So I Read Main Story 2 Finally
Umamusume. They are born to run. They inherit the names of horses from another world, whose histories were sometimes tragic-
This part of the opening monologue always stuck with me.
I've been a fan of sports for a long time, but human sports. I've been a fan of some real landfill teams (Come On You Spurs, Let's Go Royals) so I know the kinds of heartbreak sports can bring. Career-threatening/ending injury, especially as a fan of la jogo bonito, is something even more tied to football than most other sports at least in my time as a fan.
But death is something that always eluded me.
Death came for the old legends after fulfilling lives, or due to long battles with cancer their millions of dollars afforded them the extra time and resources to fight. Death came for the young up and comers with promising careers on other teams (Tyler Skaggs comes to mind), but never mine. At least until Diogo Jota got into the car crash that killed him.
I remember being at work when I saw the news and it absolutely took the legs out from under me. We'd just won the league. The World Cup was coming up and I'd put aside my seething righteous hatred of all things Cristiano Ronaldo to watch him play for Portugal and win the Nations League. And all of that just...stopped right there. I took a 15 because I kept looking at the picture of Liverpool's trophy lift and seeing him there and it felt like getting kicked in the stomach.
Death has popped up here and there outside of sports, too. A high school classmate of mine lost an all-too-brief battle with an intestinal cancer that took him in my junior year. I didn't know him that well, but we were friendly, so not seeing him around was a very felt presence.
A girlfriend's mother suddenly passed away despite being in good health. I'd just been at their house a week before watching Rocky Horror and Firefly. I remember pretending to look into the casket at the funeral and cracking my eye open to see her lying there and realizing at that moment that'd be me at some unknown point in the future, in a room displayed in front of loved ones and well-wishers. It scared me. And it still really, really scares the hell out of me, even moreso as an adult.
Reconnecting with my estranged birth family and learning that my biological father died when I was very young without me even getting the chance to meet him in any form but a photograph was something that I still think about. How crushed I was that someone who I look so very identical to is never someone who will get to say how happy they are to meet me after so long like my mother was. I hope if he's looking down at me he's happy about the person I grew up to be despite everything.
I'm not a hypochondriac, but I am what you would call "incredibly attached to my mortal coil". I've been at some low points but despite coming close have never made a genuine attempt to cut things short, mainly out of that primal fear in my mind that reminds me
You don't know what's past this. You sure you wanna find out before you're really done?
I cling to my existence quite hard and as a result I find a lot of comfort in the idea of memory. Memory is how Diogo, a past partner's parent, and my father live on in 2026. Memory is how recently deceased titans Dolly Parton and Tim Curry will live on. But like. That's the thing about memory.
I'm not Tim Curry. I'm not Diogo Jota. My name's probably not going to end up on a related Wikipedia page in blue text for someone years down the line to click on and see me as an inspiration. But there's alway that hope that something I do will make my existence ring out across space and time, realms of death and life, for as long as humanity draws breath.
So anyway, about the horsegirls.
...
...
...
Okay, now that you are also surely in the middle of bawling your fucking eyes out after witnessing peak fiction, I wanna get into why it fucks me up so bad.
Kraft is a girl who really just wants to be remembered.
If this sounds familiar to you, it's also kind of Aston Machan's deal. Funny enough, they're both mares (Tiara Track Umamusume, in the world of No Boys). They both are, in their own ways, footnotes in the careers of other horses — Kraft is to Cesario, Heart, and Messiah as Machan is to Vodka and Scarlet. As a result of being in such strong generations, their accomplishments and careers tend to get overshadowed, so as a result, both of their Umamusume counterparts strive to be someone that leaves a lasting impression. Kraft wants to inspire future generations of racers, and Machan simply wants you to never forget Aston Machan. My personal thing though, as someone who's gotten a whole fucking lot of Machan and literally next-to-no Kraft (except for what my dear friend Nano has said about her in the past)...
...I think Kraft is a waaaaaay better execution of the concept.
I will accept my tomatoes with grace and bravery.
It's not that I don't like Machan. I think she's very adorable and VodMaSca is a cute little polycule I will never say no to seeing art of. But it's just...I don't know. Maybe it's just overexposure to the cheap Angstslop-ification of her story (people LOVE to say "don't forget Aston Machan" as a sort of shortcut for making people feel sad), but Kraft feels like a MUCH better execution of the concept of An Umamusume Who Wants To Be Remembered.
You see it in Kraft sharing her dream of being an inspiration for the future, you see it in Kraft being excited to have a junior to watch over and help. You see it in how she talks about herself and her running, and you see it as she is breaking down and exhausted from the stress of her career. You see it in how she reacts to The Mysterious 2005 Triple Crown Winning Umamusume Who Is Totally Not Named Deep Impact Offsceen Where Makoto Kaneko Can't See drowning out the noise in the Tiara track she and her rivals make.
Most importantly, you see it in her rivals and friends.
For an Umamusume who stated she thinks she failed in her mission to be remembered, the news of her coma* hits the racing fan scene with only a fraction as the intensity as it did the people who knew her, ran with her, ate with her. Shared a life with her. Helped see her go from fledgling newbie to an athlete with graded stakes wins and a Tiara to her name. We can see just how heavily it all weighs on each and every one of them. It makes me think back to Diogo Jota's accident and how I felt; how I knew standing there that all the sorrow I felt was probably only a drop in the bucket compared to how the rest of his teammates at Liverpool and on the Portuguese MNT felt, but more out of empathy and compassion than minimizing my own sadness.
In even the idealized world of Umamusume, where Cesario's injury gets a very heartfelt send-off that made me cry, it just feels so...abrupt, as a death often does. None of what happens to Kraft felt fair at all. It's not fair she still had plans and aspirations for a career that ended up stolen from her by tragedy. And so we circle back around to the start of this whole word salad:
...horses from another world, whose histories were sometimes tragic...
I write a lot of umamusume fan stuff. My main squeeze is an Uma-fied Zenyatta, an American mare who achieved 19 straight wins across three states (including 13 G1s, two being the 2008 Breeder's Cup Distaff and the 2009 Breeder's Cup Classic) before falling just short at her second Breeder's Cup Classic after a truly herculean effort after a late start by Mike Smith to salvage a 20th win and cement her name even deeper into the stone tablets of horse racing history. In my version, she pushes herself toward that 20th win, going for the Santa Anita Derby. She isn't in the best condition, but she's certain she'll win. But she ends up a victim of tragedy, suffering a catastrophic on-track injury that puts a very true and final capstone on her career. As a result, she ends up with a very rocky relationship to the supernatural and divine, and to the concept of fate itself. Nothing realistically should have caused even someone in her condition to get hurt like she did, but it happened regardless — anyone would feel like they were getting a little targeted by some cruel trickster god (or three very uncharitable goddesses who feel like pushing the course of your fate is only reserved for a chosen few).
Of course, this does not happen in real life (she and Blame, the one to finally kill The Queen, both had the 2010 Classic set as their retirement races). But it makes for a lot of interesting exploration, especially since I threw her wildly out of time to do it which makes her encounter many mythical figures of the track who she would not have met under normal circumstances.
But Shan, you say, what's your OC delusion have to do with Rhein Kraft at all? Well I just wanted a fun excuse to go into that stuff. I can talk about all that later. But it IS related.
Rhein Kraft died in August of 2006 following acute heart failure during training. Her umamusume counterpart slipped into a coma in turn. I've always been on the fence about how umamusume treats horse death, but generally I lean more into the "well if a human could live that with treatment, an umamusume could too". Heart failure is a completely different beast than an ACL tear, or an ankle break. It's...debatably possible to survive something to catastrophic to such a vital organ, but it's really, really atomically slim, especially in Kraft's case where it happened while she was alone in her trainer's office and no one found her for who knows how long. The fact she was comatose at best would be classified as a miracle under normal circumstances, even.
I knew the real horse passed away before starting MS2 because I did some preliminary reading and it became very apparent to me in how she spoke and acted toward memory and legacy to be what I affectionately referred to as "Dead Friend-Coded". She talks almost like she knows her time is very limited, and that she has to strive to make as much impact on the racing world as she can before that fateful August 19th comes. A spectre of death haunts MS2 like the spectre of proto-Marxist communism haunts Europe. And I frankly love how they almost feel like they're taking their time with it.
Kraft's declaration of Sprinter's Stakes glory in tandem with Pando's Shuka Sho comes just before it, but they really make you chew on it. The constant appearance of shadowy butterflies, symbolic of death and fate in Japanese culture, in Kraft's vision as she tries to snap a picture of one. You get a single line about how she sure is getting tired a lot more and very easily lately. She drops that she was exhausted before the Hanshin Himba. You see her run an entire other race and struggle through it. You get a bunch of cutaways to her genmates and we spend some time with Pandora right before they finally just drop the image of Rhein Kraft's lifeless body slumped over on a couch into your eyes. It almost feels abrupt because there's no lead-in. But death usually does feel very abrupt. It never announces itself. Even if the decline is long, once death pulls the rope, that's curtains on your story.
If one thing really came to my mind thinking about Kraft, it's what I consider Kendrick Lamar's magnum opus, "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst". The first half of this track is one that the full messaging of never hit me until it was 4 in the morning on a drive back from dropping a roommate off at the airport, and I remember crying because it struck me in that vulnerable place I spoke on earlier. Wanting to be remembered. It ends in the following:
And hope that at least one of you sing about me when I'm gone
Am I worth it? Did I put enough work in?
Promise that you will sing about me
Promise that you will sing about me
I said when the lights shut off and it's my turn
To settle down, my main concern
Promise that you will sing about me
Promise that you will sing about me
Promise that you'll sing about me forever
Promise that you'll sing about me for— ooh
...
This is pure ethos of Rhein Kraft. Even she sits there and doubts that she did not work hard enough to leave the mark she wanted to leave, even before her coma* which left her unable to see for herself what came after she closed her eyes that afternoon. But every day, those she entrusted with it came by to let her know. All their joys, their sorrows, their wins and their losses. Watching races on the hospital room TV talking to her like she was still there, alert and responsive, witnessing exactly what she wanted most come about - a Tiara Track umamusume standing at the absolute pinnacle of the world stage.
Fourteen long years, a Kraft-shaped hole in the hearts of four horsegirls filled with her memory. And she opens her eyes after those fourteen long years, pulled out of her coma by the wishes of her best friends and rivals, able to make new memories with the bearers of her hopes and dreams in a world she willed into existence with her own determination.
To paraphrase Billy Bean:
"How can you not be romantic about horse racing?"
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[* = THE LOAD-BEARING ASTERISKS]
As stated, I got some fence-sitting of my own about Umamusume and Horse Death. While I generally do agree with the sentiment that the Umaverse is one free of the pain of such an insanely crushing and serious loss (especially in a fandom that eats up the lowest-tier angstslop they can dredge out of the depths of twitter dot com's ongoing "hey, we all skimmed/heard second-hand about Yol_Yoola's beautiful and haunting The 4 Years I Loved You Most and we just all steal the angst parts and not the part that gives it heart and makes it special and so heartbreaking" issue).
BUT. And it's a BIG BUT.
I think this is one case where I think that Rhein Kraft's death actually makes the impact of the story more gutwrenching.
How they talk about her as if she's dead. How they shoulder the full weight of her hopes and dreams. The cut to her ear decoration in a dish by her bedside as if it were a memorial. How they discuss her coma with such finality regarding her bleak condition. You'd honestly be forgiven if you think she genuinely did just fucking pass away.
I can go two ways on it because it's just as easy to imagine a story where Cesario's "Hey, Kraft" is a guiding voice to the afterlife, one where she can wake up and keep having a fun life with her now-fourteen-years-older friends. She finally, ultimately, slips out of her coma and into the lightless walk, the last thing she hears the reassurance from her childhood friend that the world she wished for has arrived.
...
HOWEVER (after making you tear up probably, teehee~). It's just as easy and equally sad (in its own ways, because I'm a chronic overthinker) to subscribe to the idea that she genuinely did wake up. She'd been told about the progress toward her dream, and it finally rouses her from the confines of the darkness. She awakens, bleary eyes seeing a mix of old and new faces, including that of the ultimate inheritor of her dream of Tiara Umamusume to achieve — neigh, SURPASS —the same level of godhood as the Crown Umamusume. She will learn to walk, talk, and do the things she used to again in a world foreign to her, but she will get by with that typical Rhein Kraft stubbornness and the eager helping hands of her comrades.
Personally, I skew toward the latter. She really was a stubborn horse, after all.