The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Beheneko: The Elf-Girl's Cat is Secretly an S-Ranked Monster!

After dying in a fight against the forces of evil, a knight found himself reincarnated as one of the most powerful monsters in the world: a behemoth. The problem is, he has to grow up before he can really strut his stuff, and a baby behemoth looks an awful lot like a housecat. And when an elf adventurer decides to take him in, she may need his help as much as he needs hers.

Beheneko: The Elf-Girl's Cat is Secretly an S-Ranked Monster! is based on the I'm a Behemoth, an S-Ranked Monster, but Mistaken for a Cat, I Live as an Elf Girl's Pet light novel series by writer Nozomi Ginyoku and illustrator Yanomitsuki. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Saturdays.

So, let's address the elephant in the room: yes, it does appear that Aria, the busty elf, is sexually attracted to, or at least fascinated by her kitten. There are two distinct scenes of her staring, rosy-cheeked and glossy-eyed, at Tama's testes. I may be influenced by reading the source material, which makes the point abundantly clear (and has a much less safe-for-work bath scene), but I still think the point is pretty obvious. At any rate, how you feel about that may be a, if not the deciding fact about this show for you, because otherwise, it's a relatively run-of-the-mill RPG-inspired fantasy. It features a human reborn as a monster with lots of narration (less than in I'm a Spider, So What?), stats, skills gained by consuming other monsters, a dungeon, and an adventurers' guild. Nothing new to see here.

And yet, somehow, this still manages to be at least a bit off-putting, even in its basic elements. Does Aria need to be threatened by a rapacious asshole who tries to have her kitten killed? Do the servers at the Guild need to wear thongs, suspenders, and thigh-high boots? Does Aria's armor need to cover less than her nightgown? The answer to all of those questions is “no,” and at least the clothing bits seem designed to distract viewers from the fact that the story isn't doing anything new. But hey, at least HIDIVE has an uncensored stream, so Aria's nipples are on full display in the bath scene. That sounds sarcastic, but I'm quite pleased; I'm not a fan of censorship in general.

The main point here is that Beheneko is a fanservice show with some fantasy rather than the other way around, at least in its first episode. It unabashedly leans into that (my back hurts just looking at Aria), and if you're expecting more of a balance of the two elements, you may be disappointed. I've certainly seen worse, but this failed to hold my interest when it wasn't actively uncomfortable, and that's saying a lot for a show featuring an adorable kitten who looks a bit like my Lucinda. The episode is at its best when Tama is the focal point because how he defends Aria is wonderful, especially since cats can be as protective as dogs. Still, that's not enough to win me over, and if I want to see a cat defending her human, I'll watch Wonderful Precure!. At least that one doesn't have awkward sexual overtones.

Truth be told, I can't help but respect any anime that has no delusions about what it is. Any anime that puts itself on full display without shame or embarrassment from the start. This episode contains no attempts at deeper themes and no characters whose personalities can't be summed up in a single word. Beheneko is exactly what it appears to be: the story of a ludicrously busty elf girl who really wants to have sex with her pet cat.

Now, is it any good? Well, that depends on what you're looking for. If you're looking for high-quality fantasy action, you will not find it here. While there are more than a few fight scenes, all of them look cheap, often feeling disjointed thanks to using nearly every budget-saving trick under the sun. Instead, the focus of this series is on one thing and one thing only… okay, two things if you want to be specific: Aria's ginormous breasts.

This entire show seems to be little more than an excuse to show off Aria's “assets” at every possible opportunity. As Tama, our reincarnated knight, uses them as his bed/chair nearly constantly, they get an awful lot of screen time. They're even central to the episode's main conflict, as the villain is someone lusting after Aria to the point of blackmail and sexual assault.

Aside from the fanservice, the anime seems to bank hard on a single joke: namely, that Aria is incredibly horny for Tama. So, if you find an elf girl constantly making googly eyes at a cat's package the height of humor, you'll love this show.

This show is nothing more than an excuse to look at massive mammaries. If that's all you want, you'll leave fulfilled. But if you want anything other than that, it's best to look elsewhere.

This season, I've decided to renew my mission to find something unique or interesting about every single crappy LitRPG series that comes out. So here's what I liked most about Beheneko: The Elf-Girl's Cat is Secretly an S-Ranked Monster!: it resists the genre's tendency to over-narrate every single thing that happens. There are stretches without dialogue that go on for minutes at a time, allowing the visuals to do the storytelling. Do you know how rare that has become? As someone who has had to watch nearly every trashy premiere for the past four years, I am keenly aware of this.

But it feels like we're playing limb every year or so, with half the new series inviting us to ask, “How low can you go?” The answer is already, “Pretty freaking low.” After all, this is a series about an elf who wants to fuck her cat, nay, kitten, as expressed by her staring at his itty-bitty-kitty balls, molesting him while drunk, and taking him into the bath with her. Which, if you're looking for a series about a girl with enormous bahonkeroos, I guess you're getting what you paid for. But if you watched My Life as Inukai-san's Dog and thought, “This is great but needs more extended montages of the animal eating monsters and adding skills to their stat screen,” this one is for you.

Me? I'm not into that. Instead, I found solace in how frequently Tama and Aria's massive mammaries changed size. There's no consistent sense of scale! Tama will go from the size of a normal cat to small enough to fit in Aria's palm to a half-grown kitten… sometimes in the same shot. Aria's tits, meanwhile, moved back and forth from considerably larger than her head to… slightly smaller than her head. Whenever she would lean forward while running, I half-expected her to become imbalanced and tip over. My shoulders, already sore from having my own boobs big enough for small animals to rest on, ached just looking at her.

If the central premise of Beheneko appeals to you, I wish you well and good luck on your journey (preferably to somewhere far away from me). But if you're just here for LitRPG slop, there's so many options coming this season, one of them has to be better than this.

On the one hand, the premiere of Beheneko: The Elf-Girl's Cat is Secretly and S-Ranked Monster! is just chock-full of stuff that generally makes me very tired and grumpy: It's got that horrendously overlong title that may as well be a giant neon sign that reads “I am not even going to bother pretending like I am doing anything original or creative, and I'm damned proud of that for some reason!”; its setting is another generic fantasy world filled with godforsaken ranking systems and stat menus, where everything is so ripped-off from the rip-offs of cheap rip-offs that it is impossible to know what is even being stolen from anymore; all of that, and the show is also weirdly horny, and in the kind of juvenile way that isn't actually any fun for viewers that are too old to be regularly still attend middle-school classes.

On the other hand, though, this time the anonymous main character is a fallen hero who has been reincarnated into the body of a Cute Little Fella™ who has been gifted an exceptionally buxom elf waifu and the powers of a god. This is, objectively, a marked improvement over all of the other anime where the main hero is reincarnated as just…some guy, albeit one who has been gifted an exceptionally buxom elf waifu and the powers of a god. That's just science, y'all. All of the lame comedy, basic worldbuilding, and shameless perving around that Beheneko gets up to is made at least 75% more tolerable on account of the protagonist being the most adorable little son of a gun that we've met since Buchio graced us all with his presence in Tonari no Yōkai-san.

Granted, all of the other crap that Beheneko is throwing at us would have been completely intolerable otherwise, so a 75% increase of ~0.00001% is still…well, I'm not a math guy, but it's not any good, is what I'm getting at. Of course, given that the big setpiece of this premiere is a bath scene where we get to see Elf Waifu's dodongos in all of their uncensored glory makes it clear that this cartoon isn't even all that concerned with being “good”, so much as it aspires to be “mildly entertaining smut trash.” Even then, though, I wish the show were better at being smutty and trashy because, aside from the fleeting novelty that comes from getting to coo over Tama the cat and all of his widdle facey-waceys, Beheneko doesn't leave much of an impression at all. You'd be better off just alternating between a couple of browser tabs that are set to your preferred hentai boutique of choice and r/catpictures, respectively. Just, er, don't let anyone walk in on you while you're taking in the sights. It will only lead to a series of very uncomfortable questions that have no satisfying answers you could ever give.