As the internet breaks apart and mutates in hideous new ways at breakneck speed, 2024 reminded netizens of one comforting constant: cat memes — at least that remains the case in Japan, where the year’s top trends on YouTube revolved around our furry friends.

That’s not to say Japanese YouTube is some kind of outlier from the rest of the world. In fact, through the 2020s it has been thematically aligning with a standard narrative on the platform. Take music, for example. A good chunk of Japanese youth discover new tracks on YouTube, and this year’s biggest included rap duo Creepy Nuts’ “Bling-Bang-Bang-Born” and Kocchi no Kento’s “Hai Yorokonde.” The “trending” section was dominated by pop acts as well as assorted TV personalities and, arguably Japan’s biggest celebrity, Shohei Ohtani.

Still, it’s animal clips that get the views.

At the start of August, a user on X shared a video from a Dutch research and rehabilitation center housing rescued seals. The clip came from the center’s 24-hour livestream of its seal pool on YouTube. It was a hit in Japan, with viewers logging on in the tens of thousands just to watch the seals swimming around.

The seal habitat, dubbed online as “azarashi yōchien” (seal kindergarten), even inspired some Japanese fans to travel to the Netherlands to see the animals in person. Part of the appeal is the calming nature of the livestream, but the community that has sprung up around it is even more impressive. Fans not only check in regularly but have developed a common vernacular for this cuddly world (for example, a seal treading water is “chabashira,” as they look like a tea leaf). The channel’s popularity has also resulted in an increase in donations to the center.

This goodwill and greater unity helped propel “azarachi yōchien” to third in internet security company E-Guardian’s SNS Buzzwords Award ranking. The top spot in that poll, meanwhile, went to another animal-centric development powered by YouTube: neko mīmu (cat meme).

Cat memes are nothing new on the internet, but what’s surprising is how they’re still going strong in 2024. The recipe for this year’s memes is easy: Take a clip of a cat (occasionally other animals), put it in front of a green screen and add some manipulated audio.

Neko mīmu creators used this combination on social media to vent frustrations over their jobs, their pachinko addiction and the Chunichi Dragons pro baseball franchise, but the memes were also an outlet to express creativity by telling original horror stories using the animals, documenting an experience with ADHD or sharing stories from sex work.

What looks like pure internet goofball-ery at first is actually shared language that many Japanese netizens use to talk about, at times, serious issues. And though neko mīmu are popular on YouTube, they’re tailor-made for TikTok, which continued its streak this year as the chosen platform among young people. TikTok, YouTube, X — none of these platforms are fenced off from the other, so expect to see goats speaking in tongues or cats dancing to Avril Lavigne on your preferred medium eventually.

Given the way things are going, we may see future presidential debates reenacted and explained using old clips of Grumpy Cat and Doge — may they both rest in peace.