Mein Liebe, mein Welpe

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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.