Example: "I went on a hike and saw a 'mountain dark fly alive thing' yesterday!" probably means an owl or something.

山暗飞生物? I'd be pretty shocked at a word for an indigenous species (like "owl") that was more than two characters.

Not because they’re cute but because they’re are semi-reflective of how they’re used to reading.

Edit: HN won’t let me paste emoji examples :( they were pretty good I thought.

[1] One could argue it may have been kanbun, that is Classical Chinese read with Japanese readings, but I think the character meaning cat was written in its simplified form (which is the same in Japanese and Simplified Chinese) so this rule this out. And someone which that much knowledge would state it if it was the case.

[2] Edit: the choice of vocabulary, while existing in Chinese, leaned a bit towards Japanese. I'm asking native Chinese speaker for confirmation. So, it was a weird mix, but not real Japanese.

PS: as far as I remember is was written 山猫求家族 but I may be wrong.

On a radically different note, I find it kind of surreal that comics 334 and 335 have been silently excised from this comic's archives page, and #333 now links forward to #336.