Aubrey Plaza Loves Grumpy Cat No Matter What

Oh joy, this week the Lifetime special Grumpy Cat's Worst Christmas Ever is set to premiere, with deadpan queen Aubrey Plaza is set to voice Internet meme sensation Grumpy Cat aka Tarder Sauce. A wonky career move on her part, perhaps, but of course Plaza doesn't care about what you think her artistic credibility. In fact, she's been shutting down web sass on Twitter for a month now, and it's awesome on so many levels.

First all, let's relent: Grumpy Cat is a national treasure. I vaguely remember my best friend seeing Tarder Sauce on the cover of New York Mag and being literally overcome with emotions. So yeah, it's ridiculous, but it's so awesomely ridiculous that everyone will watch it, and Plaza is capitalizing on this. Besides, what else do you expecting from a Lifetime movie?

Second of all, duh, of course Plaza doesn't care what you think. She's April Ludgate. She's 2014's answer to Daria. She's sarcasm personified. And watching her fight back little smack-talking twerps on Twitter has been a glorious battle, saddled up with multiple images of the adorably melancholy meme. It's a tactic that both brilliant and kind of mock-immature.

Contrast that to the approach of Allison Williams, who's to have her own half hokey, half fantastical special later this week. Williams sent out a message to viewers of the NBC Peter Pan special, stating:

If you're going to watch this the same way that you watch a TV show that you hate, but you hate-watch it with all your friends so that you can drink wine and tweet at each other about how it's bad, you need to just go ahead and take those lenses out of your glasses and put in the lenses that you had when you were six.

Essentially this still comes across as fighting words, but the subtext is that Williams doesn't have the energy to deal with snarky Tweeters. Plaza, with her biting wit and snappy one-liners, is much more like, "Bring it on."

Both women are free to deal with the veritable wave of social media sass however they please, of course. Personally I also don't have any patience for mean tweets myself. Morever, I don't mean to put words in Plaza's mouth and issue a challenge to all of Twitter, to blatantly assume she wants to spend all night sorting through badly misspelled insults in 140-character bites would be a dick move on my part.

But I am sure, with absolute confidence, that she could bounce back any negativity you throw her way. In fact, here's a selection of times she's been boldly shutting down Grumpy Cat naysayers over the past month. In short: don't mess with the master, kiddies, negativity is totally her thing. She's GRUMPY CAT, for Christ's sake.

"So terrible it's genius" should be Lifetime's tagline.

I thought Jingle All The Way was the DEFINITION of a classic? Definitely up there with It's A Wonderful Life, tbh.

Tarder Sauce picked up the slack on this one.

Simple but effective.

So nice it had to be done twice.

I'm sure she does not lose sleep over things like this.

It's a Christmas movie about a famous perpetually-frowning cat, of course you're going to watch it.

I'd like to think Plaza WOULD be the type of woman to throw an end-of-my-career party.

Banked in on Internet gold, I think.

I mean, if that isn't an excited face, I don't know what is.

A new twist on an old favorite.

GOOD.

Image: Giphy