Was 'Loss' Really All That Cringe? Viral Tweet Reconsiders Infamous Comic And Sparks Debate

A doozy of meme discourse has erupted on Twitter / X this week after a brave user gave his best Freedom of Speech Guy impression to declare that "Loss," the notorious Ctrl+Alt+Del comic panel that inspired one of the internet's most famous memes for 16 years, was "fine," actually.

That user is @joepostingg, who on Sunday said of "Loss," "This was a perfectly fine comic, the insanely hostile reaction to it was some kind of collective psychosis."

This is an incendiary hot take to make about arguably the most infamous webcomic panel of all time, practically akin to meme sacrilege, as mocking "Loss" has been a rite of passage for a generation of memers.

Its iconic "I II II I_" structure has been a canvas for some of the internet's most creative memers to make some of the world's most frustrating exploitables, which in turn inspired other memes to turn into "Losslikes" where the original image's structure became fodder for minimalist edits.

Mr. Postingg's take inspired passionate responses from users who would not stand for Loss revisionism.

Know Your Meme has exhaustively covered the history of Loss over the years since its creation. The brief version is that "Ctrl+Alt+Del" was a stilted, vaguely comedic video game webcomic in the mid-late 2000s, an era when video game webcomics were in vogue and dime-a-dozen.

Most of the webcomic's jokes centered around silly gaming-based jokes and antiquated ideas about women, embodied by its female lead, Lilah. Its author, Tim Buckley, had been the subject of an anti-fandom for forum users on sites like 4chan and Something Awful.

On June 2nd, 2008, Buckley posted Loss, a comic that showed the comic's protagonist, Ethan, rushing into a hospital to find that Lilah had suffered a miscarriage.

This created a backlash within the webcomic community and fandom. On its own, "Loss," may not appear all that mock-worthy, but it marked a dramatic shift in tone from the goofy comic, appearing out of nowhere and tackling a gravely serious subject matter in what some might call an inelegant way.

One user responding to @joepostingg compared the publishing of "Loss" to SpongeBob trying "to do a 'serious' episode on abortion" (though comparing Ctrl+Alt+Del to SpongeBob is a grave insult to SpongeBob).

From there, other webcomics made parodies of Loss, while threads devoted to the comic devolved into pages and pages of mockery. Eventually, the "I II II I_" structure of the comic's four panels became so iconic that people began making minimalist edits, and the rest is history.

All of this was remembered by critics of @joepostingg's tweet, which seemed unaware of the mountains of context that turned "Loss" into an infamous webcomic.

"Loss" may not look all that awful on its own, so it's understandable why some people might be confused as to why it's one of the internet's most infamous memes.

Luckily, there's a website that will always be around to remind people of the history that turned Loss into an iconically bad webcomic.