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Zalgo is a meme where a popular picture/comic is edited in a way that "corrupts" it, producing scary results. The term "Zalgo" refers to the being apparently responsible for the corruption, whose name is uttered by its victims in an eldritch manner. Zalgo can be recognized by the two words often repeated when he is near...

"He comes."

NOTE: Do NOT post Zalgo text in the discussion area or anywhere else on the wiki. Doing so will subject you to a ban.

The Creature

Zalgo is a being that could best be described as a horror of incomprehensible form. He is known as "He Who Waits Behind the Wall" and the "Nezperdian Hivemind" in some circles. He is an eyeless abomination with seven mouths. His right hand holds a dead star, and his left hand holds the Candle Whose Light Is Shadow and is stained with the blood of Am Dhaegar. Six of his mouths speak in different tongues. When the time is right, the seventh shall sing the song that ends the Earth:

To invoke the hive-mind, representing chaos. Invoking the feeling of chaos. Without order. The Nezperdian hive-mind of chaos. Zalgo. He Who Waits Behind the Wall. ZALGO!

Origin

Zalgo is the brainchild of Dave Kelly (aka "Shmorky"), a Flash animator and Something Awful "goon". It was first mentioned (but not seen) in parodies of syndicated newspaper comics on a semi-secret page on his official site.

Since the meme's spread, Shmorky has made several flash animations referencing it, in his own inimitable style, of course. Oddly, according to him, Zalgo only affects comics, cartoons, and illustrations, not reality itself.

According to a presently archived forum post, Shmorky describes Zalgo as thus:

I like how people who try to figure out the origin of the "meme" don't even know where it came from originally. I'll tell you where it came from. From me. I just made it up. Zalgo is something horrible. Zalgo is something that's coming. It's coming soon. It has nothing to do with Lovecraft. I'm not nerdy enough to make those kind of references. Seeing it become a meme kinda killed doing further Zalgo edits in the future (for me anyway) but maybe I'll do one when you least expect it.

In modern media, Zalgo exists as an icon of pre-digital-era viral memes and how technology helps to disseminate information quicker than it can be analyzed. As evidenced by the latter claim, Zalgo is an example of how the internet can rapidly obfuscate or warp information the further away from the source said information is spread. Zalgo's consistent affinities lean towards corruption, death, violence and insanity, a further reflection of the nature of human insight and how taking in hazardous information (or cognitohazards, ala the SCP Foundation) can lead to one's destruction.

Originally uploaded on February 23rd, 2011

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