Like her interaction with most things. the Foodbeast’s relationship with animals is skewed and destructive. It is always performative and “ affection”is given on her terms only. Whenever sickness , age or difficulties strike, she abandons them . They’re just narcissistic props and if she can make a buck out of them all the better Buster got this fat bitch figured out
I'm not going to talk too much about the cats themselves because most people have said all that needs to be said, but I did want to expand a little more on Chantal's motives here too.
An important note, which most of us already know but I'm going to restate anyway is that Chantal is incredibly stupid and incapable of noticing even the most obvious patterns in her own behavior, and even when they're pointed out she unwilling and uninterested in changing them.
The second note here is that Chantal very obviously has a deep deep rooted longing to be loved but due to her poor upbringing, her extreme narcissism and being as emotionally intelligent as a toddler only knows that if you love something you feed it and any other expression of love outside public displays of very shallow platitudes is met with dismissal (Infamously: "Why do I have to do something just because someone else needs me?"), confusion (such as not understanding why she would stay at the Villa with Peetz after his cat died even though he was sleeping), anger (shown anytime anyone tries to help her better herself), frustration (anytime the Villa cats tried to show her affection when she was busy or moody) or apathy (lots of examples of this but what comes to mind are interactions with her family. Inviting her out or including her just to be blown off without explanation, or giving her gifts just for them to never be taken out of the car or to be regifted).
So this brings me back around to the cats: Chantal has a void in her that we've seen her try to fill with everything she can get her hands on. Obviously food, but also travel*, drugs, attention and cats.
The problem is that those are not the things in her life that are missing, so when the initial high from eating/the literal drugs/planning/adopting cats wears off she now has both this void and the consequences of her substitution.
The point I guess I'm trying to make is that yes, she uses the cats for props but there's also a deeper drive there, and given how she understands "love" she'll never see why its a problem. In her mind she feeds the cats, therefore she loves them and they need nothing more.
A bit of an interesting (to me) aside is how she'll never see their needs outside of food (nail trims, being fixed, not being locked in one room for their whole lives) as important or worth considering neglect no matter how huge the impact on the cats lives.
I think this actually circles back to her very honest confession that she doesn't see why she should have to do anything she doesn't want to and how horrifically unempathetic she is because she legitimately does not see this as a flaw in herself.
This is normal to her, and despite this being the attitude she takes towards EVERYTHING she does she still insists she's a good person who cares about people. To me this heavily implies that she simply doesn't consider any negative outcome from her avoiding doing anything that may be even slightly inconvenient (or simply not what she feels like doing in that moment) even if that outcome is incredibly harmful for someone else (like having claws so long they literally curl around into your own flesh).
It's not that she wants BBJ to be in pain, it's that she literally just does not have the emotional intelligence to ever connect the action to the outcome, because in her mind it's not that she took a bad action, she just took no action, therefore there should be no consequences.
I guess I'm just writing this all out because it's only with this latest cat saga that all these points really clicked into place for me and I figured there would be a few others who may find it interesting too.
You can apply this "logic" to a lot of her justifications over the years.
Take when her gran died and she saw nothing wrong with going straight to Nadar and planning OF. She may have considered that her mom may have benefitted from her being there to comfort her (not that I think Chantal would be a comforting presence but still), so she didn't do a
good thing, but she also didn't rub it in that her gram was dead and make everyone feel worse so she didn't do a bad thing either. She did nothing, therefore she did nothing wrong.
Same with say, not taking Nadar to a probation appointment. That shit is pretty serious and missing one could have real legal consequences. She didn't want to go though (after promising she would) and couldn't figure out why he was so angry about that. Sure, she didn't do a good thing for him by driving him, but she also didn't pick him up and then drive him 8 hours in the opposite direction and dump him on the highway. She did nothing, therefore she did nothing wrong.
TLDR; Chantal will never see anything wrong with adopting cats or with how she treats them because she's emotionally retarded.
*Travel is a bit tricky to explain here but its not that she would find travel fulfilling or even enjoys it (She's hated it since her first trip and knows it) but she clearly gets a high out of the planning phase and the exciting lead up.
But can we get to 10000 pages because of those cats?
You keep making posts like this. Please stop.
Julia was eventually spayed, there were at least a dozen pages of catsperging then too because she refused to put the cone on the cat, refused to leave the cone on the cat, had to take the cat back to the vet because the incision was pulling open and infected, the cat had purple / silver antiseptic shit on the incision, and chins still refused to put the cone on the cat and leave it on. Even Salad got annoyed with her over it.
My personal theory is that she had used the excuse that the vet said it was dangerous to fix her, was upset no one believed her and purposely kept the cone off in hopes Julia would get sick or even die so she could play victim and scream about how she knows what is best for her cats.
She'd be all in her glory; she could play the victim, say I told you so AND get a new kitten!