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6 existential ways to deal with the Hello Kitty conundrum

SINGAPORE — Every once in a while, life throws you a curveball, forcing you to take stock of your life and re-evaluate all that you thought you knew.

Hello Kitty everywhere. Photo: Reuters

Hello Kitty everywhere. Photo: Reuters

SINGAPORE — Every once in a while, life throws you a curveball, forcing you to take stock of your life and re-evaluate all that you thought you knew.

Reactions to the news that celebrity Sanrio character Hello Kitty is not, for all intents and purposes, actually a cat ranged across a very small spectrum, from “mindblown” to “I can’t even”. Shocked Kitty enthusiasts are probably still in foetal positions in the corners of their pink bedrooms as we speak.

Clearly, this is not a trivial matter and must be analysed with the greatest care and intellectual rigour. Here are some theories and disciplines through which we can interpret the riddle of the British girl whose avatar is a mouthless cat five apples tall.

1. QUANTUM MECHANICS. What do Hello Kitty and Schrodinger’s Cat have in common outside of the litterbox? Schrodinger’s thought experiment posits that while a cat, a flask of poison and a radioactive source are in a sealed box, the cat is both alive and dead. Hello Kitty is both a cat and a non-cat. This cat has ceased to be. She is no more. She is an ex-cat.

2. SURREALISM. Rene Magritte, the artist who produced The Treachery Of Images — you know, that famous painting of a pipe with the caption “This is not a pipe” — caused a stir in the surrealist art scene, but that scene probably didn’t have a population as big as the line outside McDonald’s for plush Kitties.

3. DEATH OF THE AUTHOR. Roland Barthes’s famous theory is that it doesn’t matter what the author’s creative intention was because that’s unknowable. Since we can never get inside the mind of Hello Kitty’s original creator, her ultimate truth and meaning resides in her fans’ own interpretations. So, you say cat then cat, lah.

4. DECONSTRUCTION. According to French philosopher Jacques Derrida, there is no such thing as a pure presence, absolute truth or, for that matter, “reality”. Hello Kitty is Hello Kitty only because she is not Goodbye Doggie. Get it? Of course you don’t. No one understands Derrida.

5. META-MODERNISM. Hello Kitty is an ironic statement meant to subvert, challenge and interrogate our understanding of what it means to “cat”.

6. SHAKESPEARE. To cat or not to cat, that is the question.

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