Chainsmoker Cat turns cat girls into total degenerates

I’d seen people talking about Chainsmoker Cat around the internet for a while, but it wasn’t until I watched CJ Da Champ’s video about it that I finally decided to give the series a shot.

I love CJ’s videos. The guy really knows how to bring the hype, even when he’s talking about something completely ridiculous. After watching him describe an anime about a chain-smoking cat girl living in absolute filth with a building full of equally deranged neighbors, I figured I had to see this shit for myself.

Chainsmoker Cat follows Yani, a cat girl who lives alone in an apartment and has basically given up on functioning like a normal member of society. She smokes constantly, lives in filth, barely takes care of herself, and routinely makes life miserable for her long-suffering landlord. Most of the series revolves around Yani interacting with the other deeply dysfunctional cat girls living around her, each of whom has her own particular brand of degeneracy. There isn’t much of an overarching plot, with episodes instead focusing on short situations involving drinking, smoking, drugs, bodily functions, terrible decisions, and whatever other disgusting thing the characters happen to be doing that day.

Basically, this show is what would happen if somebody turned the “Damn bitch, you live like this?” meme into an anime:

Believe me, women like this exist more than you’d think.

I’ve been in plenty of women’s bedrooms and apartments in my lifetime, and some of the shit I’ve seen would make Yani look almost respectable. Everybody likes pretending that women are these naturally clean and organized creatures while men are filthy animals living surrounded by empty pizza boxes and dirty socks. Bullshit. I’ve walked into women’s rooms that looked like somebody emptied a dumpster through the window.

Yani just takes it to a more cartoonish extreme.

The majority of Chainsmoker Cat is gross-out humor, which probably explains why the series has generated some controversy in Japan. Characters piss themselves, puke everywhere, fart on each other, drink themselves stupid, and generally behave like absolute fucking animals (which I guess they technically are).

Nobody suffers more from this than Yani’s landlord.

We’re introduced to this poor bastard beating his dick about a minute into the first episode, and somehow things only get worse for him from there. His tenants are fucking nuts, and Yani alone has probably removed 30 years from his lifespan through stress. She drops cigarette ashes on his head, “accidentally” drops a microwave on him, sticks nicotine patches all over his scalp, and eventually farts directly into his face.

I actually started feeling bad for him. Imagine buying an apartment building because you think real estate will provide a nice steady source of income, only to discover that your tenants are a collection of alcoholic, drug-addicted cat women who treat the property like a condemned crack house.

What really makes Chainsmoker Cat work for me though is how thoroughly it corrupts the whole cat girl thing.

Guys who obsess over cat girls are fucking weird. I’ve never understood the fetish. I understand liking anime women. I understand liking cute characters. Somewhere along the line though, some fucking weirdo apparently decided that adding ears and a tail makes a woman exponentially hotter, and now we have an entire genre built around girls saying “nya” while dudes lose their minds.

Chainsmoker Cat looks at that fantasy and asks, “Okay, but what if they were complete fucking degenerates?”

Yani is a disgusting chain-smoking slob whose nickname is literally “Chimney.” Her friends aren’t much better. Yaku shoots heroin. Hameko’s legal name is Anal Angel because of a screwup at city hall. Aruko spends most of her existence drunk (making her basically the cat girl equivalent of a certain beer-guzzling freeloader I know). Then there’s Saori, a perverted hentai artist.

Almost every person, or cat person I suppose, living around Yani has something seriously wrong with them.

Which seems fitting, considering the audience they’re parodying.

That subversion is probably the funniest part of the series. These aren’t adorable fantasy girlfriends who are going to curl up next to you and lovingly say “nya.” They’re the kind of women who would drink all your beer, throw up in your sink, burn a cigarette hole in your couch, and somehow convince you that the whole thing was your fault.

There’s something weirdly refreshing about seeing anime deliberately make its cute girls repulsive.

You definitely shouldn’t go into Chainsmoker Cat expecting much of a story, because there really isn’t one. The plot exists mostly as an excuse to put these characters into increasingly fucked-up situations. You’re watching because you want to see what disgusting or insane thing Yani and company are going to do next, followed by several moments where you stare at the screen and go, “Yo, what the fuck?”

How much you enjoy that is going to depend entirely on your tolerance for gross-out humor.

I thought it was funny, but I wouldn’t call it bust-a-gut funny. There are some genuinely good jokes, especially whenever the landlord gets dragged into Yani’s bullshit, but a lot of the comedy boils down to somebody doing something disgusting and the viewer reacting to how far the show is willing to take it.

Eventually, shock humor starts running into diminishing returns.

The first time somebody does something completely fucked up, it catches you off guard. By the tenth time, you’re already expecting it. Chainsmoker Cat does enough with its characters to keep things entertaining, but I don’t think there’s enough underneath the gross-out stuff to turn it into some huge breakout hit.

Ironically, the controversy surrounding the series will probably do more for it than anything else. People are going to hear about the disgusting cat girl anime and watch an episode just to see what everyone is complaining about.

Don’t take it seriously or expect some elaborate story with emotional character arcs and deep social commentary. Watch it because somebody took cute anime cat girls, turned them into some of the biggest degenerates imaginable, and decided that was enough of a premise for an entire series.

It’s not awful, and I had fun with it. But if bodily fluids, drug jokes, chain-smoking cat women, and relentless shock humor aren’t your thing, there’s absolutely nothing here that’s going to change your mind.

Everyone else can come watch Yani slowly kill her landlord through stress.

AJ’s rating: 5/10

Angry_Jerk

Adam “The Angry Jerk” Baker is the CEO of The AJnet Organization and Editor-in-Chief of AJnet Magazine. A grizzled internet veteran of over 20 years, he writes about politics, culture, and whatever else manages to annoy him that day.

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