CatGirl: Cat Girl

It may be worthwhile noting some concerns raised in the YKTTW of the femme fatale feline one; namely about the name.

How are the two subtropes coming along?

Not well. I didn't get a lot of support on the YKTTW, so I've put it aside and got busy with other things. Now, for various reasons, I'm inclined toward retiring (for awhile at least) from active editing on TV Tropes.

I'm giving up on it. Someone else will have to do it. The links are on the previous page.

edited 15th Jan '12 9:56:24 AM by Auxdarastrix

Necro-Bump!

I just thread-hopped a bit, so I might have missed out on some stuff.

Looking at the two drafts in Ykttw right now, I noticed one thing. How can we objectively define either of them. If catgirl is a character type, then we're splitting based if they're cute or dangerous. Something doesn't seem right about that.

I'm just seeing this thread for the first time, but yeah, this seems kind of crazy.

Especially since it seems like a huge amount of cat-girls are supposed to be some combination of cute and sexy and dangerous, or cute and innocent, but also sexy.

Yeah, the split never made any sense to me honestly.

I guess they are both tropes though. Is there a reason we can't just keep it as one page, and talk about the different types of cat girl in the description, and possibly split the examples?

Splitting the examples, even a soft split is going to result in either a lot of weasel words, or a lot of duplicates. Most characters aren't one or the other, but instead shift back and forth between the two.

We would still have a problem in terms of objectiveness.

We would have to list out every possible trait of how a cat girl can be "cute" or "Dangerous". And even then, it would still be a matter of opinion.

Edit: Semi-Ninja'ed

edited 11th Mar '12 9:09:30 PM by pokedude10

I dont know many examples will play one aspect or another

Cute will emphasizes the "Nya", purring, curling up into a ball, playing with yarn yada, everything about them is kitten like, Moe and/or domesticated really.

The other types are very wild, warlike, predatory, sexy and such.

edited 11th Mar '12 9:54:04 PM by Raso

I don't know any examples that only use one aspect of the trope all the time though. Even the mostly cute ones are sometimes sexy, sometimes predatory, sometimes wild.

Almost all examples have those elements in them. It's just the ratios aren't always the same.

edited 11th Mar '12 9:59:18 PM by shimaspawn

Seems like the sort of thing that's one trope but the description says it tends to come in flavor X or Y.

I dont know I have seen a lot of Kitten like ones that only have occasional moments of predatory and only when threatened.

I guess the biggest tell is how they look the kitten ones tend to be short like under 5 feet while the sexy ones are usually tall.

edited 11th Mar '12 10:18:37 PM by Raso

Raso, I honestly have to say, I've never seen your distinction. I've seen tall cure cat girls. I've seen short feral cat girls. I've never seen a cat girl that falls neatly into these categories ever. That's why the split was never done. Because it's impossible.

edited 11th Mar '12 10:26:50 PM by shimaspawn

So, what do we do now? Morgue this or restart everything from scratch?

I'm not really convinced a split is practical. Who wants to go through 1500 + wicks of works that they may not necessarily be familiar with, and decide (often based on very limited description) which of the two categories the catgirl in question belongs in?

Also, lots of nekoimmi don't easily fall into either category. Catboys, for example, tend to be quite different from either category.

Another concern I have is that Catgirl is something that attracts a lot of misuse from people that want to shoehorn anything remotely feline (like the Thundercats) into the trope. Looking though the history of this page and the thread, it looks like a few people did a lot to clarify the defintion and clean out bad examples, but if we introduce two new subtropes, those are going to start attracting the same sorts of shoehorning, and require extra effort to curate.

Personally, I think that the Analysis.Cat Girl page that was created does an adequate job explaining the many different ways that Cat Girls and Cat Boys manefest in the media. Someone also split off a lot of the bad examples and sent them to more appropriate tropes.

If any additional change is needed, it is having some of the example descriptions on the main page spend more time describing the variation on the catgirl concept that each example uses.

So yeah, while there are variations on the concept that could be split off as subtropes, even those two categories wouldn't cover every variation or character that is somewhere in between.

I'm not really convinced it is necessary or practical in this case, and most importantly no one seems willing to actually do the work. Cat Girl works fine as reasonably broad trope in terms of personality types, especially now that it has been better defined to undo the Trope Decay that resulting in a bunch of Petting-Zoo People, Funny Animal and Rubber-Forehead Alien types being assingned to it.

edited 12th Mar '12 5:10:09 AM by Catbert

That is just the way I have come across them.

There is a huge difference between "the standard Anime stereotype Cat Girl" than other characterizations of them with emphasis on Moe and everything they do is cute. The standard way is most prevalent in the way Animal-Eared Headband users act or even instructed to act when putting them on. (hell even without the headband on they still might act the part.) So cute it should be illegal tendency to use Nya, purr and jump at fish well use kitten traits.

If you have played Star Ocean The Last Hope Meracle's [1] race the Lesser Fellpool are this her being an Always Cheerful Genki Girl if a little simple minded and easily swayed with food like fish as well as wanting to eat the Winged Humanoid of the party.... is a very by the books example of this.

There are also the sexy, dangerous, devious, manipulative, predatory cat girls (usually tall) like Black Cat, Cat Woman or the page image, also the Cat Girls of Kingdom of Galette in Dog Days led by the Queen Leonmichelle are characterized as this. (With her younger brother being a Warrior Prince who loves a good fight.) They are running on Rule of Sexy not Rule of Cute.

I don't mind overlap here and there with these but they are distinctly different splitting the two types. Like This would be overlap it is for sure sexy but he screams Kawaii (meaning cute) at the Tongue Twister

One isnt really standard Fanservice (well to anyone but an Anime fan) but the other most certainly is. The two should be subtropes (Cute Kitty Girl and Sexy Cat Girl) while those that dont fit stay on the standard catgirl page.

edited 12th Mar '12 6:03:40 AM by Raso

But all those depend on the exact moment of time in the character. Even Black Cat runs on Rule of Cute sometimes. The distinction isn't as clear cut as you're trying to make it. It's far more of a spectrum with most examples falling between the two and swapping back and forth meaning that almost every example would either be duplicated or right back on cat girl. There are maybe a handful of examples that fit either of the proposed tropes.

edited 12th Mar '12 6:59:06 AM by shimaspawn

Part of my concern is that having two many hard-split variants on the Cat Girl trope will just result in a lot of confusion, shoehorning and even natter and edit warring about what examples go there.

While I consider myself neither splitter or lumper, I know I've sometimes find it a real pain trying to parse the difference between things like Nearly Normal Animal, Almost Normal Animal, Largly Normal Animals, Mostly Normal Animal etc. Not to mentional all the different tropes on the Sorting Algorithm of Deadness.

In this case, I think it is best to just describe the variations on the trope page.

It is bad enough there are people that keep trying to list those blue aliens from Avatar as catgirls.

edited 12th Mar '12 7:02:23 AM by Catbert

"those blue aliens from Avatar" - Yeah, Cat Girl (and whatever subtropes get split from it) need to be a little more explicit that female Cat Folk are not included.

They aren't even Cat Folk. They are Rubber-Forehead Alien creatures vaguely based on lemurs.

Cat Folk and Cat Girl can overlap, however a Cat Folk is only a Cat Girl if it has Little Bit Beastly features, and a Cat Girl is only a Cat Folk if he or she represents an entire species.

The Galette from Dog Days would be an example of a Cat Folk species with Cat Girl features.

edited 12th Mar '12 10:08:01 AM by Catbert

Unless someone wants to reopen the crowner, I don't think we can just say "Wait, no, the winning option is stupid." Especially since it wasn't exactly close.

True. But we'll have to either a) ask Eddie to reopen the crowner or b) unhook it and hook in another crowner, once we have got our solution proposals clear.

Can't any of the forum mods do that?

No, un-calling a crowner needs admin intervention.