The Cats Nobody Reblogs

By 2013, the internet’s relationship with cats had calcified into something almost liturgical. A specific kind of cat: round, soft, preferably surprised or mid-yawn, photographed in warm light. The cat that the reblog and the thousand-like photo and the cumulative weight of cat internet had collectively decided was the correct and acceptable cat.

Kotaku ran a gallery of the ugly ones, and it’s disorienting in the best way. Cats that look genuinely drunk. Cats with such spectacular derp-faces that they seem designed by someone who had only heard cats described secondhand. Hairless specimens that look like a fist with ears. One that stares with the specific dead-eyed vacancy of a middle manager on a Friday afternoon. These are not the cats of the reblog economy.

I love all of them. The cute ones are a performance—selected, photographed, and distributed precisely because they trigger a particular dopamine response. The ugly ones just exist. They don’t know they’re ugly. They’re sitting there being cats, haggard and weird and entirely indifferent to your aesthetic preferences. There’s something more honest about that than the whole rest of cat internet combined.