So the world is full of animals, right? Cats and dogs and herons and badgers and duck-billed platypi and what-not. Everyone is doing their thing. Now imagine a ‘scene’ emerges amongst the cats. A few cats decide that it’s kinda cool to have a little place they can go and play with bits of string, claw furniture, sleep on baby’s faces, listen to kitty music about hating water, possibly some common thread in their style of dress develops, like little lavender hoodies as seen on Hipster Kitty here. Either way the important thing is the cats are just being cats, they just like to express their kittiness in a certain way and share it with people who feel similarly about their feline existence.

But then the ‘Cat Scene’ suddenly becomes ‘cool.’ Not just amongst cats but amongst other animals too. Why? Who knows? Can any of us really say what causes the twoing and frowing of the zeitgeist? But this underground movement of ‘Cats’ just digging being cats suddenly gets infiltrated by a dogs, horses, pigs, a few chickens, some bears and the occasional ostrich. Whatever. Being a ‘Cat’ is now cool and everyone wants in. So the dogs now insist on playing with string, the horses sleep on baby’s faces (to disastrous results) and some wild boar figure they’ll start living with humans cos “that’s what Real Cats do.” Everyone now gets hold of those trendy lavender Cat Hoodies and, soon enough, these faux-cats outnumber the actual cats. They even start wearing little cat ears and tails, like annoying anime fan-girls. Not only this but the trends grow more and more irrelevant to the genuine cats and become increasingly more the focus of this superficial bunch of animals than the actual genuine kittiness of the original Scene.

The media, now aware of the Cat Scene due to its sudden popularity, decide to get involved. But being the media and not really knowing anything about anything that can’t be put into a sound-bite they just start terming anything in this Scene “Cat.” Those not into the scene become annoyed and irritated with these posers and their stupid fake ears and uniform lavender hoodies and start hating on ‘Cats.’ But they don’t really know what ‘Cat’ means because, by now, the term has become so misappropriated it is used almost exclusively in reference not to “four-legged feline mammals” but “anything faking being a four-legged feline mammal.” When a real cat is encountered, minus fake ears and tail or any of the extraneous elements initiated by the superficial crowd, people look bemused at their proclamation that they’re a cat. “But…. a ‘Cat’ is a total faker and a knob. You seem cool so you’re not a ‘Cat.’” (Kitty makes a WTF-Face.)

Behold the absurdity. But that is more or less every Scene ever.

The thing is elements of Scenes can, and do, get superficial and annoying and utterly worthy of derision. But one cannot fake being something unless that something actually exists to fake in the first place. There are genuine articles out there. Not all people involved in a Scene are shallow fakers. The genuine articles are the ones for whom that Scene still truly means something. They exist, albeit probably far less prominent and noticeable than the fakers for whom it is entirely an image-thing. But they are the ones who deserve the Scene. And the whole Scene does not deserve to be lumped in with the more populace, yet completely vapid, posers for whom it’s all about look and ‘being cool.’ Especially when those posers move the Scene so far away from everything relevant that it causes an ignorant public and media to completely lose sight of the absurdity that comes with calling a Burmese python wearing a tabby-striped jump-suit “a Cat.”

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