Catgirl

This article is about the anime/manga trope. For the film, see Cat Girl. For the character, see Carrie Kelley. For other uses, see Catgirl (disambiguation). Not to be confused with Cat lady or Catwoman.
"Catboy" redirects here. For the musician, see Boyd Terry.
Illustration of Wikipe-tan as a catgirl. She is a young girl with blue hair, cat ears and a tail, wearing a maid dress, and is laying down on all fours with one hand forward posing as a cat.
A shōjo illustration of Wikipe-tan as a catgirl maid, with cat ears and a tail.
A catgirl (Japanese: 猫耳, Hepburn: nekomimi; lit. 'cat ear[s]')[a] or neko is a female character with feline traits, such as cat ears, a tail, or other feline characteristics on an otherwise human body. The equivalent male character is called a catboy. As a type of kemonomimi, catgirls are associated with Japanese anime and manga but may appear in other genres.

Catgirls are descended from Edo and Shōwa period stories of villainous, shapeshifting cat monsters such as bakeneko or nekomata, whose cat traits signaled their villainous role to audiences. Postwar and more recent media have largely rehabilitated catgirls into docile, moe characters.

Description

The term catgirl is applied broadly to characters with some (often minor or superficial) cat physiology, and usually with at least one of either cat ears or a cat tail. Depending on the narrative, a catgirl may have cat-like mannerisms or verbal tics, or the ability to become a cat.[1] A character who wears a cat ear headband, or who is momentarily depicted with cat ears to convey emotion, might also be called a catgirl within that context.[citation needed]

Whether a catgirl is correctly categorized as a furry, or whether a person who appreciates catgirls is considered kemonā, is hotly controversial amongst fans who do not wish to be associated with both furry and catgirl fandoms. This is further complicated by the loose definition of a catgirl as a character who may or may not possess certain cat traits, raising the question of which or how many such traits can be added before a character is better sorted as a furry.

History

The oldest mention of the term nekomusume (猫娘; lit. 'cat girl') comes from an 18th-century misemono in which a cat/woman hybrid was displayed. Stories of shapeshifting bakeneko prostitutes were popular during the Edo period. The ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798–1861) depicted the human forms of cat monsters as retaining cat ears, a trait that made them appear untrustworthy or frightening. The popularity of the nekomusume continued throughout the Edo and Shōwa periods, with many tales of cat/woman hybrids appearing in works such as the Ehon Sayoshigure (絵本小夜時雨) and Ansei zakki (安政雑記).

The villain in Kenji Miyazawa's 1924 work The 4th of Narcissus Month [ja] is the first example of a beautiful cat-eared woman in modern Japanese literature In 1936, the nekomusume experienced a revival in kamishibai. Anime and manga such as Princess Knight (1953) and Star of Cottonland (1978) began to reimagine catgirls as cute and approachable characters rather than dangerous monsters, though these mediums can still cast antagonistic catgirls as in Dominion (1985) and Bakemonogatari (2009).[1][5][6] In America, the DC Comics character Catwoman first appeared in 1940, and Cheetah first appeared in 1943.

By the 1990s, catgirls had become common in Japanese anime and manga.Catgirls have since been featured in various media worldwide. Enough of a subculture has developed for various themed conventions and events to be held around the world, such as Nekocon.