For as long as I can remember,  being a trash animal has been considered the adorable raccoon’s game. The masked critters would creep around in the night, destroying giganting garbage bags of food, rifling through compost, and even waltzing into my Brooklyn apartment to hydrate from my poor cat’s fountain. Once they just straight up started gobbling up her food. Until relatively recent years, raccoons left our other favorite trash critter, possums, in the proverbial dust. Possums are complicated critters – and they’re sadly not nearly as cute as their rivals. In fact, at least in my own yard, they seem way more bumbling – stomping around the leaves and eating rotten pears that have fallen from our tree. They’re not very fast, and they’re the opposite of sneaky. So why is the meme world so obsessed with them? We’re not entirely sure. But meme-makers paint an incredibly entertaining portrait of the animals, and who are we to argue?