When you look at Hello Kitty, your first initial thought is that she's just a giant cat - but people have been realising that's not the case.
It feels as though our whole life has been a lie, or someone is playing a huge prank on us, because how on earth is Hello Kitty not a cat?
I mean, she has whiskers?
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This mind-bending information came courtesy to us from a sketch on Saturday Night Live, which Hello Kitty store members are left struggling to train a new selection of employees.
"If you open to page five of your employee handbooks, you'll see a list of facts about Hello Kitty," one of the managers says in the clip, which features Cecily Strong, Molly Kearney, Keke Palmer, Bowen Yang, Sarah Sherman and Marcello Hernández.
"As you can see, she loves to bake cookies, she goes to school, and she's not a cat, she's a human little girl."
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One of the trainees then says in confusion: "No... why did you say Hello Kitty was a human little girl."
The manager replies: “Well, because it’s true! According to the creators, Hello Kitty is a human little girl.
“[…] These are just the official Sanrio facts about Hello Kitty.”
The managers go on to offer up some other facts, including that Hello Kitty is in third grade and lives in London.
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She also has a boyfriend called Dear Daniel and that, unlike Hello Kitty, ‘he actually is a cat’.
At first, many viewers assumed the skit was just a joke, but it turns out that it was very much rooted in truth, as confirmed by Hello Kitty's creator company, Sanrio - and it's left people seriously confused.
Commenting on X, one user wrote: “The fact that these Hello Kitty facts are real,” while another replied: “Wait what????”
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Someone else commented: “I wonder how many people googled ‘is Hello Kitty supposed to be a human’ after this skit.”
To which one other responded: “I definitely did, and now I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
Anthropologist Christine R. Yano previously revealed how she got called out by Sanrio when preparing her Hello Kitty exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum, having mistakenly believed – like many of us – that the subject of her display was a cat.
Yano, from the University of Hawaii, told the Los Angeles Times in 2014: “That’s one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show.
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"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.”
The more you know.
Topics: Animals, TV And Film
Mia Williams