The Kitten Brothers

About

The Kitten Brothers also known as The Colors Brothers is an exploitable meme template featuring three differently colored kittens who are made to represent different concepts in groups of three, such as saturation, hue and contrast, or thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The image originates from an X (formerly Twitter) post from 2022 and was first seen in meme format on Tumblr in September 2023. The meme may be derived from the The iPod Brothers trend.

Origin

On October 25th, 2022, X^[1] user @mousefountain posted, "Seeing our cat's kittens that she had before we adopted her: it's like she split into her component elements." The post contained a photo of a tortie cat and her differently-colored kittens and gathered over 89,000 likes in two years (seen below).

In July 2023, a meme featuring two ducklings labeled as the iPad Brothers began making the rounds on Tumblr. On September 22nd, 2023, Tumblr^[2] user @crazysodomite posted a version of the meme showing the three kittens labeled Saturation, Hue, and Contrast, gathering over 84,000 notes in five months (seen below).

Spread

On October 1st, 2023, an unknown Tumblr account posted a version of the meme that labeled the kittens as Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis, calling them the "Dialectics Brothers." The image was widely reposted, as evidenced by an October 20th Instagram^[3] post by @sadchonks that gathered over 39,000 likes in four months (seen below, left).

On November 2nd, 2023, X^[4] user @moragearsolid posted an edit of the meme referencing the video game Metal Gear Solid, gathering over 34,000 likes in three months (seen below, right).

Redraws of the meme began to make the rounds in late 2023 as well, as seen in a December 22nd, 2023 post by X^[5] user @eylcokfakir that gathered over 1,000 likes in a month (seen below, left), and a January 11th, 2023 post by X^[6] user @Lego_enjoyer4 that gathered over 105,000 likes in a day (seen below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References