Weird thing to do almost two months in, but let’s step back a bit and take it from the top.
Announced originally in March 26th 2016, Uma Musume: Pretty Derby is, at its most broad definition, a franchise where racehorses (Japanese racehorses in particular) are humanoid girls. If you were around in around 2016 this would sound awfully familiar as a concept, given that the mid-2010s saw a brief but notable boom in “X but as anthropomorphic girls/boys” IPs.
There were a couple of things that differentiated Uma Musume even in this ROUGH early stage, however.
The first one is that the setting is a world that’s exactly as our own, except that horses never existed (though other quadrupeds like cows and alpacas do) and instead “horses” are “horsegirls”. This is so ingrained into the world that the kanji for horse only has two “legs”. Even when it’s used in radicals like the kanji for “Station”. It’s even described as a more “archaic” use in the game’s glossary.
The second thing is a sort of acknowledgement that the world is fiction and the events are inspired (cannot legally say they’re “based on” obviously) by the real world. Every iteration of an Uma Musume story (except one) opens with some descriptor of varying length about how “their names comes from another world” and “they’re born to run” on the backdrop of some ancient depiction of it all.
Season 1 of the anime.
Season 2 of the anime.
Cinderella Gray
The only one without this introduction is Starting Gate (which I’ll explain more about down the line), but even then it talks about how important the “tails” and “ears” are.
This implicit acknowledgement of “the real world” actually has a very interesting result, where the story makes it clear that from the outset that you’re going to see something attempting to retell things from the real world, that if you know of a “Special Week” in the real world that knowledge will be useful in appreciating what’s about to happen.
Speaking of names, it’s fitting that the names and their legacy are given so much weight, thanks to the fact that Uma Musume is the first horse racing game to look for the rights to use the horses’ names.
You see, Japan has a long and rich history with horse racing games on every platform, with franchises that have been running since the Famicom and earlier, and Uma Musume owes a lot to them. But one issue that had always existed with them is the use of real horse names without proper clearance.
After all, horse racing is so entrenched in the value of a name and the accolades it brings with itself, that any use of it without consent is a delicate matter. In those games it was begrudgingly accepted to some extent given that they tend to focus more on the breeding aspect so names are just part of a bigger chart…
…but what happens when the name is a focal point and a character is gonna carry the name of the real horse?
Susumu Fujita, CyberAgent’s (Cygame’s parent company) president and known horse racing aficionado understood this, and sought to approach the matter more respectfully. Going to the ranches, owners, representatives, and anyone involved, and looking not only for clearance of use, but approval of the material used. So when you see Sakura Bakushin O’s story, that was directly approved by the people that owned Sakura Bakushin O or their descendants.
This has admittedly resulted in a slightly more eventful release lineup that resulted in oddities like Symboli Rudolf needing to have a story without any of its contemporaries approved at the moment. But you can tell production has managed to reach a better point given how just recently they’ve cleared rights for many horses of the 2000s in preparation for whenever they come into the spotlight.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Uma Musume’s current “actually not shameful to be caught in public with it” state owes so much to the fact that such a variety of people, many of which are most likely not anime nerds, need to approve whatever the heck they want to do.
OH RIGHT GOING BACK TO THE HORSE GIRLS…
As explained, Horse Girls are what stands in this world for Horses. Basically, instead of equines there’s an all-female fantasy race in the world that just so happens to have ears like a horse’s and a tail like a horse’s.
They’re more physically adept than humans, being more naturally strong and faster than them, and they’re also predisposed to wanting to run a lot. I’ve always found this bit fascinating, since humans’ “natural superpower” so to speak is precisely the ability to run for longer periods without overheating.
Also the ability to throw things with precision, but that’s a sidenote.
Horse Girls being all female and inheriting their legacies magically from another world is also a good call because it means that it does away with the whole selective breeding element from the real world.
Speaking of breeding, horse girls can have children with human males. The result might actually be a boy or a girl. Boys are born as normal human boys and girls are born as horse girls. You can see this for example in how Vodka is the only girl in a household full of boys and how that influenced her personality.
Befitting a “fantasy race”, there seems to be some magical element at play around horse girls. It’s very vague and, as I often say, “plausibly deniable”, but everything from how they seem to be “pushed” towards their destiny, to how they just… inherit their name, to many other elements I’m not gonna get sidetracked again by indicate that there’s a very mundane sort of “magic” surrounding them.
But all of that, including the races they run, are best left for next time.