Hello Kitty Is Not A Cat, Everything You Know Is A Lie
If you're not already, you may want to sit down, and if you're already sitting down, you may want to go ahead and clear off a spot on the floor so that you can lay there and stare into space thinking about how everything you have been told in your life has been rooted in lies and deception. Are you sitting? Good.
So it turns out Hello Kitty is not actually a cat.
Lest you think we're making this up, this shocking revelation that undermines the very fabric of everything we believe comes straight from the source. As revealed today at LAist, the Sanrio company responded to Christine R. Yano's description of Kitty, written as part of an upcoming exhibit that she's curating for the Japanese American National Museum, with one stern correction, assuring her that Hello Kitty is not a cat.
Nothing is true.
According to Yano, they were very clear on this point:
"I was corrected — very firmly," Yano said. "That's one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show. 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."
One assumes that the same applies to Kitty's twin sister, her mother and father, and her boyfriend Dear Daniel, who must all be reclassified as mysterious, non-cat creatures with no fingers or mouths with which to grasp or scream.
As disconcerting as this piece of information is, I do appreciate that they're actually drawing a distinction between Kitty and Charmmy. The fact that Kitty, who I always assumed was a cat, actuallyowned a cat herself was one of the single weirdest things about the entire franchise, so having a clear distinction -- even one as vague and somewhat terrifying as "she walks like a human but is something else, something unknowable that wants to be your friend" -- clears things up.
If nothing else, Kitty not being a cat goes a long way towards explaining why you see her around so many boats, even if there's a lot about her journey to the far side of the universe with Noah (you know, from the Bible) that remains unexplained: