Our Unusual Hero
VICE was uploading Lil Bub & Friendz to YouTube in installments, which in 2013 felt both technologically limiting and somehow appropriate for a documentary about internet cats—something to be watched in pieces, between other tabs, in the small gaps of a day.
Lil Bub had come from a feral litter in Bloomington, Indiana, born with more genetic mutations than any single cat should reasonably have: extra toes—more than any recorded cat before her—a permanently protruding tongue from an underdeveloped jaw, the stunted limbs of a dwarf, bones dense enough that she shouldn’t technically have been able to walk at all. She couldn’t, at first. She learned anyway. Her owner Mike Bridavsky, a music producer, made her famous not by selling anything but just by putting her on the internet and letting people look at her, which turned out to be a very simple formula for deep and genuine affection.
The documentary followed several figures in the internet cat world, and among them was the guy who managed memes as a professional enterprise—treating internet animals as intellectual property to be licensed, marketed, and monetized. He unsettled me a little. Not because the work was cynical exactly, but because he’d correctly identified something real in people’s feelings about these animals and had found a way to extract value from it. The Nyan Cat shop existed. I wanted to visit it anyway.
What Bub represented, underneath all the merchandise and the documentary machinery, was something more basic: a profoundly strange-looking animal who had survived conditions that should have killed her, cared for by someone who simply loved her and wanted to show her to people. That simplicity is hard to manufacture. Most internet fame is built on performance, on a legible persona. Bub had no persona. She just had that face—the wide eyes, the tongue, the impossible expression that somehow read as pure benevolent attention—and that was enough for millions of people to feel something real.
The plea for her to stay on this planet forever was the correct response. She didn’t.