I cannot begin to express how much I love the tale of Cafe’s “Friend”. It feels like even all the last few posts don’t start to convey that, honestly.
Something that I’ve seen a lot happen is people that get into Uma Musume knowing nothing about horse racing like me, and then as they let their curiosity lead them, they eventually come across the name “Sunday Silence” popping up with a bunch of the girls.
And when the franchise was still fresh off the game’s release, the question I’ve repeated to an annoying degree the past few days bounced everywhere.
“Is Sunday Silence somewhere in Uma Musume? Will they ever be?” I remember seeing every theory from maybe a rival academy, to the president of the URA (the in-universe JRA), I even remember people wondering if Riko Kashimoto Riko-chan from the Aoharu Cup scenario was somehow it.
So Cygames pulled one out of left field and did the best solution for the dilemma of adding him to the game that anyone could’ve imagined.
And the thing I love about the story isn’t just that it’s the biggest lore bomb to this day in a franchise that has only a handful of those, and it isn’t just the fact that I love anything relating to ghosts and the supernatural (except horror… or things focusing on horror, rather). It’s the fact that, in Cafe’s own story we also have a story of what the Sunday Silence debacle was like in real life.
A cursed creature that was denied by everyone, an entity so larger than life that it became a mere concept, an ideal to chase, to surpass. But it doesn’t want things to be like this. A ghost has all the time in the world after all, it is not wanting a single reckless zealot to dedicate their life to that cause, it’s screaming that you’re better off supporting those to come and give them ample foundation to keep building where you left off.
In real life, despite all the saturation of Sunday Silence blood at one point and everyone chasing to become “the next Sunday Silence”, many horses in more contemporary times have arguably surpassed Sunday Silence in all aspects and it’s not the direct descendants, but those in which Sunday Silence is but a part of the bigger puzzle.
After all, just like with Cafe needing a trainer, that goal is not achieved alone.
Let me put it this way:
From Sunday Silence came Black Tide, from Black Tide came Kitasan Black, and from Kitasan Black came Equinox, a horse that as early as last year in 2023 was praised as “The strongest horse in Japanese history” with the evidence to back the accolade up.
From Sunday Silence came Fusaichi Pandora, and from her came Almond Eye, a filly that had the sort of career where being one of the handful of Triple Tiara winners is secondary to things like winning a whole 9 G1 races (remember: Sunday Silence only had 6, and 7 is usually enough to promote you to a category of your own).
Hell, whereas the amount of fillies with noteworthy careers were a bit scant before the 2000s, the mid-2000s saw a full-on Filly Revolution and many of the ones in that charge trace their ancestry to Sunday Silence in some way (or in the case of Vodka, were linked in their career to someone like that).
When the picture becomes big enough, Sunday Silence is but a small piece of it. A recurrent and notorious piece, but a small one nonetheless.
And personally, I love to trace this sort of thing be it in media or in culture. You could arguably make a similar pedigree chart with Uma Musume itself where instead of 2 parents you have a whole circle of influences from the original arcade Idolmaster to Tokimeki Memorial to Derby Stallion, and each of those by itself carrying their own parentage crossing between each other and into other fields.
For example, you can make a line that starts in Uma Musume and goes back to Kancolle (proving the general concept had the feet to be made into a bigger multimedia IP), and then back to Mecha Musume, and then further back to World War 2 vehicles represented as girls. And in that field you would actually find the recurrent name of Shimada Fumikane.
But enough sidetracking, let’s answer the question in the title: Who or What is Sunday Silence in Uma Musume?
…actually I lied, because to answer this you need to ask two questions:
Do you think Sunday Silence existed?
And
Do you believe the Uma Musume world to have magic?
For the first one: The reason for the question is that in the end, what the Trainer remembers at the end of Cafe’s campaign is a fable, not history. And the second one is that Uma Musume has what I like to call “plausibly deniable magic”, where there’s clearly something supernatural going on, but it’s all stuff that can still be explained away rationally in some way.
This leads us to four possible stances and four different answers to the title question.
If Sunday Silence didn’t exist, and magic isn’t real: Sunday Silence is just that: a fable teaching people that we all stand in the shoulders of giants and you better live up to it.
If Sunday Silence didn’t exist and magic is real: Sunday Silence is a spectral force that all of its real life descendants share in common, that potential to help build the next generation, to become “Friends”. This can be seen by how Cafe has an easier time relating to the other Sunday Silence descendants. And after all, the last scene implies that Cafe had now basically become a “Friend” herself, perhaps instead of a different entity, her “Friend” is that potential made manifest.
If Sunday Silence existed and magic isn’t real: Then Sunday Silence is tantamount to a girl whose exploits were so legendary that people just couldn’t believe them and thought them made up. Becoming more a symbol than a person.
If Sunday Silence existed and magic is real: Then there’s a non-zero chance that Sunday Silence was a girl that was so fast and so good at running that she trascended the world and now exists in this new reality where she’s eagerly awaiting others to reach her and guiding things for that to happen. After all, the image of the girl had to come from somewhere and the text in Cafe’s SSR Support Card really makes you think.
Which one do I subscribe to myself?
All of them.
Because I LIED AGAIN, these aren’t questions, these are all just different facets of the same thing.
It’s possible a girl existed that transcended the physical just as it’s possible it’s just a tale to motivate kids and “ghoulish black-haired girl” is just the same universal imagery that they pulled from when designing Cafe anyways. It’s possible that Sunday Silence is a ghost and in the last scene she was just sending a message to the trainer that Cafe was now in the right path.
Sunday Silence can be all of this AND STILL be an allegory for the fuss made about its real life prominence and how the dividends for that building block are finally being paid.
Allegory and symbolism isn’t a one-way thing with a singular interpretation or answer, if you’ve played the game (or hell, read me ramble about this all) and have come to a completely separate conclusion, that one is just as valid as any I can come up with. Even if all the evidence points towards one specific interpretation, different readings and hypotheticals are really fun to consider.
Also, I LIED AGAIN, AGAIN.
It’s not just 4 ways to frame the question, it’s actually FIVE.
Because even if you ignore all the symbolism and all the facts, even if you think Cafe’s Friend is actually Deep Impact, even if you think there’s zero magic in Uma Musume and the fable is actually tantamount to talking about Cinderella…
Even if you frame things that way, Sunday Silence, that Fucker, that American Hellspawn, that Black Devil, that Repellent Biting Bastard STILL REMAINS.
Here’s one detail I kinda skipped strategically: Sunday Silence, as you might guess was always really hard to handle, biting trainers and even outright making one of them quit. And that didn’t change when he was moved to Japan, he was still as rowdy and borderline carnivorous as he ever had been.
UNLESS, he was hanging out with his bestie, his favorite buddy in the whole ranch.
Mejiro McQueen.
For SOME REASON that people still ponder to this day, Sunday Silence would grow really calm if Mejiro McQueen was nearby. And not even out of fear (because what can that beast fear by now), rather, the wild buck that would bite on sight would suddenly be gentler and quietly run with Mejiro McQueen.
So a chaotic and violent creature that can only be kept in check by Mejiro McQueen…
Where have I seen that before…