Marie

Vanessa Gillen, the owner of Maxwell, posted a single photograph to Imgur on 20 March 2017 showing her senior domestic shorthair, a black-and-white male estimated at approximately fifteen years old at the time, seated in an unusually flat spread-out posture on a hardwood floor in her California home. The image accumulated modest organic Imgur views and circulated periodically as a reaction template across Reddit and Twitter through 2019 and 2020. The viral inflection arrived in April 2022 when an unrelated TikTok user produced a low-polygon 3D model rendering of the same posture, animated on a rotating turntable and overlaid on a sped-up loop of the song Levan Polkka, the Finnish polka standard previously associated with the Vocaloid character Hatsune Miku. The clip reached approximately 100 million combined views across TikTok and YouTube Shorts within six weeks of upload, prompting a second wave of news coverage in Polygon, Kotaku, Vice, the Verge, and BuzzFeed. The 3D Maxwell model became one of the most-templated meme objects of 2022, with subsequent variations including holiday-themed re-skins, video-game cameos (an unofficial Garry's Mod port, fan-made appearances in Source Filmmaker projects), and an extensive catalogue of derivative TikToks that placed the model in unrelated visual contexts. Maxwell himself, by then a senior cat with chronic age-related conditions, died of natural causes in November 2022, approximately seven months after the second viral cycle. Gillen published an obituary post on the original Imgur thread that the platform mirrored as a memorial; coverage in the Daily Dot and Kotaku ran tribute pieces. The 3D model has continued to circulate independently of the original photograph, with the meme entering a long retrospective phase through 2023 and 2024 that has periodically returned the model to top-trending status on TikTok. Gillen has not pursued commercial licensing of the image but has supported a fan-organised charitable fund raising contributions to the San Francisco SPCA in Maxwell's memory, the fund reportedly contributing approximately fifteen thousand dollars across its first eighteen months.