There is a bell curve relationship between how intimidating an MTG deck sounds versus how scary it actually is to play against. Your opponent has a Mermaid deck? Doesn't even register as a threat. Necromancer deck? Ok that's going to be an uphill battle. Eldrazi? You've trained for this moment, keep it together. Slivers? Oh fuck it's time to lock in, cannot make a single mistake. SQUIRRELS? Give up now, you're cooked.
My sapphic heart heals. When Magic the Gathering debuted their new plane Strixhaven, there was a cute card in which two students from rival schools met up in secret. Adorable, right?
Well, the new set called Secrets of Strixhaven is releasing and...
The thing about uma musume is that soulmates are real not in the traditional “you’re magically compatible with this random guy” type way but in the sense that incomprehensible versions of yourselves in a different world were declared rivals and pitted against each other by forces beyond your control and still now something beyond your comprehension forces you into competition again and this rivalry is etched into your very soul. And the random girl you’re weirdly obsessed with was your biggest obstacle in your other life and the upperclassman you look up to was your father and your classmate was your brother and these bonds are etched onto your soul by something you can’t describe. At least you get to be friends this time
Idk how to phrase this best considering I'm not officially diagnozed and I also doubt Cygames fully intentionally set out to write an existing condition but
It's actually remarkable that they gave Oguri so many traits and "quirks" which read as autistic that basically everyone who isn't immediately allergic to the concept tends to agree that she is on the spectrum
And she's... personification of the most beloved horse in Japan.
She's not a background character, not a surface-level comic relief, not a convenient genius sidekick who knows math and neither is she a tragic constantly mistreated poor soul we are supposed to feel sorry for to learn compassion.
She's the protagonist. She's the one everyone's in love with to a various degree. She's INCREDIBLY competent in what she does and is never asked to tone it down. She's badass, even if not on purpose. What little bullying she gets at first never has her be a punching bag for pity points or to be saved (in fact she kinda comes up on top every time). The blob Oguri technically is a comedic gag but it's incredibly affectionate and also, honestly, relatable.
And at no point from start to finish does she have to change in this regard, be "fixed" or hide (mask) it.
She misses social cues (often even ones explicitly explained beforehand/repeating), she's extremely blunt on accident, she takes metaphors at face value, she struggles with her own emotions, she stims, she never loses "the stare" and has a one-track mind set on her favorite thing (running) to sometimes a frustrating degree that makes her out of touch with how her peers behave.
And she's Oguri Cap.
"More loved than anyone and stronger than anyone."
And even if they didn't do it on purpose, they did it better and kinder than some of the "purposeful" autistic characters out there, I think.
I'm truly glad Shonen is finally solving its terrible portrayal of romantic relationships between their leads! And all it took were two necessary ingredients to make it all work!
1.) A generous serving of actually making the woman a fucking person with an actual personality and their own motivations.
I'm seeing a couple people in the tags praising Momo for being a person who exists separately from the male MC, and while that's true, there's one little thing to nitpick.
Momo is the MC. She's the main character of Dandadan. Not Okarun. He's super important, but she's the MC.
Okarun is best boi and the deuteragonist. Protagonists of many arcs even! But Momo has the most appearances in terms of manga, is the first main character we see—THE FIRST MAJOR ARC IS HER SAVING OKARUN FROM HIS NUTLESS DILEMMA. The first person to get another love interest is Okarun not because it's a harem, but because OKARUN is the object of her affections and she is the one competing for it against Aira. SHE'S THE GAMEMAKER OF THE TEAM. THE MOST POWERFUL YOKAI IN EXISTENCE IS INTERESTED IN HER.
if demigods were allowed smart phones the very first contact percy would make with any of the greeks in SoN would be sending thalia a video of him using the 12th legions eagle to shoot lightning and smirking into the camera. no words spoken. no context given. she's crushing her phone in her hand as she watches it.
A old post of hers from before Huntrix where she is key smashing over Celine (she was in full CEO gear) gets pulled up and Zoey replies ‘oh so we’re hating on the truth now??’
A video of her sexy dancing while singing Thunder Bringer from Epic
A video with the caption ‘I asked if we can see Wicked For Good and Mira said we have Wicked For Good at Home’ where Zoey is clearly filming Rumi from around the corner as she is just fucking belting No Good Deed as she folds laundry
Bites Rumi’s hand on stream because she tried to sneak snacks
During a conversation about how people miss the point of art work due to Sexy, she says ‘people only remember spirit of the cimarron for the Sexy Horse instead of the plot about the colonization of Native Americans which is such a shame’
Signs Huntrix up for American ninja warrior while on vacation, they all go viral because the absolutely smash the course but Zoey goes viral because she goes first before any of the organizers realize who they are so they’re asking soft ball questions. When she says she’s a song writer and says the name of one of her song cloud raps from when she was 15 when asked for the name of the song and the picture of the caption saying ‘winner of five international idol song writing awards and an Grammy’ when she’s asked that becomes a meme.
Accidentally flips Mira over her head because she jump scared her
Rumi posts a picture going ‘Zoey is asking random white men for autographs now’ with a picture of her asking Tony Hawk for an autograph
I want to end the year off by saying to any and all artists that you shouldn’t have to worry about what other people may think of your content. This is because art is inherently an expression of your true self, and the content shouldn’t matter as long as it isn’t physically hurting people (I.e. Spreading hateful messages, directly attacking groups, etc.)
To the people who see art that they don’t like, the block button was made for a reason, use it instead of attacking the artist. People have gotten so aggressive with this, that it’s exhausting to see. Be better than that, I implore you.
Let’s let kindness and empathy win out over hatred, and kick off the new year with positivity, even if it may seem difficult. But I have faith in you! Anyway, that’s all, Merry Christmas!
I’ve talked in previous posts that, despite all umamusume being girls, there are differences in umamusume based on stallions compared to those based on mares. Transgender stallion umas have their decoration on their right ear and wear shorts in their gym and G2/G3 racing outfits, whereas cis mare umas have it on their left ear and wear bloomers. This rule allows us to tell whether the made up npc horses are trans or cis. For example, we can tell by the decoration and bottoms that Mini Narcissus is a stallion uma and Antagonist is a mare uma.
One strange and fascinating detail of umamusume gender is how it applies to the races where the irl races they are based on only allow fillies and mares to race in them. Races like the Hanshin Juvenile Fillies, Tulip Sho, and the Triple Tiara. The irl races only allow female horses, but once again, all umamusume are girls. Regardless of whether your trainee is a trans stallion or cis mare uma, she can race in these races. However, that only applies to playable umas.
I first noticed this shortly after learning the ear decoration detail, I started wondering if the npc horses would also have visual genders while doing a Daiwa Scarlet Triple Tiara run and at first was horrified to see that all the npcs were mares. It wasn’t until entering other races that I realized that was specifically for mare-only races
The screenshot below is from a list of runners in a G3 race with no gender biases, in the screenshot alone there are 3 stallion umas and 4 mare umas. It has a balanced npc uma gender ratio.
On the left is a screenshot from the Japanese Derby, which is traditionally, but not exclusively, ran by stallions, and the only mare uma npc I saw in the lineup was Bravely Ko. On the right is a screenshot from the mare exclusive Shuka Sho, all uma npcs in this race are mares, but playable stallion uma Silence Suzuka is also entered as a cpu in the race.
From my observations I’ve found that trends appear to be that most races don’t seem to have npc uma gender biases, some races like the triple crown have mostly stallion umas, and all the races based on irl mare only races only have mare uma npcs. I don’t know if anyone has ever put in the effort to figure out which races have what biases and what the percentages are for races like the triple crown, as it is ultimately just an unimportant visual detail. Although I wouldn’t be particularly surprised if someone on the Japanese server has done so.
I find this interesting, as it confirms that beyond the visuals of the npc uma designs, they are at least in some capacity internally flagged as being stallions or mares, despite the fact that they aren’t based on any real life horses. It’s fascinating that even in a fictional sport in which every person who is even capable of competing is by definition a girl, they still found a way to exclude transgender women.
Anyway, shoutout to the transgender horse girl named I Am Queen. I love her
It’s interesting that they call this out in the main story…
Irl Vodka was the first mare to win the Derby in 64 years. But all umas are girls so they would have to point out the mare/stallion uma differences explicitly if they were to explain why Vodka winning was so significant. They can’t do that without introducing a whole bunch of concerning implications that are a result of them adapting irl horse racing’s treatment of mares vs stallions, and they almost certainly don’t want to canonize that.
Sure the writers, you, and I all know what they are referring to here. But I imagine that to someone approaching this without that knowledge they might find it confusing why Vodka, who by the nature of being a tomboy in a game where every character is a girl, is in many ways more masculine than the majority of the cast, is being referred to as a “queen” who doesn’t belong in the derby.
It’s another one of the many things in umamusume that, due to how faithfully they adapt the source material, ends up unintentionally replicating real life misogyny. Some of which result in such a way that, if you look solely at umamusume itself without external context, doesn’t even really make sense because all umas are girls. Like the way mare/filly-only races consistently give you less fans than the unrestricted stallion-dominated races that are their equivalents (they aren’t always the exact same type of race, but it’s fairly obvious that it’s not the distance that is the reason you get less fans from some of these)
The Japanese Derby vs Japanese Oaks is the most egregious example. 9000 fans is a significant amount. Fans are a score that mechanically affects your run by upgrading your uma’s unique skill if you are higher certain thresholds at specific points in the run. These thresholds aren’t necessarily that high, but for mare umas that are locked into triple tiara races instead of triple crown races, they will get substantially less fans than their triple crown counterparts, and at times might need to do extra races to be at the same level as other umas would be.
Again this isn’t super impactful most of the time, but the other big thing fans affect is the titles you can display on your profile, with 3 increasingly impressive titles at the 10 million, 50 million, and 100 million cumulative fans across all runs breakpoints. It’s not necessarily designed to be fair, and umas that can run medium and long distances are way easier for grind fans for bc they can run in the Japan Cup and Arima Kinen which award 30k fans each, while sprint and dirt Umas can’t get nearly as many per run. This has no mechanical impact, but if you really like a specific uma and want to display the title associated with them on your profile, then for triple tiara Umas it will take more total runs to unlock them compared to triple crown Umas. Tbh if you ever see someone with one of those on their profile for an Uma who can only run in less popular races like Haru Urara, that means they’re an absolute super fan who is extremely dedicated to their favorite uma.
I respect Cygames’s commitment to faithfully adapting horse racing into their anime girl game, and I’m not blaming them for being the source of misogynistic baggage that comes with the faithful adaptations. I don’t necessarily think I would even want them to make the fan counts even across the mare races and their non-restricted counterparts. But every time I look at the agenda screen and see that the Japanese Oaks awards 9000 fewer fans than the derby, I can’t help but get a strange feeling about how blatantly displayed in direct score numbers that misogyny is. And to be clear, I’m well aware that the Derby is the most famous and historic race in Japanese horse racing, it makes sense that the numbers in the game would reflect that. Still I find it impossible to ignore it being a consistent discrepancy across all races. The fact that the mare only race counterparts have to exist in the first place already says a lot.
Because of Okarun’s ogre club being a dick joke / Chapter 219 being Momo and Okarun’s metaphorical “first time”, now I’m wondering if this ENTIRE series is just a giant metaphor for growing up as a teenager. Just a really twisted coming-of-age storyline.
Momo and Okarun obviously represent experiencing intimacy for the first time / puberty / realizing that you have feelings for another person for the first time.
Aira obviously represents teenagers growing up without a parent. Her power is literally from a yokai that viewed her as her child.
Maybe Jiji and Evil Eye are underage drinking? Because Jiji is normal on his own, but if he gets “splashed” with a “cold liquid”, he turns into Evil Eye. This dumb brute who is always trying to fight people.
Kinta is a nerdy loser whose power is literally his imagination and his mechs. So this works two-ways. One, he gets to use his nerdy imagination to help fight the villains. Two, he uses his love of giant mechs as the main way he does it. So he specifically represents a coming-of-age story for nerds.
Vamola obviously represents foreign exchange students / refugee students having to navigate a country that isn’t their own.
Rin Sawaki represents guilt from losing their childhood best friend.
Unji Zuma has the same idea as Rin, but with his sibling.
Kouki Yukishiro, unfortunately, represents teenagers who have been exploited by adults, especially teachers.
/
/
/
Dandadan is lowkey turning into the anime/manga version of Stephen King’s IT.
percy being the short guy of the friend group for five books straight always has me laughing. in book 1 he describes annabeth being a couple inches taller than him. grover is presumably also taller since, well, he has goat legs. book 2 annabeth's still beating him by a couple of centimeters and clarisse towers over him, tyson of course is taller than all of them. book 3 he says that he's legitimately 'relieved' that him and annabeth are the same height, but thalia has a few inches on him and zoe's definitely taller. next year in book 4? he doesn't even mention the height difference between him and the rest of his friends possibly because he's too scared to even think about it. but we know for sure that beckendorf was really tall, which makes things immensely funny once you imagine him and percy teaming up for capture the flag. and then it's revealed that Silena is probably taller than him, too, because she has to be tall enough to pass as Clarisse in armor. its not even till like six chapters into book 5 where we find out he's finally taller than annabeth because he mentions annabeth having to stand on her toes to reach his eye level. which is so fricking funny because annabeth in book 1 was probably thinking 'hah this kid's short' and then by book 5 it's basically like 'what the frickity fracking frick happened to you over the school year, or more accurately what happened to your spine length'
i want leo feeling down one day on the Argo II because he's the shortest of the seven and therefore the least physically capable, and then annabeth showing him a picture of 12yo percy just so that she can see his expression lighting up as he says 'no freakin way'
A Simple Trans Girl Living Her Worst Life @rabid-kat - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag