There’s a crow and seagull war around where I work. Pretty wild sky fights, but otherwise typical bird business. One time I heard what sounded like a tornado of crows outside, so I went out to see if some kind of crow Voltron was assembling. Outside was every crow I’ve ever seen screaming and swooping around one unlucky seagull that was tangled in fishing line and hanging from a tree. I cut it down untangled it and it flew off but what really freaked me out was how quiet all of the crows got when I got involved. I can’t prove it and I don’t know how they did it but I know the crows did this.
That’s what I thought at first too but there were no knots, bait, or hooks. Just a tangled messy of fishing line. When it all went silent and I could see that seagull swaying upside down it felt like something out of True Detective.
There’s a comic, titled “Loss”, which is infamous, because it’s incredibly fucking depressive. People don’t enjoy being reminded of it. And so, of course, it has become an internet culture / meme thing to do precisely that, but in a sneaky way.
In particular, the comic has 4 panels and an arrangement of characters in a certain, recognizable pattern. So, over time, it’s been reduced ad absurdum to just this pattern.
Well, and in the meme above, it becomes apparent that it’s replicating the Loss pattern, when that fourth panel has the DNA flipped on its side. So, the joke is that we have the pattern-seeking brain for recognizing Loss.
I think a good way to introduce people to the loss format is to show them the original vs the two-stick version, and then show the derivatives. It’s golden and still makes me laugh!
If I recall correctly, it’s not infamous for being super depressing but because it used to be a light hearted web comic (CTRL+ALT+DEL) about nerds doing nerd stuff and then the author decided to go into this weird dramatic arch of an ongoing love story that just didn’t really fit into the whole thing. The “Loss” strip was the overly dramatic peak of this arch and I think at this point people were already making fun of it. While the topic certainly is pretty depressing, it was more the fact that this whole thing was rather cringeworthy and over the top that started the whole meme.
I had always wondered how Loss became such a meme. The comic itself was rather uninspired and lame, and it was odd to me when the internet made it take off…although the memes about it tend to be mildly entertaining. Knowing the context behind it helps a lot.
I was a youngin’ when this happened, and I loved webcomics so I was paying attention to the scene. I hated CAD though.
Everything you said is right, and I want to add my own perspective.
The author took his uninspired joke strip where there was no plot, gave the main character (the self-insert) a girlfriend (and keep in mind, the self-insert was your typical no-personality nerd main character), and started to make a plot arch out of it. The girlfriend got pregnant, and this is drama. And instead of having any of the characters grow into people with personalities, he gave that girlfriend character a miscarriage. So he could get back to his no-plot video game joke strip.
It felt very much like those sit-com episodes where everything has to be wrapped up in a half hour, and nobody can learn anything because the show will go to syndicated reruns and be played out of order.
Miscarriages are stressful, emotional events, and he turned it into a disposable plot point. The girlfriend character had no real character development. She was a cardboard cutout introduced to be a girlfriend, and her suffering was used to neatly wrap this plot up for the strip.
It was loathsome. Just awful, unfunny obtuse nonsense written by a man with no ability to self reflect, and no intellectual curiosity about how other people think and feel.
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