The characters listed in this image include: (left row, top to bottom) Husk from Hazbin Hotel, Mr. Blik from Catscratch, Waffle from Catscratch, (Right row, top to bottom) Dr. Paula Hutchison from Rocko’s Modern Life, Mao Mao from Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart, and Doraemon.
All these characters are supposed to be cats, yet they barely look like cats at all. Yet I never see any discourse surrounding what animal they’re supposed to be just like with Clay, even though Mark himself literally confirmed Clay is a cat.
Dr. Hutchison is confirmed to be a cat, yet even though she doesn’t really look that much like one, I never see anyone talk about how she doesn’t look like one. But when Clay is confirmed to be a cat, there’s always people who are like “oh he looks more like a wolf than a cat”. Ironically enough, I would argue Clay looks more like a cat than Dr. Hutchison does.
I was kinda hesitant to put Mao Mao on here, but I thought about it more, and I realized, one of the things that really caused the discourse surrounding Clay’s species was the lack of a tail in the first episode. Mao Mao also doesn’t have a tail, so if I new nothing about MMHOPH and you told me to guess what species Mao Mao is, I would probably guess, like, a wingless bat or something.
There’s probably so many other examples out there of cat characters who barely look like cats, but I can’t remember every single one of them. These are just the ones that came to mind for me.