The History of Longcat: From Futaba Channel to Catnarok and Back

The history of longcat is the story of a 65 centimeter Japanese house cat who accidentally became internet royalty. Her real name was Shiroi, sometimes spelled Shiro, and her owner posted a single stretched photograph to Futaba Channel around 2004 or 2005. Twenty years later, longcat is a 4chan saint, a tattoo, a t-shirt, an apocalyptic prophecy, and one of the earliest cat memes the English speaking internet ever borrowed from Japan. This is the full timeline, the mythology, the rivalry with Tacgnol, the death wave of 2020, and why longcat still matters in an era of AI brainrot.

Table of Contents

• Origin on Futaba Channel, 2004 to 2005
• The 4chan crossover and the Longcat Is Long format
• Catnarok, Tacgnol, and the longcat mythology
• Peak years: Tim and Eric, Urban Dictionary, and merchandise
• Who actually owned longcat
• September 2020: the day longcat died
• Why the history of longcat still matters
• FAQ

Origin on Futaba Channel, 2004 to 2005

Every history of longcat starts in the same place, a Japanese imageboard called Futaba Channel, better known as 2chan. Somewhere between late 2004 and early 2005, an anonymous user uploaded a photo of a domestic shorthair being held up under her armpits, paws dangling, body fully extended. The cat looked impossibly stretched, like someone had pulled her through a taffy machine. On 2chan she was tagged with the verb nobiiru, which means roughly to stretch or to extend. There was no caption beyond that. No story. No mythology. Just a cat that looked long.

The image would have died there, the way millions of imageboard pictures die every day, except for one detail. The cat really was long. Reports later put her at around 65 centimeters from head to back paws, the upper end of normal for a stretched cat, but the camera angle and white fur made her read as cartoonishly elongated. People started saving the photo. Then they started editing it.

What made the original photo work

Three things, in retrospect. The pose was symmetrical, so any horizontal extension still looked anatomically plausible. The background was plain wood floor, easy to copy and paste. And the cat’s expression was completely blank, no struggle, no panic, just resignation. That combination of clean background and neutral face is exactly what makes a photo editable, which is what every meme format needs before it can spread. The lifecycle of a meme format usually rewards images that are easy to remix, and longcat was practically designed for it.

The 4chan crossover and the Longcat Is Long format

Sometime in 2005, the longcat meme jumped from 2chan to 4chan, specifically to the /b/ random board, which at that point was the main pipeline for Japanese imageboard culture entering the English speaking internet. The name longcat was coined on /b/, replacing the original Japanese nobiiru. Once the cat had an English name, the meme exploded. By September 2006 longcat had her first Urban Dictionary entry, which is roughly when an internet phenomenon stops being inside-baseball and becomes mainstream forum currency.

The format that emerged was almost mathematical. Take longcat, stretch her further using basic image editing, and add the phrase “Longcat is loooooong” with extra Os matching the length of the stretch. That syntactic trick, the noun plus the adjective with elongated vowels, became a meme of its own. People made “fast train is faaaaast,” “tall building is taaaaall,” “big rock is biiiig.” The format outlived the cat by years, and you can still see its DNA in modern shitposts where the joke is just an object being its own adjective with extra letters.

The first photoshop wave

Early longcat edits were modest. Longcat as a snake. Longcat wrapped around a building. Longcat as a bookmark. By 2006 the edits had escalated into longcat in space, longcat as a continent, longcat spanning the visible universe. The joke kept working because the original photo was so clean that you could photoshop a kilometer of cat into anything and the brain still accepted it. This is the same reason the Backrooms format works visually, low resolution images with neutral backgrounds give your brain permission to fill in the gaps. If you want the longer version of that story, we covered what the Backrooms is and how a single 4chan image built an internet mythology in a separate post.

Catnarok, Tacgnol, and the longcat mythology

In February 2007, someone on /b/ posted a color-inverted version of longcat. White cat became black cat. The name was longcat spelled backwards, Tacgnol. The community immediately decided that Tacgnol was longcat’s evil twin, and within a week 4chan had built an entire eschatology around the rivalry. It was called Catnarok, a portmanteau of cat and Ragnarok, the Norse end of the world. The mythology said that longcat and Tacgnol had been locked in eternal battle since the dawn of time, and that one day the two cats would meet in a final confrontation that would end either the internet or the universe, depending on which thread you read.

By 2009, Catnarok had become a structured 4chan in-joke with its own iconography. Longcat represented light, white fur, possibly good. Tacgnol represented darkness, black fur, possibly evil, with cyan eyes in most depictions. Both cats were depicted at increasingly absurd lengths, sometimes wrapping around galaxies. Fan art appeared. Songs were written. The mythology was completely earnest in its commitment to being completely absurd, which is one of the cleanest examples of early post-irony you can point to on the internet.

Why the mythology spread

Catnarok worked because it gave participants a shared canon to riff on without any of the joke requiring explanation. If you saw a black cat photo with cyan eyes captioned “the prophecy approaches,” you either got it or you didn’t, and getting it made you part of the in-group. This is the basic engine of every imageboard mythology that came after, including the Backrooms, the SCP Foundation, and most recent ARG-adjacent meme cycles. Longcat versus Tacgnol was an early proof that anonymous communities could collaboratively build lore without leadership or canon enforcement.

Peak years: Tim and Eric, Urban Dictionary, and merchandise

Google Trends data shows longcat searches peaking in May 2007. The reason is specific. Longcat appeared on the Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! on Adult Swim, in a sketch that treated the meme as completely deadpan public knowledge. That broadcast moment took longcat from imageboard regular to crossover figure, and the timing was perfect because Urban Dictionary, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and the first generation of meme aggregator sites were all going mainstream simultaneously. Suddenly normal people knew what longcat was, even if they had never been to 4chan.

Between 2007 and 2010, longcat became merchandise. T-shirts, mugs, posters, plush toys, all unofficial, all sold through small online stores. The cat appeared as a stage costume at conventions. A folk song called “Longcat Is Long” circulated as both an unironic ballad and a joke. The peak years coincided with the rise of broader meme infrastructure. Know Your Meme launched in 2008 and began cataloging the longcat history retroactively, which is partly why we can trace the timeline today.

Where longcat sits in the cat meme canon

Cat memes have a long history that goes back to Victorian cabinet cards, and longcat is one of the early millennium pillars alongside lolcats, Happycat, ceiling cat, and Maru the box cat. We did a deeper dive on the full lineage in the complete history of cat memes from Victorian cabinet cards to AI brainrot, but the short version is that longcat is the imageboard archetype, lolcats are the macro-text archetype, and Maru is the algorithmic YouTube archetype. The three of them basically define how cat content evolved in three different platform eras.

Who actually owned longcat

For most of longcat’s meme life, nobody knew who the owner was. The original Futaba Channel post was anonymous, the cat had no public identity beyond her nickname Shiroi, and the entire mythology built up around the photo without any reference to a real household. This was deliberate. The owner reportedly preferred privacy, and the cat’s real name and location were rarely mentioned in English language posts. For about fifteen years, longcat was effectively a folk character with no owner, the way medieval saints have no documented biographies.

What is known is that the cat lived in Japan. She was born around 2002, about two or three years old when the photo was taken. A domestic shorthair, primarily white with light tabby markings. She lived a normal indoor cat life for almost two decades, occasionally photographed by her owner, almost never publicly identified. The contrast between her mundane reality and her cosmic internet status is part of what makes her story unique. Most viral animals get monetized and turned into Instagram accounts. Longcat stayed offline.

September 2020: the day longcat died

On September 20, 2020, Hong Kong news site StandNews reported that the cat known online as longcat had died at the age of 18. The same day, Twitter user @aerosubaru posted a memorial thread with several photographs of the cat, both her famous stretched pose and casual indoor portraits. Within 24 hours the thread had gathered roughly 68,000 likes and 32,500 retweets. For a few hours, longcat trended worldwide. The reaction surprised people who had assumed the meme had been long dead, because the cat herself had stayed alive, quietly, the whole time.

The memorial wave was a specific kind of internet mourning. People who had grown up with longcat in their teenage forum years were now in their thirties, and the cat dying meant a piece of their early internet was officially gone. The pattern recurs every time an early 2000s meme figure dies, from Grumpy Cat to Boo the Pomeranian to Keyboard Cat. Each death triggers a brief collective archaeology, where people dig up old screenshots. Longcat got that treatment at maximum volume, the same kind of communal grief that more recently surrounded the This Is Fine dog when an AI startup stole the meme for a subway ad.

The mythology after death

One immediate question on /b/ in September 2020 was whether Catnarok had now happened. If longcat had died, did that mean Tacgnol had won? The community mostly settled on a darker reading. The eternal battle had not ended in fire, it had ended in old age, indoor naps, and a quiet kitchen in Japan. That reading is, weirdly, the most coherent ending the mythology could have gotten. The internet had spent fifteen years describing longcat as cosmic, and in the end she was just a cat who lived a full life and died of natural causes.

Why the history of longcat still matters

Longcat sits at a specific intersection in internet history. She predates the meme-industrial complex, which means she was born in an era when memes spread through copy-paste, forum thread bumping, and Photoshop labor, not algorithmic feeds. She was also one of the first major imports from Japanese imageboard culture into the English speaking web, which makes her a structural ancestor of every 4chan meme that came after, including rage comics, wojaks, and most of the dark humor formats that now define Twitter and TikTok. Tracing the history of longcat is one of the cleanest ways to understand how imageboard culture became internet culture.

She also matters because she shows the upper bound of how long a meme can stay culturally alive. Most formats die within months. The general history of internet memes is a graveyard of formats that flared and faded, covered in the history of internet memes from Dancing Baby to brainrot. Longcat lasted fifteen years as an active reference, alongside lolcats, the Trollface, and a handful of imageboard institutions. Other formats hang on for similar reasons. A good example is the It’s Gonna Be May meme, which refuses to retire after fourteen years, and the same logic applies to longcat. The format was infinitely remixable and the underlying joke never required updating.

The other reason longcat persists is platform memory. She survived the migration from forums to image hosts to social networks to wikis to AI training data. Modern image models still produce passable longcat outputs because the format was so heavily replicated across the indexed web. Only the early imageboard memes get this kind of immortality, because they had a fifteen year head start on saturation. For a longer look at how imageboard formats moved between communities, our piece on the history of internet forums from BBS to Discord covers the same migration.

FAQ

What is the longcat meme?

The longcat meme is a photo edit format based on a 2004 to 2005 image of a white Japanese house cat held up under her armpits with her body fully stretched. Edits exaggerate her length to absurd extremes, usually paired with the caption “Longcat is loooooong.” The meme originated on Futaba Channel and spread to 4chan’s /b/ board in 2005.

What was longcat’s real name?

Her name was Shiroi, sometimes spelled Shiro, which means white in Japanese. She was a domestic shorthair born around 2002. Online she was nicknamed Nobiko on 2chan, derived from nobiiru, meaning to stretch. Western users renamed her longcat when the meme moved to 4chan.

Who is Tacgnol?

Tacgnol is longcat’s mirror image, a black elongated cat created on 4chan’s /b/ board in February 2007. The name is longcat spelled backwards. Tacgnol is the antagonist in the Catnarok mythology, an apocalyptic 4chan in-joke that imagines a final battle between the two cats ending either the internet or the universe.

When did longcat die?

Shiroi died on September 20, 2020 at the age of 18. The news was reported by Hong Kong news outlet StandNews and a memorial Twitter thread by @aerosubaru gathered roughly 68,000 likes and 32,500 retweets within 24 hours. Her death briefly trended worldwide as 30-something former forum users mourned a piece of their early internet.

Is longcat still a popular meme?

Longcat is no longer in active rotation as a format, but she remains an iconic reference in internet history discussions and survives in AI image model training data because the format was so heavily replicated across the indexed web. She is considered one of the foundational imageboard memes alongside lolcats and the Trollface.

The takeaway

The history of longcat is unusually clean for an internet meme. She had a clear origin, a clear peak, a clear mythology, and a clear ending. Most formats blur together or die unnoticed, but longcat got fifteen years of active life and a real, dated death. The takeaway is that some memes are not jokes, they are folk characters, and the people remembering them are not laughing, they are mourning a chapter of the early internet that does not exist anymore. If you grew up posting on /b/ in 2007, longcat is a hometown. The cat just happened to be 65 centimeters long.