Are you sitting down for this?
Hello Kitty is apparently not a cat, but rather a human girl, according to anthropologist Christine R. Yano, who is curating the Hello Kitty exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum.
Yano told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday that Sanrio, which produces Hello Kitty, “corrected–very firmly” her when she referred to Hello Kitty as a cat.
“That’s one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show,” Yano said. “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.”
Later, in a clarification to Kotaku, Sanrio said, “Hello Kitty was done in the motif of a cat. It’s going too far to say that Hello Kitty is not a cat. Hello Kitty is a personification of a cat.”
The Internet, predictably, went insane on this news. “I’m having a really hard time sleeping tonight like how is Hello Kitty not a cat?” tweeted John J. Salomone.
Other things revealed by Yano: Hello Kitty is British, she’s the daughter of George and Mary White, she’s a Scorpio and she has a twin sister.
But, for real, not a cat?!
