Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: My Roommate is a Cat
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CastMember1991
 Posts: 858 |
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This looks like something that would belong on the Hallmark Channel.
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AholePony
 Posts: 330 Location: Arizona |
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This week's episode was a real snoozer for me. Felt really drawn out and the cooking idea was really boring for me. They can't all be winners I guess, more personality from the human Haru would have helped a lot. I was intrigued when she was delivering the food in the prior episode but she came off really flat in this one.
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Kokuryu Daimao
Posts: 115 |
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Cats can get concerned over their humans eating, they just express it in different ways.
From what I've observed from my own cat and previous others, this happens often with female cats, I suspect this is because of some mothering instinct in them. The reviewer having a male cat might be why she hasn't observed it herself, or why the males acted like they didn't care. But with female cats, you're more likely to observe concern over food because its the mother's job to feed the kittens, and eventually teach them how to hunt for themselves. That instinctual behavior might be part of the reason of why Miz Tora decided to teach Haru-cat and her siblings how to survive when she met them. I've had females cats, who were what people would consider "outdoor" cats, who regularly hunted and would sometimes bring back prey to the house. Sometimes these prey were still Alive when she did so. She would drop them in front of us and then make motions as if trying to teach us how to hunt. The prey would just lie there, and if it tried to get away, she would pounce on it, bring it back to us and drop it on the ground and then look at us to do something to it. I had to put many badly injured critters out of their misery because of this. Now we kept her feed, and she had no real reason to hunt, but her instincts drove her to do so, as was her instinct to teach us sad Humans, who never seemed to hunt for our own food, what to do. So Haru-cat being concerned over Subaru's eating is, at least to me, plausible |
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TexZero
Posts: 583 |
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It likely wont happen but i just have wish they'd bring back the real best boy in the show.
I need more Haru and Dog interactions. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11339 |
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This episode kinda got me where I live.
What I'm most looking forward to next week is an explanation of what Haru was leaping at in this episode before Subaru left. I'm wondering if his parents' ghosts are still hanging about. |
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Lactobacillus yogurti
 Posts: 844 Location: Latin America |
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First Hinomaru and now this... I'm going to feel really sad this spring season.
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Neko-sensei
Posts: 283 |
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Yup, this was indubitably the pleasant surprise of the season. I'm not sure anyone quite identified what it was I loved about the show, though: I think it falls into an incredibly specific sub-genre I love that's all about examining the presence of the dead in the lives of those for whom they cared.
The series opens with the death of Subaru's parents, but they aren't gone. In fact, they're the deuteragonists! Saho and Kazuhiro form the third perspective on the show's events, the one that neither the audience nor the characters can ever know because it is cloaked by the pall of death. We see from both angles how Subaru learns to understand his cat, and learns that this understanding will never be complete, and learns that the very incompleteness of his understanding is what makes the relationship a living thing—and from watching that learning process we see that his relationship with his parents is the same. He learns to understand and value them, to appreciate the impact they've had on his life, and to embrace both his loss and his joy at their incredibly compassion for their child. They are dead, but their relationship with their son is fiercely, riotously, lovingly alive. In this sense My Roommate is a Cat is not so much about Subaru's anxiety as it is about the source of that anxiety—his fear that he'll hurt others by ignoring their attempts to connect with him, just as he's convinced he hurt his parents, and that if he starts closing that gap between himself and others he won't be able to complete the journey before he runs out of time. As Haru opens his life up and he reconnects with his mother and father across the gulf of time, he starts to see how ill-founded that fear is. The people whose lives intersect with his are inextricably bound to him, no matter what actions he takes, but also always their own individuals. Death, time, and "distance" matter far less than the simple fact that every life to which we are willing to open ourselves becomes a part of us. To quote Charles Williams, "this abides—that the everlasting house the soul discovers is always another's; we must lose our own ends; we must always live in the habitation of our lovers, my friend's shelter for me, mine for him." We need more stories that explore our relationship with the dead this way, since it's everywhere in life. Although I haven't yet lost a parent, my father's father died when he was 16. Even now, as he turns 60, I see the legacy of the grandfather I never met in his every action, attitude, and relationship. It's not that my father spends his time telling stories of his father, or that he consciously considers how his father would act before making his own decisions, but I can see from the things I have heard and from the way my father raised me how his life is, in part, a reaction to and an affirmation of the life of my grandfather. And in that way, even after my father dies, I will continue to have a living relationship with my grandfather through my relationship with my own father. Every person is a chapter in the story of a family, and every chapter changes all the chapters that come after it, forming an indispensable part of a single whole. Recently, GeGeGe no Kitarō has told several stories of this type—in fact, I made a similar comment in one of those threads— and Mirai did it as well to some extent, but the best modern anime example I can think of in this sub-genre is definitely the unfairly ignored Shōnen Maid. (A show which is proof positive, if any were needed, that it's completely impossible to judge whether an anime will be exploitive or heartwarming based on a creepy-sounding premise alone.) From its shockingly funny, touching opening, in which a bereaved son becomes justifiably infuriated at his mother's well-meaning final message to him ("life usually works out okay somehow, so you don't have to worry too much about it"), to a climax that's all about his mother's estranged family coming to terms with her place in their past, it would be fair to say that the main character of the series isn't the titular child maid at all but Chiyo Komiya, a woman who perishes before the first scene of the anime. I'm afraid Shōnen Maid does not have many cats, but I still recommend it if you enjoyed My Roommate is a Cat for the same reasons I did. Fingers crossed for the manga! |
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SchrödingerNeko
 Posts: 8 |
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That's very philosophical of you Neko-Sensei. In many ways it is a reminder that showing vulnerability is not a weakness, but rather a sign of bravery. Those who stand outside the fire may never get the scars of their faults, but they would also never ignite their souls in order to burn away their shackles to phoenix into something better. |
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Minimimiau
Posts: 194 Location: somewhere on this planet. |
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For sure I'll miss this series. I like cats, thats why I began watching it.
Its curious that Haru all time thought Subaru was missing and try her best to find him. I can imagine she will be an excellent mother. She was very protective all the time. As for Subaru he learns how to involve with people. He can do better, but in 12 episodes he began to understand people and try to interact with them. |
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njprogfan
 Collector Extraordinaire Posts: 1160 Location: A River Named Toms |
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This anime exceeded all expectations. I've always looked at my cats, (Rosalita, my wife's a Springsteen fan and Tinkerbell, daughter named her) wondering what went through their tiny heads. I could most definitely see them thinking along the lines of Haru. My cats are extremely affectionate and when Haru licked Subaru when he held her, it is so like cats when they're happy; it did bring a tear. This anime was a breath of fresh air, especially after watching a tense series like Promised Neverland. I'll miss these two and hope to see a second series, or even better, the manga brought over to the US.
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11339 |
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Cats Recognize Their Own Names even if they choose to ignore them.
Also, if this story doesn't bring a tear, you've lost your soul. 
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