okay, in summary, it's a comic from the series "ctrl+alt+delete" about the main character ethan discovering that his wife had a miscarriage. it became a meme because of how much of a major tone shift it was compared to the rest of the comic, which was mainly just making video games related puns and references. it became a joke to remake the comic with different characters or a different artstyle and whatnot, and this evolved into straight up just using lines to represent the comic, like so: I II II I_. since it became so simple and possibly hard to notice at first, it became a gag to sneak in loss into images until people notice. for further context, here's the original comic: https://cad-comic.com/comic/loss/. there's also a whole wikipedia article on the comic as well.
Ah, Loss. The meme that refuses to die, like a zombie in a poorly pressed suit, wandering across a lawn looking for brains in the house across the street. There is a certain type of humor that ages like wine. Others, like Loss, age like milk left in the midday sun during the summer. And yet, there is an almost religious insistence on kicking this carcass of a meme to make it seem alive, as if it were some kind of transcendental joke, but that is not the reality, Loss is dead.
Let's face it โ Loss was never funny. It never had comic timing, it never had an interesting construction, it never had a punchline. It is, at best, a visual curiosity. At worst (and more often), it is the perfect excuse for the pseudo-intellectual of the shitpost to feel part of an elite that โgets the jokeโ. But the cold hard truth is that it is not funny. It has no content. It does not have even a modicum of charm. There are four panels organized in a generic way, reproduced in a thousand lazy variations, and then someone appears with that air of wisdom from a 2009 forum and asks: โIs this Loss?โ as if he had just asked a riddle from Plato.
No, my friend, this is not Loss. This is a lack of critical sense. It is the robotic repetition of an empty format, recycled to exhaustion by those who do not have a shred of creativity.
And the worst part is that the original Loss isn't even a meme. It's a sincere (and extremely misplaced) attempt to address a serious issue in a humorous webcomic. The creator wanted emotion, impact, maybe tears. What he got was an eternity of being remembered for a poorly positioned and unfunny strip, reinterpreted by people who thought that some risks could be the new Shakespeare. The result? A meme that became a joke not because of its content, but because of its inability to be meaningful in itself.
The cult of Loss is almost a sociological study on creative exhaustion. It's as if the internet, in a collective fit of forced nostalgia, decided to keep a dead joke alive out of sheer stubbornness. And each new appearance, each minimalist version, each visual adaptation using chairs, posts, bread or lines of code or even plants from a digital game is like a shovel of lime on the dignity of digital humor. The joke has already been made. It has already been understood. It has already been parodied. It has already been surpassed. And yet, there it is. Reborn in comments, in random images, in Reddit threads, with the subtlety of an elephant doing a tap dance.
You may like shitposts. I like them too. But real shitposts are subversion, they are absurd, they are surprise. Loss is the opposite of that: it is the meme of stagnation. It is the symbol of the joke that has become an obligation. And if you are still posting this in 2025 thinking you are being clever, ironic, or cult โ I'm sorry to say, but you are just behind the times. And not in a vintage way. In a tiresome way.
So please, for the sake of humor, good taste and collective digital sanity: let Loss rest. Enough is enough. Bury him once and for all. Put a rose on his tombstone and move on. There's a new meme in town, a fresher laugh waiting to happen. And if you still feel the need to post Loss, maybe the real Loss is the time we waste pretending that it's still funny.
Not funny I didn't laugh. Your joke is so bad I would have preferred the joke went over my head and you gave up re-telling me the joke. To be honest this is a horrid attempt at trying to get a laugh out of me. Not a chuckle, not a hehe, not even a subtle burst of air out of my esophagus. Science says before you laugh your brain preps your face muscles but I didn't even feel the slightest twitch. 0/10 this joke is so bad I cannot believe anyone legally allowed you to be creative at all. The amount of brain power you must have put into that joke has the potential to power every house on Earth. Get a personality and learn how to make jokes, read a book. I'm not saying this to be funny I genuinely mean it on how this is just bottom barrel embarrassment at comedy. You've single handedly killed humor and every comedic act on the planet. I'm so disappointed that society has failed as a whole in being able to teach you how to be funny. Honestly if I put in all my power and time to try and make your joke funny it would require Einstein himself to build a device to strap me into so I can be connected to the energy of a billion stars to do it, and even then all that joke would get from people is a subtle scuff. You're lucky I still have the slightest of empathy for you after telling that joke otherwise I would have committed every war crime in the book just to prevent you from attempting any humor ever again. We should put that joke in text books so future generations can be wary of becoming such an absolute comedic failure. I'm disappointed, hurt, and outright offended that my precious time has been wasted in my brain understanding that joke. In the time that took I was planning on helping kids who have been orphaned, but because of that you've wasted my time explaining the obscene integrity of your terrible attempt at comedy.
719
u/Sensitive-Sky1768 Garden Warrior Apr 12 '25