Don't bet on it
Umamusume: Pretty Derby has turned out to be one of the most popular games in the world, partly due to being a gacha game and partly due to making pretty girls out of very real Japanese racehorses (which introduces a unique mourning when the real horse passes away and the anime girl lives on). A new kind of mourning faces the Umamusume fanbase now, as an upcoming stop on the game's The Stage: World Tour at Los Angeles' Peacock Theater has been cancelled right before it was supposed to open this week. The apparent cause? The US visa system.
First announced in July, the concert was supposed to begin on Wednesday, but developers Cygames have unfortunately had to confirm that it cannot run as planned. The reason for this is stated to be that "although we have coordinated repeatedly with all parties concerned and explored every possible option in our efforts to make this event happen, we were unable to obtain the necessary visas for entry into the US." In a prior post, they stated that they had been working with lawyers and promoters to acquire visas for "over six months", but had yet to receive a response.
This isn't the only recent example of a Los Angeles game concert being affected by struggles to obtain US visas, as a performer on Wuthering Waves' tour, Tarokiki, was also unable to perform in California due to not acquiring a visa in time. And it certainly isn't the first time that game events, more generally, have been affected by the US's increasingly outsider-hostile political climate. This year's GDC quite infamously saw a large number of international and/or queer developers elect not to attend, to prioritise their own safety.
The prospect of not being able to see the voices behind the horses in the flesh, nor to enjoy the soundtrack live in concert seems, to have been a sort of breaking point for some in the fanbase, as there have been quite a few posts from fans along the Community-esque lines of "I can excuse fascism, but I draw the line at cancelling the horse concert." One much-joked about poster stated, seemingly quite earnestly, "This will actually radicalize me if this gets cancelled, fuck my country." It is insane to think that there are genuinely people who might have begun to hop off an alt-right pipeline and learn class/cultural consciousness as a result of an Umamusume concert, but that's the world we live in. Everyone has a breaking point, I suppose; if it takes some people being affected by losing their precious treats to be radicalised against fascism, I'll take it as better than not being radicalised at all.