the difference in tone here. It’s less that Topro doesn’t have a shoulder to fall onto (because she’d have it if she was in a different spot) and more that impression that she can cry as ugly as she wants because she isn’t crying for the benefit of anything or anyone specifically.
Speaking of crying, this is my favorite comparison to always bring up when it comes to how things are depicted nowadays.
Slam Dunk comparisons babyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!
This element of things existing for the “benefit” of the viewer extends to other things. In particular, the tone of the franchise early on was that the girl was somehow helping the trainer instead of the other way around. A tone you can see in the aforementioned ending of Starting Gate.
OH RIGHT I forgot to mention, Starting Gate has a manga that started happening around March of 2017 and ended in 2019. That’s how you’re able to see scenes from it despite being an audio drama.
Speaking of those CDs though, that actually takes me to the other point that sticks out like a sore thumb about Starting Gate in general. The aggressive levels of What You See Is What You Get.
Or to put it another way: Starting Gate’s McQueen is how the current McQueen WISHED everyone saw her, instead of… you know…
But that brings up the question: Is Starting Gate bad?
Not really…
In the realm of “idol-adjacent stories about cute girls being cute” it’s actually very well made.
It’s also interchangeable with a lot of other things because even the spin of the girls being horse girls literally doesn’t come into play at this stage beyond being the reason why they’re all in a single academy together.
You might think I hate Starting Gate because of… all the words before, but I don’t hate it. If nothing else, the comparisons are less to disparage Starting Gate and more for me to go “LOOK AT HOW MUCH MY BABY HAS GROWN OH MY GOD”
Starting Gate has done me no harm and it was not the direction the franchise took in the end.
…but it almost was.
Even if I didn’t get into Uma Musume until the game released two years ago, I distinctly remember around 2018 when the anime came out and there was a very brief sputter of attention here In Japan (it was the same year I moved here). I remember my briefest of thoughts was something like “Oh neat, so it’s kinda like Kancolle, and Azure Lane, and Kemono Friends, and Touken Ranbu, and Girls Frontline, and Flower Knight Girl, and Soukou Musume, and Frame Arms Girls, and Robot Girls Z, and…”
Why pay attention to Uma Musume over literally every other “X but as humans” thing that had released and fallen into comfortable obscurity at best and cancellation at worst in the last half decade? Why get invested if it might not really go past a curiosity for a niche within a niche? Why care about the game when I’m still sore about Soukou Musume in general?
I think this is something that Cygames asked themselves… dunno if any of them played Soukou Musume though.
You can already see the stark contrast between the end of Starting Gate and the start of the anime, then in that same year they announced they were delaying the game.
Then cut to the end of 2020 when the second season started getting more eyes on its own and then the game released in February 2021 and I could actually answer the question of “Why pay attention to Uma Musume over literally every other “X but as humans” thing that had released in the last half decade?” in at least 20 different ways and also I’m pretty sure this blog exists to try and untangle that question.
Wild to think about a version of Uma Musume that failed to get me interested into horse racing the same way that Kancolle failed to get me interested in battleships or WW2. Despite being completely open and willing and actively trying to understand What’s Up, mind you.
Starting Gate isn’t bad, but it’s better when you see it as this window into a “what if” universe. The visible growing pains of a more high profile company, from that one godawful initial trailer, to Starting Gate, the first season of the anime.
It’s a serviceable Drama CD and manga that gives you a glimpse into the parallel timeline where Uma Musume is just a curiosity for horse racing fans instead of the outright evangelizing tool that it is nowadays.
I do plan to be back eventually with each Starting Gate volume/CD though. This is all too fascinating not to.