https://cad-comic.com/comic/loss/
Context: dude made an autobiographical comic more serious in tone than his usual work, and the Internet has been mocking him for it ever since.
None of which makes sense without the context of what a enormous jackass Buckley had famously been in online spaces for YEARS. It’s not just that loss was a weirdly serious addition to a silly comic, it’s that it perfectly encapsulated the kind of sanctimonious self-important attitude Buckley espoused and instantly turned his shitty online persona into a joke.
I don’t know if it is genuinely possible to still appreciate loss the way it was without all of the enormity of that context.
I think Cyanide and Happiness did a good job encapsulating your point and why everyone clowned on it at the time.
Man, at this point some sociology student could probably write a dissertation just on the cultural context of this comic alone. Both the stuff you’re talking about regarding de-stigmatizing talking about trauma (and miscarriage in particular), and the way the comic itself has been meme-ified and distilled down to representations as abstract as “.:|:;”
I see your point and don’t entirely disagree, I’ll just its hard to feel bad about somebody suffering the consequences of their own actions (not the miscarriage obviously, but the reaction to it).
You don’t really get to complain about feeling alone when you’re the one that burned all the bridges that lead to your house, imo.
It’s really surprising that something so obscure became a meme. What’s the first instance of the comic being represented with line segments like that? How did they come to be recognizable?
The original comic was rather popular at the time, and as a result, it became an early meme before mass-scale meme culture had really taken off besides doge memes and “I can haz cheeseburger.” So it quickly entered the cultural zeitgeist of the early internet because the kinds of people into memes and gamer culture at the time would’ve been about the size of the terminally online crowd today.
