for the record if you do not know about loss .jpg the story is some pretentious (at the time at least) asshole artist named tim buckley made a comic called ctrl+alt+delete about really REALLY shitty and misogynistic gamer tropes and the main character was a self-insert gary stu. women were the butt of jokes all the time and most of the comic was light “jokes”. the comic started in 2002 and by 2008 was extremely famous and quality declined further. most people made fun of how poorly the artist wrote characters and portrayed emotion. he stopped drawing things by hand and assembled pre-made graphics into comics and threw a fit whenever anyone criticized him. he was very very famous at the time and let it get to his head. he was considered a huge asshole in early 2000s internet which says a LOT. he was also suing people for fanworks and was in general a total asshole. in a last ditch effort to prove everyone wrong and show the whole world he could express emotion and decent writing in his comic, tim made a four panel comic about a miscarriage.
everyone lost their shit mocking this guy who defended what he thought was a quality emotional comic. anyway here it is, an artist’s idea of good writing and intense emotional drama
while loss itself is about a miscarriage and definitely not funny on its own, the joke is more about the hubris of the infamous artist that made it and thought it was a genuinely heartfelt and appropriate comic, especially considering how much of a mood whiplash it was compared to the rest of the comics.
initially loss was sort of an internet-wide inside joke about pretentious artists, but eventually the | || || |__ format began to spread without the context, changing the meme from a criticism on how bad this guy was at writing to trying to hide or express the loss format in as many ways as possible. thanks for coming to my TED talk
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