If there’s one good thing to come out of this year, it’s the huge influx of horse-brained sickos (hello) who are now well and truly engrossed in the welfare of retired racehorses thanks to gacha game and anime series Umamusume.
Since Pretty Derby ended its four-year Japan-exclusive stint earlier this year, stables and owners of the real-life counterparts behind Umamusume’s colourful cast of characters have been inundated with everything from an uptick in tourist visits to mountains of donated grass for the retired critters to feast upon.
The Northern Lake crowdfunding campaign ultimately raised 125M yen (0.8M USD).The completion of the new stable has also been moved up to March or April, and the day when Meisho Doto and Neko Punch can move out of their rundown house is drawing near.Blessings to all supporters! pic.twitter.com/MeCd0U4PvXDecember 22, 2025
And now another good deed, this time in the form of $800 thousand freakin’ dollars to help renovate dilapidated stables. Back in October the Northern Lake Farm—home to the stable that houses the Umamusume-featured horse Meisho Doto—opened up a crowdfunding campaign in order to raise 15 million yen (around $95,000 USD) for repairs and renovations to its run-down horse lodgings.
As noted by this Reddit post, the farm’s crowdfunding campaign didn’t push Meisho Doto as a marketing tactic to increase the number of donations. Instead, Umamusume fans seem to have taken it upon themselves to spread the word around while using his horse girl counterpart to help push advertising for the campaign even further.
And hell, it’s worked. The crowdfunding campaign has come to a close two months later, and Northern Lake Farm has found itself sitting just shy of a dizzying 125,000,000 yen—that’s almost $800,000 USD and over 800% more than the original target.
本日23日に #ノーザンレイク のクラウドファンディング、無事終了いたしました。たくさんのご支援、温かいメッセージありがとうございます🙇改めてご挨拶の投稿しますね。本当にありがとうございました‼️ https://t.co/WflhlsbNLkDecember 22, 2025
“Thank you so much for all your generous support and warm messages,” a machine-translated post from the Northern Lake X account reads. “I’ll make another post with proper greetings soon. Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart!”
As for what over 100 million yen gets Northern Lake’s horses—well, according to this post it looks like the farm will be replacing the fences in the pastures as well as purchasing and installing treadmills for the horses that are in need of more thorough exercise or can’t quite get around the pasture as much as they used to.
It’s been genuinely heartwarming to see how much folks have come to care about the real-life versions of the racehorses that form the bedrock of Umamusume’s entire existence. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so much good come out of a gacha game about relentlessly pushing a bunch of high school horse girls to their limits, but I’m certainly not complaining. The world is certainly a better place for it.
