If you’ll indulge me briefly, let me explain how I came across this.
I was looking to see if anyone had backed up the Haru Urara Ganbaru manga… alas, nobody had and my best find was a scanlation that covered the first three chapters.
But in the process, I saw some Japanese imageboard archive comment about “a manga that didn’t release”, and this visual by Watanabe Yoshihiko (渡辺義彦) of Versus Earth fame.
A bit of research then took me to this announcement in the Cygames website archive (unofficial, I assume) where they talk about how they’ve decided on making a comic out of “The short Seiun Sky Novel from Umabako – The First Corner”. Which is a fancy way of saying that it’s the first Bluray Box of season one.
And I do have the box in question, so let’s go through it！
Actually, before tackling the story, I wanna make note of how the inside has these small horseshoe tracks.
These are the contents themselves minus the obi (the paper “belt”) kept to the side and the expired Granblue serial code behind the book.
Inside the book we can see that the novel is credited to Yoko Yonaiyama (米内山 陽子), who also has credits for the first two seasons of the anime and other works like Skip and Loafer. The most interesting one I’ve found though, is actually her Sign Language instruction duties for stage plays, that’s really neat.
So the novel opens with Seiun Sky skipping the entrance ceremony, where her idle thoughts are interrupted by a really forceful trainer that says he comes from Team Albireo, a comment is made about how “Team Algenib” is really relaxed and Sky ditches the trainer to mind her own business.
Here we’re introduced to Sky’s two main relationships at the moment: King Halo and Grass Wonder. With King, Sky makes notes about her energy and that ambition in her eyes; while with Grass, Sky notes how they both get along really well due to how Grass knows how to keep to herself.
I should note that the novel does a great job is characterizing Sky, and one of the earlier ways this shows is with how part of the reason why Sky gets along so well with Grass is that she can read when she’s smiling vs when she’s “smiling”. The other is this element that Sky doesn’t care about “making it big” because she feels as if everyone has given up on her but (skipping ahead for a moment) she really cares about being able to race with her friends.
So Sky has to join a team or she won’t be allowed to stay in the academy (technically it’s that she needs a TRAINER not a team, and you only need a trainer to participate in the Twinkle series which isn’t a requirement last I checked, but regardless) and she remembers that there was a really relaxed team so she looks for team Al… something something. But oh nooooooo she joins Albireo with the busybody trainer instead of Algenib with the relaxed training.
And this is where my problems with the novel start, actually.
Albireo is painted as a grindhouse of training, all phisical training and no theoreticals. It’s so bad that Sky keeps getting a pain in her knee that doesn’t go away and everyone in the team leaves, and if Sky were to leave then the team would have to disband.
Oh, and the reason she joined at all was because the trainer insisted until sunset that she join them.
I think the intent is to show that all Sky needs is someone that pushes her further out of her stupor, but as we’ll see, even the novel contradicts this point.
In the meantime, talks of transfer students start, but instead of Special Week, it’s El Condor Pasa, who is introduced as a truck of energy ramming everything and everyone, this is when Sky makes the comment about Grass “smiling without smiling” if I remember correctly.
Special Week does join later and the novel actually doesn’t focus that hard on introducing her because this IS in the boxed Bluray where she’s introduced, but the effect this has in the narrative is… oddly intimidating.
After this it’s when Sky has her post-debut race and loses to Special Week, a frustration that results in a trainer from Team Deneb outright explaining to her that she’s not gonna go far with the Albireo training regime, she outright points out how Sky is more fit to be a “trickster” a runner that depends more on strategy and theory than guts and raw power like Special Week.
There’s a whole dramatic scene where Sky has to leave the team she didn’t want to join in order to join Deneb, she makes note of how the pain in her leg is gone and wouldn’t you know it, the next race is the Satsuki Sho, where she wins against Special Week.
Then it’s revealed she’s going back to Team Albireo because apparently Team Deneb was going to basically become a joint thing with Team Albireo but the process wasn’t going to be completed in time for the race and the trainer forgot to mention it.
And so, Sky is happy to go back to the team pushing her physically the wrong way, that coerced her into joining and kept her in with the threat of the team disbanding.
Team Albireo isn’t a cautionary tale of what should be avoided but supposed to be sympathetic apparently.
It’s already a yikes set of developments on its own, but then you have to remember that the core conceit of Sky in this story is the idea that nobody expects anything of her so she doesn’t care about anyone other than her friends… and yet she’s glad to be stuck with people pushing her in all the wrong ways. It doesn’t really sound like the girl so willing to skip the entrance ceremony to goof off.
And then you also have to remember that I come to this from a post-game-released world, where the core concept of the franchise is that helping the girl achieve her dreams is the most important thing, in fact, it’s the whole point of the gameplay itself. So Sky being pushed to stay for the sake of a trainer feels more like it was made during that weird period where some bios of girls talked about helping the PLAYER instead of the other way around.
But even if we stay inside the timeframe of season one, Albireo is just poor man’s discount Spica. Spica’s trainer is a forceful suspicious man (his introduction has him literally rubbing Special Week’s legs to note how good they are for running) with a very atypical way of training (he lets everyone do their thing and only intervenes when necessary) that has resulted in everyone leaving the team except for the collection of weirdos for whom the approach is perfect.
Which is part of my problem, even if we ignore the similarities on their own, everyone in Spica is very clearly happy to be there and found their place, but with Albireo there’s constant comments about how everyone’s miserable and the atmosphere is wrong.
Also did I mention that Sky’s racing outfit in this context came from Albireo’s trainer? It’d be a sweet/bittersweet thing in any other context if he wasn’t such a legitimately icky character.
You wanna know how her introduction goes in the main game? She tries to nap in the trainer office and by luck she comes to the one trainer that actually let her nap, that actually let her goof off and relax, and that only started to gently intervene when Sky was visibly distraught over losing to Special Week.
This trainer knew how to gently remind Sky that it’s their job and wish to help her win, and that she clearly wants to win. It’s also, notably, one of the quieter trainers, what few words they say to Sky cut directly through all her layers of obfuscation.
Because a character like Seiun Sky doesn’t need someone forceful, she’s like a cat, you don’t get intense with a cat and hope they end up liking you, you give them their time and space and before you know it they’ll be following you everywhere.
That said, for as much as I complain about that side, Sky’s characterization in the novel is spot-on… if a bit too early in the production timeline.
In the anime, Sky was always characterized as a slacker with the implication of “man, imagine what she would do if she put the effort”, this novel tries to give a glimpse into her inner monologue, painting the image of someone that is borderline a delinquent in some ways with her slacking and lack of motivation. The Sky in that inner monologue is recognizable as Seiun Sky, but like many things in the Season One stage of production, it lacks a certain… depth.
I could go into detail about what that depth is, but let’s save that for a post specifically about her.
By the by, there’s also a cheesy line along the way about how in the sky, Spica was starting to shine.
I’m kinda glad that the idea of turning this into a comic was canned, if I’m being honest. Mind you, this is completely separate about how I think Albireo’s trainer needs to be investigated.
Focusing on more Golden Generation as some sort of different POV of the anime’s first season would’ve been detrimental, I think. One of the strengths of current Uma Musume is how each non-game adaptation jumps around in the timeline. You go from the ’98 generation to the early 90s, to the late 80s, to the mid-2010s, to the mid-90s. And while yes, the third bluray box does shift from the Golden Generation to McQueen, that’s still two Golden Generation POV’s before any shift.
…now that I think about it, Seiun Sky and Grass Wonder were the other two non-Special Week girls to get a focus in the last stretch of Team Sirius (Sky even getting a CG of her as a child), and then Team Sirius opens with Mejiro McQueen…
Worth keeping in mind for later.
Some trivia notes.
“Albireo” is a star in the Cygnus (swan) constellation, and considering the underlying theme with Sky about nobody expecting anything from her, and probably playing to the idea of the ugly duckling tale.
“Algenib” meanwhile is part of the Pegasus constellation, and while the Winged Horse reference should make obvious what it’s about, the one thing I can only think about is Saint Seiya.
“Deneb” is a fun one though. Deneb is often more famous as part of the summer triangle with Altair and Vega, but Deneb is actually derived from the arabic word for “Tail” because it’s the tail of the swan in Cygnus, playing onto the cooperation aspect between teams.
For those curious, the other three boxes of anime Blurays included similar stories. Season one proceeds to have short novels about Grass Wonder, Mejiro McQueen, and Daiwa Scarlet and Vodka. Meanwhile, season 2 adds novels about Nice Nature, Mejiro Palmer, Twin Turbo, and Kitasan Black and Satono Diamond. Exploring these other stories (and the booklets as a whole) is now in the ever-growing to-do list.
Oh also, for those wondering, the first box of Season 3 has no small novel (because the game is already out anyways). Instead, it goes into extra detail about the real horses, which is just a lovely way to see how both the perception and expectations of the franchise has evolved.
But that’s for another day.