This artist's stuff is so disturbing-yet-tame, odd, and kinda cute. Very... different...
Amusing.

I like.

More like watered-down version of Dowman Sayman.

"Watered-down" is a little disparaging.

I'd say the author reads like a slightly saner version of Dowman. Not better, just different.

Edit : Eventhough their artstyle doesn't look alike but it give me the same feeling.

the characters tend to have pretty similar silhouettes at least

This story was kind of sweet, though as others have pointed out, somewhat ethically questionable. But the questionable bits are not very different from 'regular' pet ownership, so... shrug

This has a sort of lumpiness to the writing...

scratches head That was cute, I think.

Hmmm catgirl ownership as cute it is but in real life....

It's unique like Dowman-style but tamer. I guess we should call it Shimazaki-style now?

Now that I've reread this several times, I've concluded that this story is better thought of as being from the viewpoint of an actual cat in a pet store rather than a world where catgirls are sold as pets. From the perspective of a cat, growing attached to and cuddling its owner might be as emotionally intense as a yuri romance would be to human. Also the ending would be less of an ethical conundrum. Or not.

We should think they are actually cats and dogs and not sentient beings.

Also, this world seem to contain only females.

And there's only 26 first-names for the whole population.

We should think they are actually cats and dogs and not sentient beings.

Also, this world seem to contain only females.

And there's only 26 first-names for the whole population.

Cats and dogs are sentient beings.

I was expecting it to end kinda similar to how it is, but with that cat girls being actual cats and it's just the manager who sees them as "people"
It also reminded be of the darker "spinal fluid explosion girl" don't let the name fool you though, that story revolves around a human zoo, the song is pretty random too :P

themusicman500 posted:

We should think they are actually cats and dogs and not sentient beings.

Also, this world seem to contain only females.

And there's only 26 first-names for the whole population.

Cats and dogs are sentient beings.

But Church says they have no souls...

j/k

This is from the collection with that eye ball eating one, so compared to that, I guess this was milder? :3

Well most stories that change just one detail of the world, while the rest remains the same, don't hold up too well when taking a closer look. If animal-like people existed since the beginning, would we have pet shops? Maybe if they do have a pet like mentality but otherwise I would say humans and animal-people would have a different relationship.

But for a short story like this I think this is fine. Otherwise there are so many problems/factors one has to decide on. Easiest solution would be to say animal-people = humans + animal tails/ears but in this case it would be more like Centaur's Worries, so no pet shops.
Another simple solution are slave-races, pet like characteristics but much darker overall.

But if you want to keep more animal traits like lifespan, assumed intelligence, morals/ethics and stuff like this it becomes much more complex.

And now I have been thinking about it too much and even came up with an example xD.

For example: Cat People. The internet tells me cats out in the wild reach an age of 2-3, maybe 5, while house cats can reach somewhere between 10-20. A few exceptions can get older, but most die before 20. If we assume that humanized cats can take better care of themselves, lets say they all reach 15-20. A cat is considered a full adult with 2 years. Now if they have intelligence comparable to humans that puts them at an disadvantage, because they have less time to learn things. But how would a society work that as to consider a 2year old cat and an 21year (or 18) old humans as equal? Wouldn't humans screw the cats over?
But maybe the cats are quick learners and can learn thinks 5x as fast as humans. If we move the adult limit a bit, we could say that cats are adults with 4-6 years. Still weird from a human perspective.
And relationships. Would humans accept an adult human (21+) dating an adult cat (4+)? And wouldn't cats find it weird, that they can't date a human (under 21 or under 18)? Like a human and cat born at the same time might never be allowed to have an relationship with each other because the cat might be dead by the time the human is legal. Ignoring stuff like accidents and the like. I guess this is just like elves feel about humans in fantasy stories xD.

And one would have to decide stuff like this for all animal races, if they even exist. I mean, would there be dogs or only wolf-humans around? Would they live peacefully or fight with us? What about animals that can get much older than humans? Or animals that can reproduce like crazy. In fantasy stories humans often have the numerical advantage over older races, but now?

It's interesting to think about how society would have developed if all these human like races existed since the beginning. Would all of them be still around now? Would humans still exist? Would some races be treated as slaves? Would they even mind? What about mixed races? Are all animals humanized or only a few?
Anyway, way to much work^^

We should think they are actually cats and dogs and not sentient beings.

Also, this world seem to contain only females.

And there's only 26 first-names for the whole population.

There's a mystery-comedy novel I read a long time ago (by Donald Westlake, I think), where the main character gets accidentally mixed up with spies. They insist on him, and everyone else involved, using code names, which end up going A, B, C, and so forth.

By the end there are so many people with code names he's cycled all the way through the alphabet and forced to start calling people AA, BB, and CC.

More like watered-down version of Dowman Sayman.

The actual artstyle reminds me of Sayman too. Source of inspiration, maybe?

There's a mystery-comedy novel I read a long time ago (by Donald Westlake, I think), where the main character gets accidentally mixed up with spies. They insist on him, and everyone else involved, using code names, which end up going A, B, C, and so forth.

Much like the eyeball story before it, all the stories in this anthology use the A, B, etc. names. It's that little bit of top-secret-confidentiality that adds a little extra naughtiness to the whole thing.

Thought it was cute. I was actually relieved to find that it was a fantasy scenario involving the sale of cat-people. During the early bits, I was worried that it was going to turn out to be some kind of Stockholm Syndrome/dude-who-kidnapped-those-three-girls-in-Cleveland scenario. Which would've put a serious hitch in my giddy-up.

We should think they are actually cats and dogs and not sentient beings.

Also, this world seem to contain only females.

And there's only 26 first-names for the whole population.

Cats and dogs are sentient beings.

Sapient, then. There are distinctions to be made. Cats and dogs don't deal in abstractions, for instance. So a cat can certainly know it wants to go out now and may be annoyed if it is hindered from doing so, but it can't want FREEDOM or be manipulated by catchphrases like "Give me liberty or give me death!" Cats and dogs are not moral agents. If a cat plays with a mouse in the process of killing it slowly, one fascinated pounce at a time, you can't say the cat is being evil or that it should have known better. It's just a thing cats do and that's that; if you feel for the mouse you can stop the cat; maybe with clever training and rewards and stuff you could even train it not to, although I have doubts, but you can't teach it why it shouldn't be doing that. If a human does something similar (and all too many do), you can say those things; in some cases you can even teach it to be a better person.
These "cats" in the story are capable of language, empathy, abstraction, apprehension about the concept of servitude; they are clearly a kind of being that abstract "freedom" could make a difference to. So there's no question what's being done to them is deeply ethically wrong. They are, however, both fictional and sexy.

last edited at Oct 5, 2016 12:26PM

Shimazaki is becoming one of my favorite authors

We should think they are actually cats and dogs and not sentient beings.

Also, this world seem to contain only females.

And there's only 26 first-names for the whole population.

Cats and dogs are sentient beings.

Sapient, then. There are distinctions to be made. Cats and dogs don't deal in abstractions, for instance. So a cat can certainly know it wants to go out now and may be annoyed if it is hindered from doing so, but it can't want FREEDOM or be manipulated by catchphrases like "Give me liberty or give me death!" Cats and dogs are not moral agents. If a cat plays with a mouse in the process of killing it slowly, one fascinated pounce at a time, you can't say the cat is being evil or that it should have known better. It's just a thing cats do and that's that; if you feel for the mouse you can stop the cat; maybe with clever training and rewards and stuff you could even train it not to, although I have doubts, but you can't teach it why it shouldn't be doing that. If a human does something similar (and all too many do), you can say those things; in some cases you can even teach it to be a better person.
These "cats" in the story are capable of language, empathy, abstraction, apprehension about the concept of servitude; they are clearly a kind of being that abstract "freedom" could make a difference to. So there's no question what's being done to them is deeply ethically wrong. They are, however, both fictional and sexy.

All true, but people, cat lovers especially, often personify animals and mentally assign them those traits. Fictional depictions of cats and cat-like beings may depend on that perspective.

Should this have a "harem" tag?? jeje

I kind of had it in my head that these were all normal animals but the pet shop owner saw them as people and the half-human thing was just a metaphor.

Tonal Dissonance: The Kawaiiening

I kind of had it in my head that these were all normal animals but the pet shop owner saw them as people and the half-human thing was just a metaphor.

Hmm. Sexual chattel slavery or bestiality. Pick your poison, I guess.