Pro-cat

Yesterday afternoon, I bought some half-liter plastic bags. I use these bags when I clean out the cats' litter boxes, and I've been buying them regularly, the same brand of bags from the same store, for many years. When I got home and opened up the package of bags, I found that the company had changed their design. The bags, which had always been featureless before, now had something printed on them:

The bags are now decorated with a cartoon lion -- or, rather, what looks like a housecat with a lion's mane and tail. At the bottom of the bag is the Chinese character for "half," indicating the bag's half-liter capacity, and at the top it says "Pro の Cat." The central character is Japanese but is commonly used in Taiwan (which was formerly occupied by Japan) as a substitute for the Chinese character 的, which is transliterated as de and very roughly corresponds to our preposition "of" (and thus, coincidentally, to de in Spanish and French), except that the Chinese word is a post-position, coming after its object rather than before it. That is, the Chinese structure "A 的 B" is equivalent to the English "B of A." I don't speak Japanese, but my understanding is that の has a similar function in that language, which is why the Taiwanese treat the two characters as interchangeable. A quick Google search confirms this, and even uses "cat" in the example:

の (no) connects two nouns. It lets the first noun modify the second noun. Examples: 私の猫 (watashi no neko): my cat.

So apparently the intended meaning is either "professional cat" or "the pro's cat" -- both of which Google Translate renders as プロの猫 (puro no neko). However, my first thought when I saw it was that it said pro-cat -- an adjective describing one who is in favor of cats.

I remembered that earlier that day I had done a bit of browsing on 4chan and had come across a thread beginning with a post that said simply, "Protip: Stay away from people who don't like cats." Clearly a "pro-cat" post, and the use of protip (Japanese プロのヒント, puro no hinto) incorporates the other meaning of pro as well.

Having made that connection, I went back to 4chan to look for that thread. It was on /pol/, but I incorrectly remembered that it had been on /x/, so, figuring it was recent enough to still be in the current catalog, I started scrolling through the /x/ catalog. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did find a thread asking for thoughts on this symbol:

It just looks like a random hodgepodge of symbols to me. The three Chinese characters are 玉 (jade), 藻 (algae), and 前 (before), and right in the middle is the Japanese character の. As discussed above, this character doesn't actually mean anything; it's a grammatical particle. I would be like creating a similar symbol in English with the word of in big letters. Extremely odd. And I found it because the "Pro の Cat" bag had led me to search for the pro-cat thread.

Later, I was looking up the Tolkien character Thû, who is mentioned a lot in Doug's books. Apparently, he is the Necromancer, who later developed into Sauron, and his precursor was Tevildo, Lord of Cats (the Neko-mancer?). The image associated with Sauron is a single eye, and the pro-cat thread on /pol/ began with an image of two "one-eyed" cats: