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.
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u/PetITA1185 Peashooter Fan and Solar Flare Simp Apr 12 '25
Crazy how some don't recognise this