I said “it’s the same but horses are humanoid girls” and that’s not a lie… but not quite the full truth.
Horse Girls aren’t “just there”, as illustrated by how the kanji for “horse” reflects horses being bipedal in this setting. It’s a world that has acknowledged and adapted to the presence of Horse Girls, but not in any… confrontational way.
Here’s the thing: If I hear the concept that “the world has a fantasy race that’s more naturally strong than regular humans”, my mind was primed to go out of habit to the concept of horse girls as some sort of opressed or opressor group. The dreaded “cat girls/androids as a cheap stand in for some real world opressed group” route.
And surprisingly, Uma Musume does acknowledge within itself the impact that Horse Girls existing can have. But they’re not cheap stand-ins for any opressed group. Rather, if they’re stand-ins for anything at all, it’s for youth athletes or anyone with a talent that puts them a league above others.
My mind always goes to Narita Taishin for this. I haven’t talked about her yet, but the big thing about Taishin is that despite her outwards cold demeanor, she’s very clearly very caring and protective of her friends, and a big element about this, and one you can see if you play the main story is that before joining the academy she was constantly bullied. Being a horse girl was a small element on it though, the biggest element being the fact that she was small and quiet and her natural running prowess wasn’t worth much at that point. Her group of friends and joining the academy is framed for her as finally finding a place where who she is and what she is can be fully appreciated.
Even Sweep Toushou, whose character is otherwise that of a bratty little girl, has to stop a girl at one point because a horse girl shouldn’t be fighting human kids.
The feeling you get overall is less one of segregation and more one of girls with shared goals and talents who, in finding each other as a group, can grow better and accept who they are easier. You even see this in most adaptations of Special Week’s story, where it sticks out to Fuji Kiseki how Special Week hasn’t interacted with other Horse Girls before coming to the academy and thus she’s missing a bit of that “inherited knowledge” you might take for granted (think for example, if you moved to another country and even if you knew the language you don’t know what the most basic things are called or where to buy them).
In fact, here’s a neat example from the anime.
After moving to the city, old phones are shown to be long to accomodate the distance between a girl’s ears and mouth. And it might look a bit goofy…
But in chapter one we actually see how in her family home (Special Week was raised by a human mom) she has to use a regular phone, which needs her to move the speaker and microphone up and down. The intent being clearly to illustrate the difference of being in a place better adapted to the particular needs of a Horse Girl.
It’s a really fascinating balance to strike. The first thing that comes to mind is Pokemon, oddly enough. The reason being that if you play Pokemon, everything in the world revolves around Pokemon… this isn’t to criticize Pokemon doing that because it’d be dumb to complain a chocolate cake has too much chocolate, it’s more to illustrate the frame of reference that I’m working with.
The Uma Musume world feels like it revolves around Horse Girls because the focus of the story is on Horse Girls, but you never feel like that’s all there is to it, nor does it feel like the setting pushes too hard in the opposite direction of asking TOO many questions trying to find holes in the logic. We’re still talking about the franchise where a high schooler will run for three calendar years and still not graduate by the end.
It wants you to feel like the world isn’t blind to the implications of what it has on it, but its ultimate goal is only to make the setting feel stronger through this acknowledgement. If we use the Pokemon parallel, it’s more Legends Arceus than the Pokemon Manga.
Like any setting, there’s actually a religion… kinda.
Horse Girls venerate the “Three Goddesses” (三女神), which, as I’ve explained in the past, are basically another serendipitous synergy of using the motif of three goddesses that many cultures have combined with the fact that all thoroughbreds in modern day can trace their ancestry back to at least one of three “Founder Stallions”.
The interesting part of it, is that this “veneration” is more shintoistic in nature.
There’s this book I really like and recommend to anyone with a passing interest in Shinto called “The Essence of Shinto: Japan’s Spiritual Heart” it’s written by Motohisa Yamakage, an actual real life Shinto master and it’s available in english.
One of the most interesting points of the book that sticks out early on is the explanation of the incompatibility between Shinto and western religions. It explains that it’s impossible to understand Shinto with western religions as a frame of reference because Shinto doesn’t require the same level of “allegiance”. Being described more as paying respect to a fundamental part of the world than something that demands your undivided loyalty.
It’s the idea that you put an offering and a prayer in a temple to offer thanks or a wish, instead of being asked to sit one hour per week listening to a sermon. It’s the reason why shinto temples are so open and many times found so casually. I’ve seen temples on the top of malls for example.
All of this to illustrate what I mean when I say that there’s a “veneration” for the Three Goddesses. There isn’t a “religion” in the western way to see it. There’s rituals and festivals to honor them (the first autumn event covers that, actually), and you can see them in relevant places… but making things in their image isn’t blasphemy and you’re not required to be a “Founder Stallion”-ian to enroll in the academy.
Man, all of these words and I haven’t talked about the races or the live shows…
Let’s leave those for next time.