Hello Kitty has no mouth, a Sanrio spokesperson said, “so we can be happy and sad together with Hello Kitty.” Memes are popping up about a nightmare romantic archetype—a cute, pink-obsessed succubus—the Hello Kitty Girl. For each ‘Hello Kitty Girl’ meme, Sanrio fans are compelled to claim authority and authenticity in the comments section. They mean to say, “Whoever this Hello Kitty Girl is, she’s someone else. My love for Sanrio and Hello Kitty is pure.” East Asian pop cultural exports seem to particularly lend themselves to competitive personal ownership claims. This commenter is one of the chosen believers of an esoteric religion, the cradle consumers, not the converts. A woman in Kansas, the childhood fan, has a true claim to this multi-billion dollar Japanese corporate iconography—not this so-called Hello Kitty Girl, who glommed onto Hello Kitty during the pandemic as an extension of her loneliness and pre-existing character pathology.
The Hello Kitty Girl didn’t watch Sanrio VHS tapes as a child and innocently collect a healthy(?) amount of decorative accent plushies over a lifetime, she makes memes of Hello Kitty with Kafka quotes and knives. The Hello Kitty Girl is marked by depression and paranoia.
Who is Hello Kitty? For the Hello Kitty Girl, she’s a human-like cat or cat-like human, digested and abstracted into an accessory. Hello Kitty has no mouth, a Sanrio spokesperson said, “so we can be happy and sad together with Hello Kitty.” So, Hello Kitty can carry the Hello Kitty Girl’s own voice, even the voice of her emptiness, addiction, masochism, and aggressive fantasies…she can shit on your love, she can sexualize pain, and in her cuteness she can be forgiven.
For the Hello Kitty Girl, Hello Kitty offers non-abandonment, non-rejection, absolute unconditional availability. Hello Kitty will never squirm from her arms. Hello Kitty will never threaten separation.
For the Hello Kitty Girl, one purchase is not enough. Hello Kitty is an apparatus for exploring her self, offering a temporary cohesion of a consumer identity. The desire to acquire is written into the Hello Kitty Girl’s ways of seeing, visually accumulating and claiming images and objects as a means of self-branding, self-understanding. The Hello Kitty Girl can hardly fit another plushie on the bed and even so, the lack remains. #hellokittygirl #sanriocore #traumacore #voidcore #cutecore #gore #yandere #schizoposting
And you, her nice-enough boyfriend, have an affliction that is sort of like love for the Hello Kitty Girl. As the object of her love, you quickly become the organizing principle of her life. Her angel and rescuer…her defective, despicable tormentor…and she wonders without words, “Why can’t he be more like Hello Kitty?” Unlike Hello Kitty, you can cheat, you can lie, you can die, and worst of all, you can leave.
The Hello Kitty Girl is kinky, she’s alternative, she’s compelling. She may tell you not to speak to other women, isolate you from family and friends, and threaten to self-harm over the phone, but you find it almost charming how she has so aestheticized both abuse and love.
Your Hello Kitty Girl loves (as much as she can love) the cute—the ‘kawaii,’ so dangerously close to ‘kowai’— and above all, she believes that if she envelops herself in that cute, somehow—despite how rotten and wounded she feels she is—she too will secure love and survive. But she doesn’t know when to stop, and she eroticizes the cuteness. You have some reservations about the depth of her masochism and her slight autopedophilia, but you make yourself okay with it because you love the Hello Kitty Girl. You stare into machine-embroidered eyes as you rail her from behind. The Hello Kitty Girl leaves before she is left. She locks the door to her room of intimate objects, blocks you on her phone, asks her friends to send paragraphs-long texts calling you a narcissistic manipulator, and adds “Sanrio Hello Kitty Plush Pink Maid Outfit RARE 2007 Vintage” to her eBay watchlist.
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