This Week in Anime

My Roommate is a Cat is a Must-See for Kitty Lovers

Catgirls are all well and good, but returning to the internet's favorite non-Newtonian liquid is so nice. My Roommate is a Cat is the latest anime where half the gimmick is that there's a cat, so every single cat-lover will watch it because there's a damn cute kitty-cat.

The other half of the show is about Haru's owner struggling with grief, social anxiety, and generally being a disaster of a human being. But luckily he has this ball of floof to help him along the way.

Not even the cute kitty cats can escape the world's cruelty. :( But yeah, Subaru's introduced as this anti-social grouchy guy, but as the show progresses, it becomes clear that most of his seclusion stems from powerful social anxiety. He's the kind of person who makes one minor social blunder and then blows it up
to ridiculous proportions.
 
 

Haru is definitely a positive addition to his life. Simply by being an annoying little shit who doesn't know how human rules work, she gets him to revisit his parents' room so he can start to come to terms with their passing. She's this little bundle of chaos that forces him to take the first steps to processing that grief and recognizing the support network he has around him.

That's the inevitable weakness of a human trying to write a cat's perspective, I guess. Cat psychology isn't a total mystery to us, but every so often they'll do stuff we don't have much explanation for, so this is My Roommate is a Cat's solution to that nugget of cat weirdness.

When we get down to it, Haru is still very much a cat with a cat brain and cat logic. So about 90% of her thoughts are food-related.

It still cracks me up that Subaru thought a cat could pick its own name. All that happened was that she picked up on the string of sounds she associated with food and went ballistic over it.

You're gonna end up with three cats named Aaron. But that's basically what Subaru did, and I feel so much secondhand embarrassment for this poor boy. One neat thing the show does is parallel Subaru's losses with Haru's. She might just be a cat, but she's lost siblings to starvation and other animals, so she shares that tragedy with Subaru. Even though she doesn't understand what Subaru's going through, she knows that it'll be sad if he disappears and doesn't come back. Meanwhile, the pupper next door, who's probably never been a stray, is just like "man there used to be an old lady who lived here but now she's not here anymore, huh wonder what happened"!

Subaru and his parents were terrible at communicating, and he deliberately ignored all the efforts his parents made to include him in their plans. Only after they're gone does he realize what an ungrateful jerk he was for all those years. In a way, he sees himself in Haru's inability to comprehend that he's trying to take care of her. Like when he kicks her out of the kitchen while he's cooking, and Haru just insists on coming right back in.

Neighbor boy might be stupid, but at least he feeds Subaru, go easy on him.

As much as Subaru loathes having Hiroto over, at least he takes over when they're at the store and Subaru can't bring himself to speak to employees. Every socially awkward dweeb needs at least one extrovert friend to handle the hard stuff like talking to strangers and saying no. And Subaru's starting to enjoy having visitors, which is a far cry from his "ugh I can't believe I have to go within ten meters of another human" attitude at the beginning.

Kawase's aggressive affection for Haru is an annoying character trait, but I suppose he's good enough at his job. Besides, I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't also make endless excuses to visit someone for their cat.

No, but I have made an instagram account for somebody else's cat, so maybe I'm worse.

So yeah, My Roommate is a Cat is a sweet show about coping with personal losses, building social connections, and making dumb faces, all of which apply to both Subaru and Haru in some way or another. It's a pleasant experience, and best of all, cat.