Every anime season there’s at least one series that catches the audience’s attention for some reason. Whether it’s because of the quality of its animation, because of its plot or its characters, there’s always at least one series that becomes a fan favorite. That’s inevitable and it happens like clockwork every single season: with each new season, there’s a new series that becomes the latest sensation.
It’s unusual, all the same, for a series to attract attention for the wrong reasons. For it to be vilified and hated in a way that, if not universal, is at least widespread for a specific reason. Usually it’s because its animation is far below what’s expected, but in some cases it’s for another reason. And in those cases, they’re rarely good reasons. As this season’s victim of these attacks demonstrates: Chainsmoker Cat.
A series about the harshness of addiction
Chainsmoker Cat, which is currently airing on Netflix, has a very simple premise: Yaniko, a catgirl who lives in a tiny apartment, tries to live her day-to-day life with a very serious addiction to tobacco that’s seriously harming her physical and mental health, as well as everyone around her. Through that addiction, the series shows us what the life of a person who isn’t capable of getting out of a vicious cycle she’d like to be able to escape from, but doesn’t know how to, is like.
The series, in any case, does a lot to soften that impact. To begin with, they aren’t strictly people. Most of the characters in the story are cat-people, which gives everything an unreal, fantastical feel. And besides, despite the absolute seriousness of the subject matter, this is a dramatic comedy. One as dark as the subject it deals with.
This is important to stress. Chainsmoker Cat is a scatological and pitch-black comedy where the hardest moments are always punctuated by a gag. Yaniko can have such terrible anxiety that it causes her violent vomiting. Made of rainbows. Or she can have such a need to smoke, but no money to buy tobacco, that she considers smoking a cigarette she’s dropped. Including one she dropped onto a piece of shit in the street.
All of this relieves the dramatic tension in a rough and brutal way that a lot of people won’t find the slightest bit funny, but it has a specific function: to make Yaniko’s miseries bearable. And it does that very well. It’s necessary to click with that kind of humor and understand what it’s trying to convey: how brutal that kind of life is. How addiction leads to situations where either you laugh at the situation itself or you fall into the purest despair. Because the idea of simply not doing what you’re doing isn’t a possibility for Yaniko. Not for the addict.
A problem of expectations
In that sense, Chainsmoker Cat, in what we’ve seen so far in the anime, and judging by the manga it adapts, is a brilliant representation of addiction in the tone of black comedy. So then, why is it generating angry reactions on social media, claiming it never should’ve aired? Because of mismatched expectations.
Many people romanticize mental illness and addiction. When the anime was announced, these people thought Chainsmoker Cat would be about a girl who has addiction problems, but deep down aren’t all that serious. That she’d be addicted, but not much, that she’d have problems, but not serious ones, and that she’d basically be functional, and aside from that she’d be a sexy catgirl they could fetishize as a waifu to have as a romantic interest onto whom to project their interests. But that’s not what it is. It’s a genuine representation of what addiction is. And that isn’t romanticizable.
Many other people simply don’t understand that mental illness and addiction are conditions that go beyond a person’s character. That they aren’t fixed with willpower and the desire to improve. What this kind of person sees in Chainsomer Cat is an anime that caters to that earlier group: people who romanticize “layabouts and delinquents,” who “don’t want to do anything with their lives,” and who actually “aren’t doing so badly”. But in reality that’s not the case: addiction is a serious problem that requires specialized help or, at the very least, tremendous willpower and a great deal of outside help and validation to manage to break the cycle of addiction.
Chainsmoker Cat is a series that will alienate a lot of people. It deals with very tough subject matter, its comedy is dark and scatological, and it’s not the kind of easy feel-good story most anime out there is. But it doesn’t deserve the treatment it’s being given on social media. It’s a sensitive and well-thought-out story about an important and relevant subject for many people. And it should be regarded as such.
