An eagle-eyedSplatoon 3player has correctly recognized a reference to the iconic meme ‘Loss’ in one of the game’s lockers. New to the series,Splatoon 3introduces lockers as a way of sharing a player’s personality with others, allowing them to fill and cover it with weapons, gear, and decorations to their heart’s content.
Splatoon 3lockersseem to already be a hit, with many unique and funny designs reaching social media. However, this particular locker is hiding a reference in plain sight, created with squid stickers.
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TheSplatoon 3meme was shared on Reddit with fellow fans by user UwU1408, who simply asked, “is this…” a shortened version of how most people refer to the meme, with “Is this loss?” The screenshot from the game shows the inside of a locker door covered in squid stickers. However, there’s a pattern here: it follows the original comic’s four panel setup, with one squid by itself, then three iterations of two squids each, with the one squid standing and the other lying down in the final panel. Anyone who wasn’t familiar with thetragedy-inspired memelikely wouldn’t recognize it as one at all, but this particular meme has been broken down so much since its origination that it’s often referenced with nothing but lines.
The ‘Loss’ meme being referenced here originated with the webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del, which was primarily a webcomic about video games. However, the creator surprised his readers when he tried to take the comic down a serious path, creating a comic in which no dialogue is spoken, but the main character can be seen running through a hospital to find his girlfriend who had just had a miscarriage. Despite the serious nature of the subject matter, the comic ultimately became a meme, and is often referenced online. These references are sometimes as simple as a series of lines matching the pattern of where characters are placed, complete with the protagonist’s girlfriend Lilah lying on her side on a hospital bed in the final panel, just as theSplatoon 3playerdid with the positioning of the squid stickers.
Readers in the comments were quick to agree that this was a reference to the iconic meme, and others noted that they’d seen similar Loss memes in the game, either as a message somewhere in the town square or in other lockers. It’s likely that many more memes will be spotted in users' lockers going forward as more playersunlockSplatoon 3itemsand decorations to place in them.
