cat soup is my favorite piece of media. i first discovered the ova by tatsuo sato several years ago when browsing anime forums for 'weirdest anime', and it kept coming up.
i was immediately drawn in by the avant-garde visuals and compelling story. i love cats very much and i liked the cute artstyle and gorey imagery. i've watched it countless times since then and i'm sad i'll never be able to capture the feeling of that first viewing (doesn't help that i was stoned out of my gourd at the time).
i did some more reserch and found out it was based off of a manga, and had a tv short series. i ended up bingeing the series in a single sitting, since it's about the same length as the ova.
after watching i came to a realization. whoever wrote the story for this was extremely nihilistic, and on top of that, hated people quite a lot. they were fed up with being alive, and they despised everything to do with it. reading the manga, and their diary, was just more of the same.
i don't think i've ever related to someone that much. it was like i had found someone who actually understood how i felt on a somewhat deep level. not just a general sense of 'ugh life sucks i wanna die' but a genuine disgust for the people around them, society, and the act of having to live. i did more digging and found a documentary about the creator, nekojiru's, life and death.
it was very poignant and sad. she ended up killing herself only a few years after her work became popular. i'm just making an educated guess but i think she was frustrated with her fanbase. people viewed her work from a surface level "eww its gross but the kitties are cute!!" and completely ignored that it was a cry of frustration and anger from a very damaged individual.
i honestly still get frustrated with how cat soup is treated now, with it's second wave of popularity. it reminds me of people who post neko-arc, yet don't know what type moon or melty blood is. or people who collect fumos but have never played a touhou game. or most recently, the wave of teenagers posting memes about lean, not knowing its a literal drug.
on top of that, i almost feel like the ova is an insult. it's really well done, and skyrocketed her posthumous popularity, but it was stripped of her creative vision, and more importantly, message. it felt more a product of tatuso sato, than nekojiru.
i wish that i could talk to nekojiru, and tell her that i get it. people are gross and don't deserve to live. it's tourture to spend time around people, and also tourture to be trapped in a human body. the only things that make life worth living are little obsessions, enjoying art, or liking a place visited. or trying to get the feelings trapped in a fucked-up little head out onto a page. i relate to her lack of motivation to practice art, but wanting to make *something*, just to feel like you did *something*.
i'll be forever grateful to have found her work, through a web of wires, connections, and digital, deprecated burial grounds.
