Don't panic, Hello Kitty is still a cat

The internet got excited today when the Japanese company that created Hello Kitty apparently revealed the character is not a cat, but actually a British schoolgirl named Kitty White.

That's one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show. Hello Kitty is not a cat.

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.

• Anthropologist Christine R Yano talking about a Hello Kitty exhibition she is curating.

This announcement led to untold levels of not coping, as formerly rational people generally lost their s*.

But, leaving aside the pertinent point that Hello Kitty is actually neither a cat nor a school kid because it isn't real, Kotaku went into PSA overdrive to establish what Sanrio actually meant.

A spokesperson explained: "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."

What a time to be alive.

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(Pictures: Getty)