Korok
1 review liked by Korok
Nekopara Vol. 1
2014
Nekopara is a series of adult visual novels you've most likely heard of in passing from post-post-post-ironic weeaboos online who wear Ahegao hoodies in public and think being horny is a personality trait. It's the funny anime game about the catgirl cafe that's garnered a status comparable to something like Bad Rats: a gag gift best sent to your friends during a Steam sale for a quick laugh (which is how I obtained my copy back in high school), or something you play so your "hilarious" Steam status pops up on your friend's screens during their CS: GO matches. In honor of the holiday, I thought "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if I played the porn game about cat girls and published a review on it online?", but while I slogged through one of the most joyless visual novels I've ever read, I came away with a lot to ruminate on betwixt the standard anime hijinks and incestuous little sister jokes.
Now obviously, Nekopara is porn, and if you came here expecting anything other than the world's most boring set-up to catgirl hentai, you were barking up the wrong tree. But as I was reading through lines and lines of filler text and moeblob cuteness, I found myself thinking about the common archetypes you find in the female characters written for this sort of media: the incestuous little sister romance, the (worryingly) child-like girl, or in Nekopara's case, pets. These all have a connective through-line, which is a lack of independent agency and an innate dependency on a superior of some kind (usually the self-insert main character of the story.) This throughline isn't something specific to Japanese media by any means, but these are just some of the few I noticed while reading Vol. 1.
The very concept of catgirls as they are written in Nekopara are a bastard child of the aforementioned archetypes mentioned previously: They're pretty explicitly stated in the text to be analogous to cats, displaying numerous cat-like mannerisms. They have a limited understanding of human society and abstract concepts (money, emotional awareness, etc.) and are even required to be "chipped" in a sense via the possession of an "Independent Action Permit", a mix between an ID and a Driver's License, in order to be allowed in polite society without being detained by Animal Control. They mature at roughly the same rate as a regular cat (it's stated offhandedly that a 6 month old catgirl is roughly equivalent to a 12 year old girl), but retain roughly the same intellect and mannerisms of a child. But most importantly for Nekopara's main intent, they can't bear human children, the existence of catgirl-human sexual relations is both normal and widely accepted alongside those who keep them as regular pets or family members in this society, and they are "excessively honest and uncomplicated", which means that emotional miscommunication and conflict basically never happens (unless its in service of anime tropes, like "jealous clingy tsundere").
What this means is that Nekopara's catgirls are the "idealized woman" for the target audience: a walking fleshlight in the shape of an girl, who has an innate attraction to the self-insert main character and will basically never reject them. A mirage of a character who only exists for pleasure. This is taken to the extreme in the context of Nekopara, in which the main character (who has helped raise the two leading catgirls ever since they were kittens and explicitly views them as daughters and family) enters a sexual relationship with what is essentially his pet cats/younger twin sisters, the ultimate fetishistic culmination of tropes to create the most dependent females possible for the express purpose of sexual pleasure. Incestuous threesomes and shower sex are sandwiched in-between the most trite rom-com anime scenarios and paragraphs of pure filler text to create the perfect visual novel for the modern-day weeb, the equivalent of a corporate blockbuster designed to appeal to the otaku equivalent of John Q. Public. This isn't an original conclusion by any means, and it's one that's not even necessarily a negative in terms of Nekopara's main goal (be titillating and provide comfort to its target audience), but it's telling that the series can basically excise the naughty 18+ bits from its story and still achieve success in other medium adaptations with little editing to the main girls' writing.
It's a formula that obviously works: Nekopara has numerous sequels, spinoffs and is one of the biggest rags-to-riches success stories to come from the eroge scene in recent memory. It's the kind of monumental success that makes someone with an ahegao anime girl avatar on Twitter thrust their arms towards the sky in joy to celebrate the "Based" culture of the Land of the Rising Sun, as if the success of an eroge where a guy sticks his dick in his pet cat is some kind of cultural dunk on the puritanical Westerners who would seek to deprive them of their catgirl waifus. Nekopara wasn't the first, nor was it the last time a bog-standard anime-flavored media property with weird sexual content and weirder fans is used as another lamppost for the proverbial moths to flock to. It's just another drop in the bucket as far as weeaboo culture is concerned.
Now obviously, Nekopara is porn, and if you came here expecting anything other than the world's most boring set-up to catgirl hentai, you were barking up the wrong tree. But as I was reading through lines and lines of filler text and moeblob cuteness, I found myself thinking about the common archetypes you find in the female characters written for this sort of media: the incestuous little sister romance, the (worryingly) child-like girl, or in Nekopara's case, pets. These all have a connective through-line, which is a lack of independent agency and an innate dependency on a superior of some kind (usually the self-insert main character of the story.) This throughline isn't something specific to Japanese media by any means, but these are just some of the few I noticed while reading Vol. 1.
The very concept of catgirls as they are written in Nekopara are a bastard child of the aforementioned archetypes mentioned previously: They're pretty explicitly stated in the text to be analogous to cats, displaying numerous cat-like mannerisms. They have a limited understanding of human society and abstract concepts (money, emotional awareness, etc.) and are even required to be "chipped" in a sense via the possession of an "Independent Action Permit", a mix between an ID and a Driver's License, in order to be allowed in polite society without being detained by Animal Control. They mature at roughly the same rate as a regular cat (it's stated offhandedly that a 6 month old catgirl is roughly equivalent to a 12 year old girl), but retain roughly the same intellect and mannerisms of a child. But most importantly for Nekopara's main intent, they can't bear human children, the existence of catgirl-human sexual relations is both normal and widely accepted alongside those who keep them as regular pets or family members in this society, and they are "excessively honest and uncomplicated", which means that emotional miscommunication and conflict basically never happens (unless its in service of anime tropes, like "jealous clingy tsundere").
What this means is that Nekopara's catgirls are the "idealized woman" for the target audience: a walking fleshlight in the shape of an girl, who has an innate attraction to the self-insert main character and will basically never reject them. A mirage of a character who only exists for pleasure. This is taken to the extreme in the context of Nekopara, in which the main character (who has helped raise the two leading catgirls ever since they were kittens and explicitly views them as daughters and family) enters a sexual relationship with what is essentially his pet cats/younger twin sisters, the ultimate fetishistic culmination of tropes to create the most dependent females possible for the express purpose of sexual pleasure. Incestuous threesomes and shower sex are sandwiched in-between the most trite rom-com anime scenarios and paragraphs of pure filler text to create the perfect visual novel for the modern-day weeb, the equivalent of a corporate blockbuster designed to appeal to the otaku equivalent of John Q. Public. This isn't an original conclusion by any means, and it's one that's not even necessarily a negative in terms of Nekopara's main goal (be titillating and provide comfort to its target audience), but it's telling that the series can basically excise the naughty 18+ bits from its story and still achieve success in other medium adaptations with little editing to the main girls' writing.
It's a formula that obviously works: Nekopara has numerous sequels, spinoffs and is one of the biggest rags-to-riches success stories to come from the eroge scene in recent memory. It's the kind of monumental success that makes someone with an ahegao anime girl avatar on Twitter thrust their arms towards the sky in joy to celebrate the "Based" culture of the Land of the Rising Sun, as if the success of an eroge where a guy sticks his dick in his pet cat is some kind of cultural dunk on the puritanical Westerners who would seek to deprive them of their catgirl waifus. Nekopara wasn't the first, nor was it the last time a bog-standard anime-flavored media property with weird sexual content and weirder fans is used as another lamppost for the proverbial moths to flock to. It's just another drop in the bucket as far as weeaboo culture is concerned.