Being a Lesbian Trainer in Uma Musume Feels Like An Exploit

    

I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards

 

 

    Cygames is an incredibly queer inclusive company. From the MMM (the third M stands for mech) love triangle of Bravern to the diverse cast of gay characters in Granblue Fantasy, it should come as no surprise that Uma Musume has a lot of queer text and subtext. From Daiwa Scarlet indulging in self insert romance fiction that gives away her true feelings about Vodka, to Special Week and Silence Suzuka’s overwhelming adoration for each other, it’s not particularly subtle when the series wants to tell you a horse girl isn’t exclusively interested in men.

 

    But let’s not kid ourselves. In a series where only the occasional man appears at all and where you can take a dip in the hot springs with any horse woman of your choosing and where most of the storylines currently terminate in cute date nights, the target audience is women likers the world over. And the majority of those women likers are straight men. While the game does blend a cutesy and horse-y (that’s a word now) aesthetic that is often coded feminine with auto-sports management gameplay that’s often coded masculine (see eFootball’s 99:1 male to female ratio among Japanese players), the Trainer you play as doesn’t feel quite as blended. While I chose to play as a girl, and the game will gender me correctly, it feels more like I hacked the game to change all the instances of “he” to “she” in a game that continues to assume I’m a straight cis man. Part of this is that the role of “trainer” or coach is itself coded male, but part of it is also the social role your trainer often takes in your budding friendship/relationship with your horse girl. More romantically aggressive characters like Super Creek (ma’am I don’t want to play goo goo babies!) or Agnes Tachyon (who really enjoys running very unethical experiments on you, and also really wants to kiss Manhattan Cafe) are outliers in a game where even the most confident horses often let you lead the way romantically. 

    Think even about the phrase “your horse girl”. In the metatext, you’re collecting them to own in the game text, you’re scouting them. You, as the scout who determined the success or failure of their career before it even started, have immense social power in the relationship. The trainer can also often choose rude options that imply a mild lack of respect in their intelligence or skill as an athlete. These sorts of toxic power dynamics obviously can exist with someone of any gender, but I wouldn’t particularly call it a common wish fulfillment from a lesbian gaze. 

    I think this reflects a broader issue with inclusion and diversity in media as a whole. VerilyBitchie’s YouTube essay “How Bisexuality Changed Video Games” describes how Fable’s same sex relationships were a coincidence of game design. All of the love interests must be attracted to the hero, and the hero can be either gender. Why waste the energy making the characters straight when that costs extra resources? Bisexuality was an oversight. Games, especially a game with dating sim elements like Uma, are often so obsessively focused on you, the player, that characters are gay or poly or any other sexual identity for you, not because they actually are. Like I said, there are horses that are explicitly into other women, but whether they’re bi or lesbians (in the text of the game), depends on your pronouns. Even when the game tries to make the romanceable characters have agency, this “mechanical bisexuality” seems to take it away

    The design of the game as a collecting gacha and the lens of a dating sim in placing all the agency on the player makes a lesbian love interest feel like an accident. A glitch. An exploit. Which feels frustrating from such an inclusive company like Cygames. 

Sources:

verilybitchie, "How Bisexuality Changed Video Games," Sept 3, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZGkxUTbDqw