About

Cat Boys, also spelled Catboys, are a genre of character and monster depicting either an anthropomorphic cat that acts like a human or a human with cat ears that acts similarly to a cat. A long-standing figure in various ancient religions and folklore, cat boys began to proliferate online following their popularization through modern anime culture in the 2000s and 2010s.

History

Origin of Cat Boys

In ancient Babylon, one of the gods, known as Nergal, was often depicted as a man with a lion's mane (or as a lion himself), though he would take human form, being the earliest example of a cat boy in history. Nergal has always been depicted as having chaotic tendencies and not being understood by men or gods, much like cats themselves^[1] (shown below).

Online Presence

In 2008 the Hellsing Ultimate anime premiered episode four of the series, featuring the character Schrodinger (based on Schrodinger's Cat), which is depicted as a Nazi boy with cat ears. This character would go on to be featured prominently in early forms of fan art and cat boy-related media, with DeviantArt user Shiroki123^[3] uploading a deviation on December 27th, 2009 (shown below).

With the spread of UwuSpeak, cat boys began to get paired with the phrases "OwO," "Nyaa" and "UWU." These phrases would often be used in memes to show the cat boy as being cute, or excessively cat-like, as seen in the meme posted in the subreddit /r/catboys, created on August 18th, 2011, by Redditor u/WillyTheWackyWizard^[4] (notably featuring Felix) (shown below).

Non-religious cat boys first came onto the scene via a series of anime shorts called Tora-Chan, The Abandoned Kitten, in which a series of anthropomorphic cats look and behave like humans. The entire series of Tora-Chan was reuploaded to YouTube on December 3rd, 2016, by the YouTube Channel^[2] Anime History (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References