A kitten meme with two corn snacks balanced on its head has become one of the biggest AI-made characters on the Chinese internet. According to figures from the New Rank editorial team, reported by 36Kr, videos about the "Bugles Cat" have passed 2.1 billion views on Douyin, more than 140 million on Xiaohongshu and 2.2 billion across platforms.
The character started as an ordinary joke image. Its source is a popular kitten account, "Guapi's ID Sauce", whose photos had already produced an "owl cat" meme. Users cut the ears out of one picture and captioned the round, earless result as a cat worn down by life. Someone then gave it two Bugles in place of ears, and the triangle-eared version spread through comment sections as a reaction image, sometimes posing with its snack ears, sometimes stealing a whole bag of them.
On its own the image might have had the short life of most reaction memes. What moved it beyond a sticker was generative video, which let creators give the cat whole lives rather than a single expression. One of the first, posting as "Bingxing Dilei", started in July with a straight-faced nature documentary treatment, complete with careful framing and voiceover: the cat lives on plateaus above 3,000 metres, takes three to five years to grow its snack ears, and chooses mates by how intact their Bugles are. An episode in which a herd flees its predator, the Shield-Dog, dropping Bugles that the dog then eats, passed 7.2 million views on Bilibili.
Viewers added lore in the comments, and other creators built on it. A "Survival Diary" series by "Kimi Planet" keeps the documentary tone, following the cat as it hunts, migrates and lives in the wild, and has drawn more than 1.1 million likes on Douyin.
Others moved the cat into human society. The account "Mi's Bugles" made it a veteran repairman who crawls under cars, works in factory sheds and fixes water pumps. In one clip it mends a hot pot restaurant's light, earns a half-price meal and ends up eating free after an impressive mukbang; that video collected over 1.63 million likes and 712,000 reposts, with commenters joking that calling it AI-generated erased the creator's effort. A third creator, "I Am Super Smart", built a "Kimi Community" where the cat is an ordinary resident who wakes up without its Bugles and asks the security guard, Shield, for help; that video has more than 528,000 likes.
The report describes the result as a parallel universe that keeps expanding: wild colonies studied by the camera, working cats in the city, and whole neighbourhoods with their own relationships, all grown out of a single meme.
It places the cat in a wider run of AI-fed internet creatures that have surfaced every few weeks over the past year, each built on a simple shape and a nonsense premise. Shield-Dog, its frequent co-star, began as a mishearing of the phrase "What the dog doing?" and became a Shiba-headed, toad-bodied figure with a knife and shield; its Douyin hashtag has more than 8.15 billion views, with people generating its fights, adventures and deadpan vlogs. In February a Bilibili creator used AI to redraw an administrator character from Arknights: Endfield as a round penguin known as "Gu Gu Ga Ga", which also became raw material for stickers and AI clips.
Earlier examples it lists include the Meituan kangaroo, Nai Long, the speechless "What's Up Cat", Banana Cat and Grassland Cow. The common pattern is a simple, instantly recognisable shape with an absurd premise that many people can extend. The piece argues that as AI lowers the cost of copying an image and producing a story around it, such virtual creatures are becoming a content category of their own rather than a passing joke.
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