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Whether this list leans more toward "cursed" or "blessed" ultimately depends on your interpretation. However, the cursed image as a meme can trace its roots straight back to the Creepypasta era. For the unfamiliar, Creepypastas were a mix of horror stories and urban legends that emerged from various forums and dark corners of the internet in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
A spooky subset of "copypasta"—blocks of text copied, pasted, and circulated online like digital chain letters—Creepypasta notably gave rise to legendary characters such as the infamous Slender Man and the moral-panic-inducing bird-woman chimera, Momo.
"The thing around Creepypasta stuff is that sometimes it blurs the lines between genuinely, earnestly supposed to be scary and something that's scary but also playful and funny," says Ryan Milner, an assistant professor in communications at the College of Charleston and author of a book about the rise of meme culture, The World Made Meme.
What usually separates a cursed image from a simple shock photo is that the terror is implied rather than stated outright. There is always an imagined narrative lurking behind it—albeit one that is frequently and deeply unclear.
You're left with the distinct sense that a highly specific, chaotic series of unfortunate and bizarre events led up to that moment.
With blursed images, this confusion is even more intense because your brain is kind of trying to laugh, gasp, and "aww" at the exact same time.
Blursed images seem to reaffirm the "benign violation theory." Basically, it says that for something to be funny, it has to hit three specific boxes all at the exact same time: it has to feel a little wrong, it has to be completely safe, and you have to realize both of those things simultaneously.
The "wrong" part—the violation—just means the situation breaks your expectations of how the world should work. This can be anything from physical playfighting and tickling to someone totally butchering grammar rules for a bad pun.
But how do you make something that feels wrong feel safe (or blessed)? According to experts, there are three main ways to do it:
You just don't care that much: If a church gives away a giant luxury SUV as a prize, a highly religious person might find it offensive, but someone who isn't religious will probably just laugh because they have no skin in the game.
You've got some distance: It’s the classic rule of comedy—it’s funny because it happened a long time ago, it happened to someone else, or it’s completely fictional.
There's a backup explanation: Take tickling or playfighting. Your brain initially flags it as a physical attack, but the backup explanation is, "Oh wait, this person is just playing around." It's actually why primates laugh during roughhousing—the laughter is a literal signal to the rest of the group saying, "Hey, this looks scary, but we're totally okay.
In a chaotic world where news headlines seem to defy logic more and more with each passing day, the blursed meme kind of reaffirms the fact that it's not just us who think everyone's going crazy.
When reality itself starts to feel like a giant, unsettling joke, our brains naturally look for a release valve. As Kurt Vonnegut famously put it, "Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward."
