...I TOLD ya I'd do it, but ya didn't BELEEVE me! WHY DIDN'T YOU BELEEVE MEE?

*ahem*

So, unlike most of these "totally out of fucking left field" inspirations, I know EXACTLY where this came from. When I uploaded those Louis Fender pics, I mentioned that she was the closest I'd ever come to an "anime style" catgirl, despite me sneaking catgirls into almost every project I've ever worked on. Part of it is because they're so easy to draw: just stick cat ears and a tail onto any regular anime girl and voila'. The other reason is because the tropes normally associated with anime catgirls...meek subservience, domesticity, timidity, calling the lead character "Master"...are kinda the exact opposite of how normal cats act. In my (admittedly limited) time around them, no matter how much they might love you, NO cat in history would EVER willingly call ANYONE, ESPECIALLY a human, "Master." Still, especially after playing "Nekopara" and "HuniePop," I got a craving for nekos...but how to make one that was more "traditional" than I usually do without it getting my hackles up..?

The next inspiration came from a review of a horrible French knock-off of Dreamworks' "Puss In Boots" that, for all it's many flaws, was still truer to the original story than Antonio Banderas ever got...which, not many people realize, has always been my FAVORITE fairy tale ("Little Red Riding Hood" is a close second, but since that's because of a stripper routine at my bachelor party, it qualifies more as a fetish than a childhood favorite...). Seriously, Puss is one of the biggest badasses in fairy tales, although his traditional "talk his foes into defeating themselves" method is more in line with Doctor Who than with the swashbuckler from the "Shrek" movies. I've tried several times to make my own twist on Puss...long-timers here might remember me mentioning him in the backstory of my PPG-esque Three Little Kittens years ago, plus my Catspaw character owes some of her inspiration to him also...but nothing ever stuck.

Irregardless, when I heard (the horrible Shatner-voiced abomination) Puss in the French film refer to his owner as "Master," I had one of those "3AM Alchemy Moments" where a single question popped into my head: "What if Puss...was a catgirl?"

This was the result, and, as you can tell from my shitty little doodles, she arrived fully-formed and raring to go in my head. I'm still deciding on a color scheme for her...my first impulses were blonde (which feels a little too much like MandalorianJedi's Sith catgirl, who I fully admit was another inspiration for her, especially with that "acting like a real cat" bit) or dark-haired and -skinned (at which the rational part of my mind kindly pointed out that, equal representation or not, having someone with brown skin and black hair running around calling some European guy "Master" would PROBABLY not be a good idea), but I'm almost leaning towards making her a strawberry blonde, akin to a tabby cat's coloration. I sort of see her version of the story being like one of those European "sexy but not actually porno" comics, with loads of innuendos and casual sex done as much for laughs as for titilation; I already see a running gag being her slight size (especially compared to the more traditionally curvy Renaissance women) and tendency towards wearing men's clothing making people believe she's her Master "The Marquis'" effeminate young pageboy, and her working that angle for all it's worth during their con job, especially in getting the sergeant-at-arms to teach her how to swordfight. Also, since nobody ever seemed to notice Puss was a cat in the fairy tale, I was gonna have it that "normal" people tend to not notice her ears and tail, which she chalks up to "humans are really, really stupid."

I like her. I'll see where this goes.