Chainsmoker Cat: Yaku Was Turned Away From Grandpa's Funeral

A Japanese manga-narration channel built a Chainsmoker Cat clip around a side character named Yaku — and the reveal is that a criminal record kept her from attending her own grandfather's memorial service, so the dorayaki she'd brought along for him never got handed over.

Across the video's 881 comments, the reaction splits between piecing together exactly what happened to her and arguing over whether the main character Yani's total lack of sympathy toward her is coldness or, in its own strange way, kindness. The top comment, at 5,891 likes, just calls Yaku pitiable at this point.

It ends with fans half-jokingly volunteering to make her happy themselves.

A Japanese manga-narration channel posted a Chainsmoker Cat clip titled "the overkill black-haired Yaku chapter is too much to take," built around a side character named Yaku — distinct from the show's chain-smoking title character, Yani. The clip doesn't spell out much backstory on its own, so most of what viewers know about Yaku comes from stitching the scene together themselves: she has a criminal record, and that record is what kept her from attending her own grandfather's memorial service, so the dorayaki she'd carried along on the trip never got handed over to anyone. The clip has pulled in 881 comments, and most of them are doing one of two things: piecing together exactly what happened to her, or arguing over how the title character Yani is handling it.

So what actually happened to her? A handful of comments reconstruct it the same way.

That instinct — wanting to look after her — turned out to be the majority mood in the thread.

But the character who ends up getting debated the most in the replies isn't Yaku — it's Yani, and specifically whether her total lack of sympathy toward all of this counts as coldness or, in its own strange way, kindness.

Not everyone reads that coldness as a bad thing, though.

One reply even tries to put a kinder spin on one of Yani's blunter lines to Yaku, filling in what she's really trying to say.

Amid all the theorizing and the back-and-forth over Yani's tone, a few commenters step back from the character debates entirely and credit the performance itself for how heavy the scene ended up landing.

It's a comedy clip about a chain-smoking cat, and it still ends up spending most of its 881 comments on a side character's criminal record and a funeral she couldn't attend. Yaku's fans clearly aren't satisfied with leaving it there, though — the video closes out with one more show of support.

Whatever Chainsmoker Cat actually does with her next, the comment section has already decided where it stands.