Just casual slavery — Infinite Dendogram & Nekopara First Impressions

This raises so many questions.

“Tians” are Infinite Dendogram‘s “generic” (sic) term for NPCs, which for some reason are given human intelligence and personalities, which is, erm. If you kill a tian in the game, isn’t that murder? Do the tians know they are in a game? What happens once the game’s no longer profitable and the servers are turned off, wouldn’t that be genocide? It all seems ethically dodgy on a level that even your average amoral tech company would balk at.

All of this is ignored by the show of course in favour of a very low stakes not actually trapped in a videogame story, with yet another clueless newbie player gets to hang around in a fantasy world having adventures. The first two episodes have been alright, but I’ve read dozens of these sort of isekai or videogame stories and there’s nothing interesting going on. Only if you really like this sort of thing.

Meanwhile, in porny visual novel turned cutesy anime Nekopara it turns out cat girls are literal second class citizens:

So in the world of Nekopara cat girls (so far only girls) are real and look just like actual human women, just with tails and cute cat ears, but sometimes they act like real cats? And that’s enough to treat them as second class citizens? It’s all a bit squicky and unnecessary for a show that’s purely a pseudo-harem series about cute cat girls working in a bakery and having issues with bladder control. Japan eh?

As said, this is based on a porny visual novel, where you can buy the actual game on Steam but have to buy a separate plugin to get all the sexy bits. Which explains shots like this, slighty too on the nose, crotch shot of the most fan servicey cat girl. Though for the most part there isn’t all that much fan service and what there is is more implied than shown, no censor beams or other BD sales enhancing techniques used here. This is almost a cute cat girls doing cute things show, if not for the presence of their master. Not a very good show, but a fun one and one that’s much less creepy than its origins would suspect.