Mango (A Dead Cat Story)

It is starting to feel harder to track down sources.

Content on TikTok clusters together like planetary bodies around a sun - a galaxy of videos orbiting around a central core “star” video. You sometimes stumble on the presence of such a node by first encountering a video about the star video, rather than the star video itself. Most recently, my experience is around Mango, a (now deceased) orange cat.

The video I first encountered was two women, laying in bed, both eyes red from crying:

@brooklynbellislame

“This is my best friend. She doesn’t have tiktok. I showed her the videos,” reads the caption.

This video is set to one of the TikTok earworms-of-the-moment - Alex Olsen’s “someday I’ll get it”, a lo-fi stripped down acoustic turnaround that he softly whisper sings “I think about you all of the time” into, and the current signifier of “sad, reflective content incoming.” It’s spawned its own set of reactions - people either referencing difficult to find tearjerkers (“the one with the guy an a blue shirt” which I’ve never seen) or just generally referring to the trend

@nowkie10

😭😭

The video of the two women crying currently stands at 72mm views to the original’s 12.4mm (almost 6x the views). This seems to be an unintended consequence of solving for engagement, as all the recommendation algos do. The depiction of two women going through a strong emotional reaction to something paired with such a cryptic headline begs further curiosity in the form of engagement (which means it gets pushed to more feeds).

I took the bait of course. I needed to find the original. First, I hit the comments, which then sent me down a multi-video rabbit hole where, frustratingly, I kept running into other videos about the video, the “metavideos” as it were, and still no closer to what the hell everyone was crying over. I vaguely got the sense that this was a cat that probably died, but also there’s a Beanie Baby involved?

I note that I am also not the only one having this issue - within the comment sections of the metavideos, the Tik Tok suggested search (culled from comments in the comments section) entices you with a search link to “the mango cat video original.”

Unfortunately, the first video on this query for me was a nasally influencer-cadenced greenscreen floating head commenting loosely on the video in question:

@beautifulpeoples69

#greenscreen #cat #animals #mango #pet #rescue #fyp #kitten #cute

Incidentally, this sort of thing - a thin “fair use” voice over rehash of something that’s popular really feels like the kind of thing that generative AI video is going to run ramshod over in like a month’s time - it’s easy, it’s in the strike zone of both summary AI, generative AI voices, and hell even the floating talking head, not being the focus, could be generated whole cloth or generatively augmented as this video was).

Anyone who drinks deeply from the strange human well of the Internet knows that this is quite possibly the worst way of experiencing a video, as the kinds of people engaging in this sort of content churn bottom-feeding are knuckle-dragging morons to begin with, so it’s not even like the commentary is all that insightful or interesting to begin with. Old heads like me perhaps note the similarities of this kind of video to the busty reply girl era of YouTube, wherein a flaw in YouTube’s approach to “reaction videos” (which placed a row of four thumbnail links in prime real estate under the original video) allowed a brief renaissance of chesty babes providing bored threadbare commentary to what seemed like every popular video on the platform (as, in a misguided attempt to push this feature, YouTube left “video reactions” on for new uploads by default)

In any case, as one follows the threads around the Mango video trying to find the original, it feels aimless. It’s hard to judge if something’s the “real” original video or not just from the short thumbnail previews, especially if the metavideos are using the visuals of the original and there are apparently a few other (alive) orange cats named “Mango.” Other comments echo this sentiment of feeling lost - “Can someone explain I don’t understand also what is the mango cat video” from Sarah.Whitlock has 82.4k likes and 353 replies.

Which, of course, predisposes me to really not like this Mango video when I actually do find it. Here it is: (You’ll need to click on this, as it’s a photo slideshow which (pure speculation) may explain why it was difficult to find as this type of TikTok content seems to be harder to embed/link to which suggests it’s in a different bucket of content that might be treated differently)

I don’t wish to impugn upon the many people who are having genuine emotional reactions to a story of a pet dying (suffice to say, I did not have such an emotional reaction. My relationship with my cat Moku can be described as brusque and businesslike to the extreme). Nor do I have anything bad to say about the person who created the video. But there’s a lot of things, formalistically, that’s happening here which I note:

There’s the anthropomophism of the cat itself in the form of orange-colored subtitles in which the cat speaks like a naive innocent child. Milennial doggo speak this is not, but the desire to cutesy up our pets with an affected manner of speech is certainly there. There’s is one grief selfie (speaking only for myself, I can’t help but raise an eyebrow every time I see a selfie or video of someone crying that they took themselves because I can’t remove the fact that they framed up and shot it and quite possibly did a few takes and selected the best one to upload , which just intuitively feels like maybe the grief has a bit of performative clickbaityness baked into it).

And, from a dramatic standpoint, the Beanie Baby end up being very important because it shows up at the very end as our emotional punchline. The Beanie Baby is coincidentally also named Mango, and the little poem in the card, in the context of everything we’ve seen before it, is transformed from corpo copywriting to poetic profundity. “I climbed up here just for the view” goes from a trite observation about cats liking to climb shit into some quasi-spiritual meaning of life shit which, if it works for you (like apparently many folks in the comments) hell yeah nice dawg, but it feels a little bit like ascribing great depth and import to a McDonalds Happy Meal.

Not that you can’t have a deep fast food experience - like, I don’t doubt this lady had a real moment with this Beanie Baby (indeed, the power of finding the coincidence of the beanie baby may very well be the raison d’etre for the slideshow in the first place). But this is where I think my age really stands out - to me, in sum total, the desire to post about it colors my assessment, and I acknowledge that for a more online crowd, such entanglements don’t exist because so much more of their lives has been “posting about it.” In any case, I’m willing to bet the OP is younger than me.

Still, almost six times as many people saw the reaction video compared to the original. The initial splash of a presumably earnest, heart wrenching expression of grief for a lost cat created ripples that spread outward: reactions and comments, valuable engagement which incited curiosity (that video definitely would have a lower viewcount if the subtitle read: “I showed her the video of Mango, the cat that died.”) Of those people who try and find the original, I wonder how many gave up, happy with a vague idea of what that was all about and simply moved on with their day.

And crucially - if engagement is what the algos optimize for, is a roundabout search for answers more valuable to the feed?nThat is, if they served me the original video immediately, would I have spent less time on the app than if I had to hunt for it? Is it better for TikTok that their search is kind of shitty if it means we spend more time searching, and by extension, more time on the app? I wonder, too, if they’re even looking that far ahead. Are algo feed apps doomed to push the envelope of “engagement no matter what,” and eventually reach a tipping point (which happened to me with Twitter/X) where they cross the threshhold of “too annoying” and cause people to abandon them entirely? When the consequence is diffuse and temporally dislocated from the impulse, would those data engineers even know what caused people to leave? Or does it even matter if it’s a death by a thousand cuts?

That is the epoch of internet experience we seem to be moving towards - things are just a little bit more annoying than they used to be, but not annoying enough that you abandon the platform. They got us into the proverbial door on these apps, now it’s about how much they can get away with while keeping us here.

In this epoch, clear answers take a back seat to vibes and impressions. Better to keep people confused and searching than to serve them exactly what they want. From that environment, easy answers must flourish, and easy answers, I’ve come to find, are usually wrong. Another weird side effect of optimizing for engagement.