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

Episode 4

This is by far the best episode of the show. It's not that this episode does impressive things, but it was clever in a few places. Am I going crazy, or did it feel like they severely downplayed a lot of the weird humor that the first three episodes seem to be banking on? Considering that one of this shows main gimmicks is that Aria wants to fuck her cat, I was surprised that we got almost none of that in this entire episode despite there being various opportunities to dish out such a joke. There are times when Aria is acting a little bit motherly and territorial. If I didn't know any of the previous interactions or weird moments from the other episodes, I would think that she was just being an overprotective pet owner. She also seemed more fleshed out in this episode than in the previous ones.

We get context for why she's desperate to be a top adventurer. Her village was attacked when she was younger, and she wants to do her best to not come off as weak, since she's so used to being saved by everybody. That's pretty solid and it almost makes me overlook the fact that it's implied that her nearly dying at a young age may or may not have contributed to why she has such an intense fetish for cats. The show isn't leaning into it when I thought they were setting up that joke, and I hope this is a sign they're not going in that direction. Still, there were a surprising amount of cute moments, like the picnic that Aria and Tama shared. I can get used to more wholesome moments like this moving forward.

Granted, we do have a good amount of desired cat fucking in this episode, but it's not from Aria, rather it's from a new character introduced here named Stella. However, dare I say, the way that it is handled in this episode makes a lot of sense and is surprisingly clever. We find out a lot about the lore of this world in this episode regarding some of the beasts and their unique skills. Turns out reincarnation is a skill you acquire rather than something that just randomly happens in this world, and humans aren't the only ones capable of doing it. Humans can reincarnate into beasts and beasts can reincarnate into humanoids. Much like how Tama retains a lot of his knightly and humble characteristics from when he was alive, this new character Stella retains a lot of her simple-minded beast qualities from when she was a dragon, and like a lot of animals, she desires to reproduce with a strong mate. On the surface, it looks like another humanoid wants to fuck this cat, but it's more akin to an animal wanting to do it with another animal.

I'm curious to see how this dynamic will blossom, especially when Stella is the only one who can understand Tama through some telepathy. Are they going to cover for each other? Will there be a risk of one revealing the secret of the other? And how will this new addition to the family affect things down the road? This episode wasn't great, but it did give me a lot to talk about and surprisingly had a few moments that felt good.

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