Today is the birthday of the most famous designer character in the world, Hello Kitty. According to her fictional biography, she's an anthrophised Japanese bobtail cat named Kitty who exists as an eternal third grader in England, with her parents and twin sister Mimmy. In meta she is a chaterter designed by Yuko Shimizu for the Japanese fashion company Sanrio.
Now a point of confusion over the charter comes from the myth that "someone from Sanrio said she wasn't a cat", but this statement is only half true. When making a show about Hello Kitty having a pet cat (charmmy kitty), Sanrio specified that Kitty was a little girl and wasn't really a housecat. What was meant to convey was that Kitty is an anthropomorphic character who never acts like an actual cat, but always acts like a human child. On the catgirl scale, Sanrio considers Kitty White more girl than cat, an important detail when she is interacting with a non-anthro cat. Think Goofy vs Pluto in Disney cartoons. But some chuckleheads decided that this statement had to have meant she was a hideously deformed human child or something, and started repeating that. So if you hear anyone tell you Hello Kitty is a human girl, remember it was always supposed to be a relative thing that got lost in retelling.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: This myth is the entire reason I haven’t watched The Toys That Made Us. I saw that they bungled this piece of information, which just takes a minute of research and an ounce of critical thinking to debunk. It just didn’t inspire confidence in me.]
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