Sanrio has stated definitively that beloved children’s character/inscrutable void Hello Kitty is not actually a cat, shaking the Internet’s belief system to its very core. This bombshell comes courtesy of the Los Angeles Times, which quoted anthropologist and Hello Kitty scholar Christine Yano in its article about the Japanese American National Museum’s upcoming Hello Kitty exhibit:
“Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it’s called Charmmy Kitty.”
As the Times’ Carolina Miranda points out in her followup article, this was already common knowledge to Sanrio fans dedicated enough to just Google the fucking thing. But the world at large was not prepared to accept a little girl with a horribly deformed cat face, and a number of dumbstruck articles with their attendant cat puns have popped up in the interim.
In their despair, the little girls and little-girls-at-heart of the world have turned to their leaders for guidance, and all the celebrities you’d expect to weigh in on a Hello Kitty controversy (plus Josh Groban and the dude from Linkin Park) have come forward to reassure their flock in its time of need:
Avril Lavigne could not be reached for comment.