Umamusume players are engaging in unhinged summoning rituals to enlist the aid of Egyptian gods and

Since its Western release on June 24, horse girl gacha racer Umamusume: Pretty Derby has been steadily warping the collective noosphere. Anime girls based on very real race horses have proven a uniquely potent fascination, driving those caught in their psychic gravity well to become amateur chroniclers of while others destroy innocent websites by for a retired failhorse.

In the last 24 hours, the mindstate of Umamusume players has started contorting in new and exciting ways. On the Umamusume subreddit, in anticipation of an upcoming horse girl card, users have begun in an effort to bend gacha probability in their favor.

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16 hours ago, redditor WLLover posted an image of a Satanic sacrament with amharic script demanding "15k carat compensation" and "+3.0% banner rate up." Five hours later, another redditor and what I'm pretty sure is an edited version of that "lady yelling at [[link]] cat" meme .

By 8 am EDT, users were as depicted by concept artist . All these empyrean petitioners and overnight cultists are appealing to higher powers for the same reason: the advent of .

In Umamusume, you need more than just a high-tier horse girl for success. You also need support cards, which represent your horse girl's friends and peers. When you train your umamusume in career mode, the characters associated with the support cards you've selected will appear to provide additional stats and other bonuses.

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Arguably, support cards are a more important part of the umamusume training equation than the actual horse girl. And Kitasan Black is a support card that provides potent enough speed buffs that she's been a meta mainstay for Japanese Umamusume players since her first release four years ago.

Even before Umamusume's global launch, rumors about Kitasan Black's effectiveness had filtered westward from players who'd witnessed her omnipresence on Japanese servers. At time of writing, we're only four hours away from her support card's launch, and newly converted Umamusume players have [[link]] been primed to receive her arrival with an intensity that, in another era, would be punishable as heresy.

On [[link]] Twitter, at least, doesn't involve any extraplanar beings. And helpfully, Umamusume veterans are reassuring newer players that the hype might make her seem to be—unless you're spending more than most of us should.

As funny as the memes and brainrot are, it's worth noting how these moments of fevered community shitposting can reinforce the FOMO that serves as one of the strongest pressure points for predatory gacha monetization to squeeze. If you're playing Umamusume, be sure to remind yourself: No horse girl performance is worth gambling away your money.