One of the lockers in Splatoon 3 nods to the well-known meme Loss, as a sharp-eyed player notices. In Splatoon 3, a first for the series, lockers are introduced as a method for players to share their personalities with others. In addition, players can customize their lockers in any way they see fit by adding whatever weapons, equipment, and decorations they like.
Many original and humorous designs for Splatoon 3 lockers have made their way into social media. But, on the other hand, the safe in question has a squid sticker-made reference hidden in plain sight.
The photo from the game depicts the inside of a locker door covered in squid stickers, and user UwU1408 shared the Splatoon 3 meme with other fans on Reddit by asking simply, “is this,” an abbreviated version of how most people refer to the meme, with Is this loss. There is a pattern, though: it duplicates the original comic’s four-panel layout, starting with a single squid, followed by three variations of two squids apiece, with the last panel featuring a standing squid and a lying one.
The webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del, mostly a webcomic about video games, is where the “Loss” meme being discussed here first appeared. Although there is no spoken dialogue in the comic, the main character can be seen scurrying through a hospital to find his lover, who had just experienced a miscarriage. This attempt by the creator to take the comic in a severe direction astonished his audience. As a result, the comic eventually became a meme and is frequently mentioned online, despite the brutal nature of the subject matter.
These allusions can be as straightforward as a sequence of words that follow the placement of characters, with the protagonist’s lover Lilah lying on her side in a hospital bed in the last panel, much like the Splatoon 3 player did with the placement of the squid stickers.
