Longcat

One photo of a white cat lifted under the front legs, her body stretching impossibly downward, was enough. It surfaced on the Japanese imageboard 2chan around 2004 or 2005, and the caption "Longcat is long" carried it worldwide. Fans then did what internet folklore does best: they built a mythology, complete with a dark nemesis called Tacgnol, out of a single picture. The real cat was Shiroi, whose name means white, and her owner's announcement of her death in September 2020 drew a wave of tributes. She was about 18. Longcat is the place to start for anyone who wants to see how early meme culture turned a family snapshot into shared lore.