Wilfred Warrior Will Haunt Your Dreams, and You’ll Thank Him for It

Evil tongues say he looks like someone stuffed Steve Buscemi into a white fur coat and then backed a car over him. Twice. Three times. That he’s the result of a botched experiment, nature’s revenge for every kitten drowned in every river across a thousand years of human cruelty. That he crawled up from the underworld specifically to warn us about the apocalypse—or, more accurately, to inform us it’s coming, since there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.

The truth is simpler and better. After Maru, Grumpy Cat, Lil Bub, Cooper, Nala, and Colonel Meow, Wilfred Warrior is the latest white Persian cat from London that the internet has collectively decided to lose its mind over. His fame spread largely through comedian Michael Rapaport, who redubbed one of Wilfred’s videos and sent it ricocheting across every feed and timeline imaginable. Since then the following has grown by the minute.

What gets me isn’t just the face—those wide, slightly unhinged eyes, the perfect teeth, the expression of a man who has seen things and chosen to say nothing about them. It’s the combination of that face with the undeniable fact that Wilfred is extremely, objectively cute. A warm bundle of fur wearing the look of someone who has lost everything and finds it funny. Once you’ve seen him, he doesn’t leave. Honestly, I’m not sure I want him to.