And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,33

poems as a sign of despair before taking her own life – or were they her last will and testament? These questions remain open.

As soon as the poems and the legend made their appearance in the digital domain in this century, they gave rise to a huge industry that has been taking on various shapes ever since. For more than nine decades, Girl & Rat has been told and recorded on every medium imaginable, and you even find its imprint in extraterrestrial human colonies. Each generation offered its own interpretation, whether based on ones from earlier times or introducing a meaning all its own.

It started with the poems, which became tremendously popular with teenagers. But once the Japanese comics appeared in 2013 and developed into a major industry, with interactive animation and multimedia games, Girl & Rat became a hit with younger kids too. When the pop music industry recognized the potential, many of the poems were set to music and made the charts. The mass hysteria peaked in the autumn of 2015 with Tail, which became an enormous hit and has had dozens of arrangements. One of them, a medium they used to call a “video clip”, shows a singer down on his knees, with a winged rat bursting out of a cloud of black particles and handing him a cross made of potatoes. I find it hard to believe that you don’t have a single one of these songs stored in a submemoryfolder, because until about twenty years ago, the first few notes were the signal tune for several messaging systems. The screensaver version, the one that was such a hit when we were younger, shows a little girl who grows tails from every part of her body. She catches the beamee and turns him into her personal rat.

Remember that, Stash?

Your brain couldn’t possibly have classified all of that under “irrelevant information”.

Soon afterwards, Girl & Rat became the visual image most likely to be found on diaries, calendars and PDAs, even more popular than Raphael’s angel – which was the most common visual at the turn of the century. Girl & Rat stickers are on display in a special wing of the Twenty-First Century Museum in Washington, and a notebook with the 2014 print sold last year for a record fifty million eurollars.

I was there when they beamed the auction.

If only I knew who bought that precious notebook...

Since the second decade of this century, Girl & Rat has been an icon of alternative religious movements, mostly non-mainstream ones. The poems became cult texts: they’ve been carved on tombstones, quoted in eulogies and virtual condolence books, and sung at wakes and cremations. Girl & Rat shrines have been built all over, first just at sites dedicated to extinct species, and later at rest-and-recreation sites and online shopping centres. The most popular shrine ornament is an electronic figurine of a dark, eyeless little girl with seven rat tails wrapped around her arm. It was later converted into a popular slot machine: figure out the right tail to pull – and win the jackpot.

The legend that went with the poems played an important role in the development of the Girl & Rat myth. It probably began with a rumor – an incredibly effective way of transmitting information – and soon cropped up on the ancient internet. The legend provided the narrative context in which the poems could be interpreted. New details were added from time to time, such as the tradition that identified the little girl as the daughter of a father from India and a Native American mother.

No sooner did the phenomenon take hold than an opposition formed, especially in North America and Western Asia. Almost every religious leadership took part in the effort to boycott the new fashion and to campaign against it. Politicians, educators and parents’ organizations joined the bandwagon. Some of them tried to prove that the poems and the legend were connected to the Cult of the Devil, and made them out to be a despicable incitement to killing, suicide, extreme violence and child abuse. The accusations gained widespread support initially, and I’m sure they had their effect on you, too.

But ultimately, Girl & Rat defied all its critics and assumed its place as a cultural tradition. By 2020 it was here to stay, thanks to the dramatic decision of the Board at PanEuroDisney Productions to replace Mickey Mouse with Mickey Rat and to give it wings: the black wing cast an artificial darkness, and the