There was a real bumper crop of cats on the internet this week
It has been another week of record-high temperatures, shockingly dangerous political rhetoric, and general despair on the internet; it has also been another week of animals. Do these rivers of content flow from the same source? Do they power each other, circle around each other, somehow negate or offset each other? Will the number of animals on the internet increase in direct proportion to the amount of enmity on the internet, eventually creating a sort of alternate, all-pet web that one might explore, blissfully ignorant of the other?
It’s impossible to say, really. Regardless, the animals were abundant online this week, and it was an unusually good one for cats in particular, whose stock appears to be rising after the great dog boom of 2017. As our colleagues at Kotaku pointed out in a post that deserves to be enjoyed at length—save it for Sunday, perhaps—yesterday was National Cat Day in Japan, a holiday so designated because the Japanese word for two is “ni,” which sounds like “nyan,” which sounds like the sound a cat makes. Thus, February 22 is “meow meow meow” day; mark it on your calendar and do better next year. The result was an extremely whimsical outpouring of Japanese cat fandom, very few of which took the form of erotic cartoons. Here, for example, is a good one:
Do you know who this cat is dressed as or why she is on a big smiling blue ball? The answers are Dragon Quest and Dragon Quest, but it also does not matter. Cat content is best when abstracted from meaning, even obscured beyond understanding. Think of the cat dressed as a shark on a Roomba, or the great cat breading phase of 2012. The internet prefers its cats as inexplicable as possible. Here, for example, is a cat who went viral this week sans explanation:
Here is a cat who went viral this week sans looking like a cat:
Compare moments like these with other prominent animals from the news this week, which fit into clean-cut narratives (a horse who is not afraid of wolves; a dog who is not afraid of wolves; a goat who is not afraid of bulls) or even commercialized packaging (dogs dressed as video game characters; a dog in a fake movie trailer).
Cats remain powerful online for the same reason they always have: the vast, unyielding mystery at their core. Twitter Moments, our great modern arbiter of taste, chose to do an “If it fits, I sits, 2018 edition” round-up this week. The meme has been around since the dawn of the decade, a play on the old “If it fits, it ships” USPS slogan, typically appended to images of cats roosting in inexplicable places: tiny boxes, strange appendages, forgotten household crannies. And while they typically do this for a number of extremely sensible reasons—to cool down or warm up, to express superiority, or just to get your damn attention—they are best enjoyed and thought of as almost randomized acts of chaos within a more ordered domestic setting.