First Thought, Best Thought

I think the biggest problem is that people insist on reading the show in one of two completely opposite directions. Either it's "gross gooner-bait fanservice," or it's Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream some harrowing, realistic depiction of addiction.

I don't think it's either. Yani Neko is based on a gag manga and, more importantly, it's a dark comedy. The cycle the show uses for its comedy is the same cycle as poverty and addiction. It's at it's core about a bunch of unemployed, addicted catgirls constantly dicking around, getting fucked up, or trying to scrape together enough money for rent and their next fix.

The comedy and the tragedy aren't separate things. They're the same thing.

The setting reinforces why, the catgirls are very obviously written as a marginalized underclass, but they're never a one-to-one allegory for any specific real-world group. They're just catgirls. That gives the series room to talk about poverty, addiction, social stigma, and fetishization without pretending it's speaking for any communitie's real experience.

They're offered worse jobs. They're poorer. The police target them more. Their neighborhoods have a stigma attached to them. None of that is especially subtle.

One thing I really dislike about the discourse around this show is the assumption that if a story has something meaningful to say, it has to become tasteful and self-serious. A story doesn't have to be refined to be insightful.

Chainsmoker Cat is sleazy. It's horny. It's gross. It's juvenile. I also think it's really fucking funny.

Episode 3 goes from the landlord using a catgirl blow-up doll, to Kansai rolling an unconscious Aruko onto her side so she doesn't choke on her own vomit, to the girls laughing at farts. On paper that sounds like tonal whiplash. In practice, I think it's one of the best examples of what the show is actually trying to do.

Because people's lives are like that.

Even addicts aren't living through an endless montage of tragedy. Real life isn't an indie movie. People with objectively awful lives still sit around trying to make each other laugh because that's just what human beings do. Even a group of crackheads under a bridge are probably spending half the day laughing at dumb shit.

Humor isn't the opposite of suffering. A lot of the time, it's one of the ways people survive it.

That's why the jokes don't undermine the show's depiction of addiction. If anything, they make it feel more honest. The show never pretends addiction is glamorous or that poverty is quirky. But it also refuses to flatten its characters into walking tragedies whose only narrative purpose is to make the audience feel sad.

On its face, it's a crude comedy anime about, well, an anime cat girl with a crippling nicotine addiction. However, under the slapstick, it's got undercurrents which point towards other matters of social commentary.

It not-so subtly shows how drug addiction is a coping mechanism but also fucking ruins your life and makes you a seemingly inconsiderate asshole towards those around you.

But also: it much more subtly points to how these coping mechanisms are more likely to be used within communities that are already under higher degrees of societal pressure with very few avenues for social advancement.

Because it would appear that cat girls are in fact a great allegorical representation of the experience of societal marginalization, while not directly representing any individual real world group.

The anime cat girls are not specifically trans women, or immigrants, or a racial minority, or anything else- they're cat girls.

But they ARE shown on screen to all have low income apartments. They are shown to be offered worse jobs and menial labor positions. They are called specific terms that sound a lot like slurs. The police treat them differently. The neighborhoods they dominate appear to have negative stigma attached to them. The girls that are socially respected by non-cat girls are the ones who seem to play the most to respectability politics, and even then they just get patronizingly regarded as "one of the *good ones*."

But on top of how they are broadly disadvantaged and disparaged, they are also simultaneously fetishized.