I Do Not Like the Horse Women
I have spent two weeks in the company of the horse women. I have given them $57, and approximately 20 hours of my time. A pittance, I know.
I do not speak these blasphemies lightly. I suspect I will face genuine social consequences for my opinions about the horse women. They have played a bizarrely large part in my life for the last two years.
I am blessed to have weird precious friends who started watching the Uma Musume anime years before the game’s english localization. While you, dear reader, were watching Northernlion’s on-stream Uma indoctrination, I had already, months prior, begrudgingly admitted that Tokai Teo’s struggle to come to terms with the loss of her lifelong dream was genuinely pretty compelling.
The admission was begrudging because I truly hate moe.
I look upon these horse girls and see aesthetically inbred waluigis of women. An empathy lure that ruthlessly pursues the limits of evolution’s beauty cues, unbound by the constraints of physical law. A pile of plastic surgeries stacked atop one another until they create a shiny, doe eyed tower of babel.1
Special Week’s design, to me, reads only as a venus fly trap created by adult men who want to fuck Asuka. I have run out of trust in the people who make cute characters that look like this. Some of that prejudice is arbitrary, clearly. Had this game been released with sweaty anime athletes who actually looked like athletes, I would’ve tolerated it for much longer. Sadly Uma Musume does not tolerate the aesthetic imperfections that I find endearing.
This wonderful exception proves the rule. Where was this emotional dynamism in the app?
I must admit - the emotional loop of this game bears a striking resemblance to my beloved Fire Emblems. Really sitting down and considering why I could so effectively project empathy for those fictional trope bundles but not their horse equivalents is where much of this post is coming from.2
Emotional gambling on blorbos you spend time with is the core premise of RPGs. You don’t have to sell me on the roguelike loop.3 Even accounting for my moe prejudice, gatchas simply fire too many arrows at your heart for all of them to miss. For me, El Condor Pasa struck true.
I lay bare my hypocrisy. Bless this lunatic.
My negativity is not merely couched in some utilitarian feminist critique of the distributed social harms of investing feelings in servile love homunculi instead of the hard, shitty, real people who need our help. My humility (or perhaps self doubt) runs too deep to trust any utility calculus that complicated. Instead, I am arguing that Uma Musume is bad for you, the player. I think it is a bad video game premised on a genuinely funny joke. I think we have priced our attention too cheap.
Get out a piece of paper and write down, in order, all of the things Uma’s main menu is asking you to do in this screenshot. Doesn’t that sound stressful, when divorced from all the glitter?
This game is hostile to comprehension. It uses stats as an aesthetic more than a gameplay element. The effects of all these skills and grades and currencies is more obfuscated than my health insurance benefits. You should be suspicious of a pastime that is hesitant to communicate the time and money is it asking to take from you.
To be clear, I don’t think this game’s base pitch is evil.4 It is a free, consistently updated video game designed with short play sessions in mind. That is a valuable niche to fill. I just want to be blunt about what games like this are offering, and what they take from you in exchange.
Uma Musume is a simulation of a fulfilling life for people who lack that. It gives stressed freemium players tangible daily goals, a fictional friend group to be parasocially enriched by, and needy bright eyed women waiting to be doted on. Women who need your help, and will thank you for providing it. It is opium for loneliness.
And like, I’m sorry. I am not here to take away your digital pain medication without addressing its root cause. I get it.
But what I think you don’t get (because messages like these are so frequently co-opted by grifters that you’ve grown numb to them) is your own capacity to mitigate that root loneliness. Please, god, go to your LGS. You will find tolerant weirdos there, I promise. Take risks, make the first move. The world is better than you think. The time and attention these games ask from you is competing for the same resources that allow you to slowly grow a better life.
If you cannot picture Uma Musume as part of that ideal life you need to delete the app. Today. Before this feeling welling up in you dims. You do not need to “be a better person” in some vague metaphysical way. You just need to plan a teeny bit further in advance.
You can do that. I know you can. It’s going to be okay.
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Ultimately, I wanna live my life matte. I want as little gloss as possible on all things. I want paper, and bark, and wool, and candles. I want considerably fewer things to shine at me than is presently the case.↩
That and Prismatic’s Hole Bandwagon. (This post’s hole is the yawning pit of loneliness within each of our souls.)↩
But I do have to sell you NSR dorks on the appeal of the old Fire Emblem games. Please trust me on this one.↩
At least for the average player. The fact that the business model only functions on the back of whales, some percentage of which are gripped by gambling addictions, is another matter. But my audience for this article is the free riders, not the whales. I am assuming, for sake of argument, that you’ve never spent a dime.↩