IMO it was never funny, it was actually pretty damned awful. The actual original piece was art and beat the shit out of the heart-strings. As it made it’s rounds for being profound in a comic, people got tired of seeing it immediately as it was so fucking sad and not funny. The internet turned it into a rick-roll, a goatse. When people got made with it they turned it into a puzzle, so that once you figured it out, you’d be angry and trigger a bit. It’s a troll.

This comic piece at the head of this post is a touch better than most. no one would come to the rescue when she asked for help, but posting the loss meme people would parachute in for, which is mostly what’s happening all over this thread… soooo… it is what it is, the original was probably best described as touching and sad, the response to it was assanine and the meta responses to it, while calling it out in new and fashionable ways, are still triggering.

I think there’s a few elements to it. The biggest part of it is that this comic artist had never done comics in this tone and the artist was already getting memed pretty often for generally “not that funny” jokes.

When this came out, it gave everyone whiplash because, well, who the fuck decided to make a comic about their wife’s miscarriage? I would get it to have a plain text media post or similar, but that was an odd step to take. IMO, that’s not something I’d casually drop in your otherwise innocuous comic strip.

Then the internet did its thing and the rest is history.

It was as severe of a tone shift as a miscarriage in the middle of a Dora the Explorer episode. Also, iirc the artist wasn’t having a personal miscarriage drama in real life, he just suddenly wanted an edgier plot line for his unfunny comic, so people started making fun of him for it.

Now it’s just a pattern recognition joke.

It’s not funny in now way, the whole trend was to sneak the Loss pattern into every possible meme, so it was more like a got you Rick rolled.