12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 5Warnings for drug use, blending fact and fiction, and the invocation of gonzo.I got off the metro around nine, avoiding eye contact with the down-and-outs with as I badged into the terminally seventies office building that hosted my 29-hours-per-week job. Most of the tenants seemed to be nonprofits with a primary output of slaughter manifestos passed off as policy analysis, but ours was of a racier breed. Set up in the nation’s capital as either a bid for legitimacy or as some sort of sick joke, the fine fellows at Penthouse US had been steadily plugging away at pornographic photoshoots and the editorial content flanking the pornographic photoshoots for the better part of a century. Having neither camera skills nor a publishing-friendly body, I was brought on board in 2022 as part of a “gaming vertical” initiative for the website, to help stave off the inevitable private equity acquisition. We’d review anything even remotely lewd – a strange approach, but one that seemed to draw more than enough clicks to please my boss. Getting to play Balder’s Gate on the job was a high high, even if most of my days involved trawling through a product category whose median output is “strip peggle with roguelike elements”.The morning one-on-one rolled around and my boss, who I knew only by the “Jimbo” on his lanyard, seemed more enthusiastic than usual. “Nice to see ya, girl. I’ve found a great’n.”Jimbo chased enough trends to be wearing a pronoun pin in allyship, but not enough to stop wearing one in 2025. Plus I’d been burnt by his leads plenty of times before. “Did they make another Bayonetta game?”“Better,” he said, as if I was on the right track, “you hear about those Japanese horse girls?The concept rang a bell, but I let him keep going since he seemed to be slavering over the idea of getting to divulge his findings. “It’s a phone game about races just for the fillies.” He was laughing wildly. “And they all wear frilly costumes too!”I kept a straight face. “What’s this got to do with… you know, the editorial line?”He laughed again, at me this time, then drew a bit closer. “Listen. This is one of those degenerate weaboo things. They like it when their games don’t have sex or tits in ‘em. They want to do it with those anime girls, sure, but they want games that pander to the idea without giving it to them directly. They project all sorts of weird things onto their favorite ladies, and a scene where the girl actually got fucked would shatter a million fantasies for every person it did the trick for.” Jimbo seemed extremely satisfied with himself, as if he’d been workshopping that thesis for months. “Besides, they can always draw it themselves on twitter and sell it at their comic kets”I was to take my time on this assignment, providing reviews one week, one month, and three months into playing Umamusume: Pretty Derby, owing to its nature as an ever-changing live-service game. I began to excuse myself once the details were hashed out, not wanting to hear any more rants on the lily-livered Japanese psyche, when Jimbo barked at me one more time. “Keep your office door locked if you’re not expecting anyone. They’re saying the school shooters ran out of schools – I wouldn’t be surprised if they came for the workplaces next!” I didn’t bother trying to make sense of his rant as I took a seat in my office and used 4.3 of god’s own gigabytes to download the game.Umamusume: Pretty Derby is far better than it has any right to be. It’s a modern-day reinterpretation of the raising game genre, which never really left Japan during its heyday in the 90s and 2000s. What we find ourselves with here is Football Manager cross Tokimeki Memorial. The game loop consists of raising horse-eared girls through three-year high school campaigns, setting their training schedules, navigating events and dialogue trees, and preparing them for increasingly difficult and prestigious races. It’s got a surprising amount of polish and tact given the premise, which is supremely sleazy in the abstract. You’re a coach through and through, and if a horse happens to fall in love with you, then that’s on them. This is the plausible deniability through which the game launders its player-directed fanservice, although the bulk of the fanservice is in fact horse yuri. These girls have friendships, rivalries, and unspeakable bonds with one another, and the intersecting narratives of the campaigns result in surprisingly strong character dynamics when they could so easily have just phoned it in.Umamusume are hell-bent on grinding themselves into dust – half of your job is to tell your trainee to take a break before she hurts herself. What made each of them this way is another matter. A horse girl can be a fiery hotshot or a stoic ace. She may fancy herself a noblewoman or she may crawl through the mud begging for a shred of approval (sometimes both at once). Like real girls, some of them just have autism. But all of these umamusume can find themselves just one bad race or one untimely injury away from complete ego destruction. Paired with the fact that every competition leads to one winner and countless losers, it makes for excellent drama. All of the epic narrative highs and lows that sports typically generate are present here, with the additional layer of anime girls having Big Anime Girl Emotions, like a pill wrapped in cheese for the weeb in all of us. All I’m saying is that football would be a hell of a lot better if the traumatic brain injuries caused the men to occasionally confess to one another instead of just murder-suicides.My initial races went poorly, but after a few campaigns I was able to build up a repertoire of helpful support cards and roll for some more horses in order to learn their deals. I felt an early kinship with Nice Nature – she has a real sardonic wit and carries the weight of a quarter or perhaps mid-life crisis even at her young age. Horsin’ Caulfield, if you will. Clocking in again on Monday was heavy – I had no karats, and no hopes of getting enough before the Kitasan Black event (the gambling race of the ages, so they said). The office wouldn’t sponsor me any in-game paid currency, which wasn’t much of a surprise seeing as they didn’t sponsor me any out-of-game healthcare. I needed external help. I needed to join a club, and a top-rated club at that, to reap the karat rewards alongside some new sources of game knowledge. My first attempts were abject failures. Every club I scrolled past was already filled to the brim, thirty out of thirty jockeys in what must have been standing room only. Even worse, I was seeking room for two. The thought of going this gacha journey alone had been filling me with a deep dread this whole time, so I was intending to sync up with an old acquaintance and veteran of gachas such as these named “Nate”. This was set to be his first experience with Uma Musume, though. Would he find it trite compared to his blue starlights and revue archives? Would he find the characterizations shallow, the setting confusing?After a few more hours of gaming and note-taking, I clocked out and got on the bus, still playing but periodically lowering the screen brightness and tilting it away from any potential spectators. I did feel some shame from not only playing but genuinely enjoying Umamusume, even though this was my professional role. A professional role that would come to submerge me in horses for as many waking minutes as my TP could take me.Eventually I found refuge in an influencer’s haunt. Turns out that Nate was already three steps ahead of me when he joined the club the next day, a grizzled Matikanefukukitaru avatar with a profile description of “honse” and a seven-star stud. We got to work borrowing club horses and budgeting our karats. I felt a surprising sense of community swapping around virtual shoes in my windowless office room, sharing scenario strategies via Signal. But after a few weeks of this, it had become increasingly difficult to focus on my task at hand: using a phone to train umamusume without being distracted by the atrocities said phone loved to key me into. Some new mass murder, natural disaster, or institutional breakdown. The national guard rolling into the street just blocks away. Six dead in this afternoon’s shooting. At least three genocides on other sides of the world. Being glued to my phone for the sake of a meager paycheck, doing nothing but training horses day in day out, had left me unavoidably vulnerable to the rest of the world. I needed a break. This is why they traditionally call for “touching grass”, but I was paralyzed by the newfound political occupation that had recently begun to plague my city, as incessant as spotted lanternflies and far more dangerous. How can touching grass possibly help when your Turf rank feels like a G, like you’re poor sweet Haru Urara? No, the only way out was through. Sometimes, you’ve got to think like a horse.Ketamine is one of those miracle cures that our boys in the lab synthesized during the sixties, but it never made it into the clutches of the hippies or unstrung Vietnam vets who really would have appreciated it. Instead, it ended up a drug for the nags, used to cover their surgeries, their transport, and their nigh-inevitable euthanasia. You see, ket is an “NMDA receptor antagonist”, which means that it takes you the hell out of yourself. Makes you stumble through your words a bit, glazes over your vision, and in exchange makes the fear, anxiety, and bad news all pass right through you. The sting’s still there, but it goes away in seconds, and you’re back to whatever you were doing, not even thinking about it. It’s tougher to keep up with chores or correspondence in this state, but the big inviting buttons of a gacha game are the perfect fit. Gaming is already something of a trance-like ritual to distract oneself from her body and external circumstances, and ket merely lets you double down on that. It also happens to be readily available in pill, powder, and injectable formats so long as you know any wellness-minded yuppie women or sufficiently clubby gay men. With one of each on my contacts list, supply was never a question again.From that point on the assignment became a cold, dissociative purgatory. Every morning I waited anxiously until 11AM when the in-game clock rolled over so I could do my dailies and borrow horses to train horses to acquire star studs to train better horses to fill out my team slots to get enough currency to roll for the support cards needed to better train the horses. You don’t even want new cards – you just want copies of cards you already have, to optimize your horses. The skinner box does its best to skin, and it all amounts to an anhedonic cycle of optimization. There may in fact be far worse things you can lose to a phone game than a twenty every now and then.English umamusume runs on an accelerated schedule, lurching players from timed event to timed event 50% faster than the game was originally planned around. Cygames, kindly benefactors that they are, increased the daily rewards and offer up plenty of one-time gifts to keep things balanced, but all this does is add fire to the fuel. The gears are simply greased too well. There’s more to gain and less time to do it all. You need to spend a lot of your day playing umamusume to stay on top of things, at least one or two hours. That’s quite a lot of life, but if you’re just trying to keep your head down and get through the day, every single day, then it ends up being more of a fact of reality than something you can debate the positives or the negatives of, or try to limit.***Fell asleep last night and had a dream about my deadname google account having a few leftover bucks from a gift card that I could turn into karats. Woke up and plundered that sucker for all four dollars and thirty once cents it had. Made my microtransaction, and thought for a bit about how my strict budgeting (otherwise zero dollars) on the game contrasted with my completely unstructured time commitment. Then I got saddled to a useless teleconference and needed something to distract myself with again.Terrible stomach pain after work. New Daisca for the medium pace slot on my team. Undefeated A+ rank, no S aptitudes though. Like Daiwa, I love Vodka, I want to drink her. Nate’s left my club for a top-ranked one. He plays the game half as much yet seems to get similar outcomes in the monthly cups. Phone’s at 23. I’ve figured out that a standard run uses about 16 per cent of my phone’s battery.For spectators, horse racing is a game of chance and throwing away money. For real-life jockeys, it’s honest, underpaid work. For me, it’s an exercise in brutal efficiency, ruining the careers of countless horses with silly names such as Ketchup Step on the quest to make a slightly less disposable Tokai Teio. These horses don’t suffer the grisly fates of their real-world counterparts – joint disorders and euthanizations are instead turned into personality traits and character arcs. What they suffer from instead is disposability, as I train one failed permutation of an uma after another, unremarkable for winning 85% of her professional races.The world painted in umamusume is hilariously clean. No booze, no gambling, no mafia, and certainly no intravenous or snorted tranquilizers. An entire society structured around having these girls race for the love of the game. For reasons related to the “2010s anime/concert/mobage media mix idol boom”, after an umamusume wins a graded race, she deigns to a concert, with the runner-ups as her backup dancers. They look as dead-eyed as they possibly can for anime girls, and as polished as a new car. Most of the cast are driven to win by rivalries, but one wonders about the fear of humiliation, too. King Halo looks like she’s about to end it all. I don’t even bother to view my girl Natty’s performances; I wonder if the crowd cares at all, either.After ninety days I collect all my notes and try to form a coherent final review. I look worse than ever before, and feel hollow on some deep level but at least I can hold that feeling without giving in to it completely. These months have felt like years and also days. The hasted schedule of Global and the willful shutting-off of the world around me has both dilated time and caused it to slip right through my fingers. The near-daily ketamine use probably didn’t help anything there either. After seventy glacial minutes of collaging, I paste everything I’ve got into the CMS, and with no further editing, write the requisite review blurbs and badge out. Tomorrow will bring a new game, and perhaps something will slice through the giant knot in the center of my life. Maybe it will be HuniePop and wine next time.A CNN push notification says the National Guard is massacring protestors at Freedom Plaza and Trump is still bombing Venezuela. The journalist is sitting on the bus, phone in her bag, darting her eyes around for something to focus on and trying to ignore her fellow passengers and how their eyes are all sunken in more than hers, but not by much. She’s tapered off the ket and as such is woozy in a different, crankier way – hopefully not for much longer, but it’s been three damn weeks already. With the last of the articles up and the app strictly for pleasure now, she tries to make sense of how much the horse game has been a crutch and what exactly it has taken from her in return. She thinks about Pokemon Go, her one prior phone game until the fucking Saudis bought it, and gets mad at everyone in the world and misses her stop by one.
Dec 18, 2025 • Subscribe
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