I Started a Shop and Picked up a Cat Girl Chapter -- Discussion

The author seems to be a big fan of nekopara. Instead of starting a pastry store with his sister, he starts a cat cafe with his girlfriend. Instead of it being catgirls from home, it's cat girls he picks up locally. Instead of it being a setting where cat girls already existed... it's one where there are all kinds of animal-girls are being introduced and normalized into society but its still semi-secret. Instead of Chocola, Vanilla, Azuki, Maple, Coconut, and Cinnamon, the girls are Cheese, Sugar, Milk Tea, ect...

Not that I'm implying this is a direct rip off. The story is different. First it's fluffy and cute, then it gets serious and vears off into urban fantasy with teleporting penguins and gene-therapy super powers and secret government organizations fighting each other with genetically engineered animal people...

unlike nekopara, the author decides to take his own setting seriously and explore the logical consequences of having demihumans with different human-rights in a modern world and goes out of his way to explain the mystery of why these things even exist in the first place: Spoiler

These animal people are, for all intents and purposes, real people with basic human rights at least in GLORIOUS CHINA. While they are tracked and cataloged, they are also given real jobs with real pay and official government identities. However, some other countries treat them like s*aves/weapons/monsters and that is a subplot going on in the background of the story.

When an animal transforms, it goes directly from young animal -> human teenager body. The only prerequisite seems to be that the animal can't have reached s*xual maturity before transformation, and thus the transformation replaces that animal's equivilent of puberty. A mysterious force grants them a basic pair of clothes and some basic knowledge after asking it some questions. Because of this, when the government creates their new human identity, their official age on their government issued id cards is 18. However, when a human and an animal person reproduce together, the child that is born is a proper 'baby' animal-person that grows normally. Theres.... all kinds of implications about this that has many different effects on society that get explored later. After all, some animals can reach s*xual maturity in less than a year, so these '18 year old animal people' are really 2 or 3 years old. However, larger animals can take the same amount of time as humans to reach maturity and therefore transform at an older age, making them closer... or even older than their official government starting age of 18. Is it morally correct to treat them all equally in this regard? Some characters in the story think so, and some disagree. It's just one of many issues brought up.

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