Beheneko: The Elf-Girl’s Cat is Secretly an S-Ranked Monster! – Episode 1

Content Warning: Fan service and a lot of tasteless bestiality jokes (sorry)

What’s it about? Felled in battle, an adventurer wakes to discover he’s been reborn as a terrifying behemoth….kitten. While he’s got plenty of skills for his small size, an unfortunate fight leaves him too weak to go on. Luckily, elf warrior Aria decides to take the adorable kitten she found in the dungeon home and nurse him back to health.

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Earlier this morning I typed the phrase, “this show about a big-titty elf girl who wants to fuck her pet cat isn’t nearly as hateful as I thought it would be.” It’s evening now, because I took that as a sign that I was in dire need of human contact. Having successfully touched grass in the middle of winter (thanks, climate change!), I must contend with my continued indifference.

Don’t get me wrong, if you’re not into the extremely specific and literalized subgenre of pet play kink going on, this is a pile of nothing. It shortcuts every bit of worldbuilding in the usual ways, from video game menu screens to convey magic and leveling systems to the usual RPG-esque quest systems. The animation is even more of an embarrassment than usual for this kind of churn, as it leans heavily on reaction shots to cover up for the fact that barely any actual movement is happening on camera. There’s an almost impressive lack of scale when it comes to depicting our felicitous feline, causing him to change size in relationship to other objects multiple times throughout the episode. It never met a plot detail it couldn’t exposit for at least three times as long as necessary.

So it comes around again: do you want to watch a show about a cat lady who’s horny for Mr. Whiskers?

If I seem a bit contemptuous of the whole affair, it’s because I consider these shows to be on some weak shit. The horny animal reincarnation niche rotates on a lack of awareness on the human partner’s end. So it’s not just about being pampered and not having to think to hard about directives beyond adoring your pretty girlfriend—it’s about gaining access to her body, resulting in situations that are erotic for one person without the other’s knowledge, not unlike those tiresome comedies about a straight dude being mistaken for a Gay Best Fried. You might as well throw Adam Sandler in a fur suit at me, I’m dead inside.

Still, Beheneko does have a paw up on its two most recent contemporaries: unlike My Life as Inukai-san’s Dog, we’re not surreptitiously creeping on high school girls; and unlike Butareba, I don’t have to listen to the protagonist’s skin-crawling monologue about wanting to groom the pubescent heroine into his perfect fantasy.

Nameless-adventurer-nee-Tama is a regular level of horny—by which I mean he says “yay boobs” upon being squeezed, and the dialogue is pretty spare on elaborate fantasies beyond a gross image spot about the dangers of sexual assault by goblins. The main characters have also cottoned on to the fact that he can understand human speech by the end of the episode. Fine. Aria herself is an adult woman, which for me makes it a little easier to shrug off the fact that the camera’s entire purpose is to leer at her. It’s objectification without a doubt, but I can’t say that isn’t rather baldly the story’s entire raison d’etre.

What gives me pawse is that Aria is seemingly already on the pussy (cat) train before she realizes her pet is sapient. The montage where she nurses a growing Tama back to health includes a long shot of her staring intently at his wee little emerging testicles, which isn’t so off. Anatomy is funny. She takes him to the bath with her and snuggles up to him to sleep; pretty normal. But then she gets drunk and, in the middle of tickling her cute lil kitten, implicitly starts playing “red rocket” while making the sweatiest o-face of the episode to date. The gates of the interspecies erotica barrier already dun’ broked, people.

All of which is kind of fun in that the longer I write about it, the longer I get to avoid talking about the guildmistress. Aria’s closest ally besides her fuzzy friend with benefit is Anna, a bald, six-foot wall of muscle who wears a rubber speedo, heart pasties, and heavy eyeshadow. She’s camp as can be, and the depressing thing is that for this genre of show she practically meets that bar that Satan keeps tripping over: all the positive characters in-universe regard her warmly, male and female, and she doesn’t stop to randomly sexually assault passing men. But I’m taking that point away before it can even get on the mantle, because her introductory title card still refers to her by her deadname—God forbid we be deprived of seeing that it’s an extremely lazy play on Schwarzeneggar.

I wish I had more theatrical rage to summon for y’all, but it’s so early in the season and there are so many bad fantasy light novel titles coming down the pipe. If you want to see a show with uncensored nipples, this isn’t even your best bet on HiDive right this instant. Go find some better written pet play, and don’t let anybody say you don’t deserve it. Atta girl.