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LET'S TALK ABOUT UMAMUSUME
OR: That's My Horse!

So what IS an Umamusume I hear you ask. This thing:
This thing right here. Take note of the ADORABLE ears, the swishy tail. This is an umamusume, a horse girl. So what's going on with these horses? What's their deal?

Basically umamusume are what happens when the spirits of horses from another world are reincarnated into their world as these girls. That's PROBABLY canon, the anime makes a point to go over that spiel at the start of each episode, but it doesn't seem like anyone in setting is actually aware of it? What's this translate to? Well for the purposes of 4th Walling, if a character is from a world that's mostly like real earth and has horse racing they may or may not have a familiarity with these names, but as for the umas themselves they seem to be clueless. That's fun!

Anyway more importantly the big thing here is Umamusume have all the power of Horse. They are as strong, fast, and enduring as horses all packed into a human body. Most of them seem to average running speeds of 60KMH, with spurts and springs that can go far beyond that. They can lift unreasonable amounts, because again, horse, and also eat like complete fiends without any negative impact upon themselves besides sometimes bloating. Because again, horses. The trade-off is while they're sturdier than humans in a lot of regards, they have leg issues like horses do in real life. Training wrong or repeated running with little rest and other factors can lead to stress injuries, and taking a fall while running at top speeds will at best result in broken bones. At worst it can be fatal, umamusume have straight up died from this, it's not pleasant. The solution is just not run but all umamusume are born with an overwhelming desire to run. They're competitive, they love pushing themselves, and they love to run. Whilst some of them find outlets in other sports the majority hold a heavy preference for racing.

There are three other major important qualities to umamusume. They have a peak, a literal actual peak. At a certain point they'll start slowing down and no matter what they do their performance will slip. There have been rare instances of umamusume getting past their peak and returning to the racing circuit stronger than ever, but this is so rare it's considered a miracle. Umamusume are capable of accessing a state called "The Zone", essentially a heightened awareness/hyper focus mode where their abilities come out to the point they can push past their usual limits. The Zone is a thing other umamusume are able to see/sense in each other, it manifesting as an overwhelming pressure alongside glowing eyes, very often an Aura, and sometimes odd visualizations. There's no further explanation for how this works outside of the fact it just kind of Does and it can trigger in any kind of competitive scenario, it's not exclusive to racing.

Thirdly, these girls don't age. Once an umamusume hits maturity they just Stop entirely, they're always going to look the way they look and as far as we know they're not passing away from old age. Oh and fourthly I guess, they're all girls, are at least AFAB. There's no equipment totting stallions out there! And an umamusume mother doesn't necessarily always have umamusume kids, sometimes she'll have just regular human children, and sometimes fully human couples will have umamusume kids. Why? Because shut up, presumably.

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OKAY SO LET'S TALK ABOUT WHAT'S GOING ON IN THIS WORLD?

Umamusume Racing is THE BIGGEST DEAL. It has universal appeal. Imagine the World Cub, Eurovision, the Super Bowl, and Video Game Awards, and the League of Legends World Championship all combined but it's horse racing. Everyone cares about it. Every country has its own racing leagues, regionals up to nationals, and the umamusume running in the nationals are straight up celebrities. These girls have merch made of them. They pack stadiums. Look at this.



If that wasn't enough? The umamusume who are out here racing aren't just athletes, they're idols. Every major race is capped off with a Winning Concert that night, a massive stage production starring the top three (or five, or the whole race, it depends) runners. Seriously, look at this:


These are televised internationally, put out on streaming services, the whole nine yards. This is THE BIGGEST DEAL THERE IS. Presumably other umamusume played sports are just as popular. In general people just kind of love these horses? Which, in a world where humans came up alongside humanoid people that had all the Ability of Horse but Smart of Person, yeah. Lets be real society probably owes a lot to these girls. (Hey speaking of that reminder; four legged horses don't exist in their world. It's wild).

Okay but you've got these HORSE GIRLS running around, right? Does this world have changes to accomidate them? DOES IT EVER. LOOK AT THE PHONES:


LOOK AT THE TRAFFIC LANES EXCLUSIVELY FOR UMAMUSUME:


Look at the "cleats", which are horseshoes that go onto the tips of running shoes so the umamusume don't wear through their shoes since they just put that much power down whenever they step and or run:

The cleats are interesting actually. They come in all different materials, styles, and weights. As well as it seems that there's places that do custom fitted ones? Wild stuff. There's likely different cleats designed for different sports too.


And what about school?! Well! Most Umamusume are going to school while they're running, the girls in the Japanese Nationals especially are all mostly enrolled in the "Japan Umamusume Training Schools and Colleges". Or Tracen Academy. A massive facility that on the academic side has schooling from highschool straight through univesity and on the athletics side is equipped with a swimming pool, training tracks designed after every style of track that exists in Japan, a dance studio, a gym full of specialized equipment built for umamusume, several outdoor stages, a library, a cafeteria, two large dormitories, as well as many open fields and gardens. There's also a soccer pitch and tennis courts. Really the only thing they don't seem to have are a basketball court and a baseball field.
This place is mad fancy:


There's also a lab hidden away in there. Somewhere. Don't worry about it too much, just don't drink anything the umamusume with giant sleeves and CRT eyes tries to give you.

This was going to be a massive magazine styled layout but then I went insane trying to do it and lost my mind so here's this instead. If enough of my friend group yells at me maybe I'll make it pretty, but I needed to get this done otherwise i'd never tag again.