BREAKING NEWS from Sanrio: Hello Kitty is not a cat

How are you enjoying your day so far? Are you happy? Good. I hope you can hang onto that feeling, because I'm about to throw a major WTF moment into your day.

Apparently, the Hello Kitty we all know and love from our childhoods is not, in fact, a cat.

"But she's got cat ears and whiskers!" you exclaim (if you're anything like me when I found this out). "If she's not a cat what the hell is she?"

I'm so glad you asked.

Apparently, Hello Kitty is no more a cutesy feline than you or I are. She is actually a little British girl called Kitty White, who is in the third grade.

(HEAD EXPLODING)

Sanrio, the Japanese company which created the Hello Kitty character and merchandise, has come forward to vehemently state she is not what she appears to be.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Christine R. Yano, an anthropologist from the University of Hawaii, was contacted by Sanrio while curating a Hello Kitty retrospective at the Japanese American National Museum, in a bid to set her straight after she - understandably - called her a cat.

"I was corrected — very firmly," she said. "That's one correction Sanrio made for my script for the show. 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."

WHAT.

Hello Kitty is also actually British (!!!) and her real name is Kitty White. She is a Scorpio and her parents are called George and Mary White.

"She has a twin sister," Yano added. "She's a perpetual third-grader. She lives outside of London. I could go on. A lot of people don't know the story and a lot don't care. But it's interesting because Hello Kitty emerged in the 1970s, when the Japanese and Japanese women were into Britain. They loved the idea of Britain. It represented the quintessential idealised childhood, almost like a white picket fence. So the biography was created exactly for the tastes of that time."

I realise this whole thing has nothing much to do with HR, but my mind is blown that a company like Sanrio would come forward after all this time to set the record straight.

Especially because if she's not actually a cat, then why is she a cat? Answer me, Sanrio!

I wonder if the people of Singapore will still fight about the Hello Kitty toys McDonald's gives away now that we know she's a phony?