User blog:Red Chevalier/Pure Evil Removal Proposal: Zalgo

Here's another Removal Proposal I've been meaning to do for a while.

Who is the villain?
"Zalgo is an Internet legend about an ominous entity believed to cause insanity, death and destruction of the world, similar to the creature Cthulhu created by H.P. Lovecraft in the 1920s. Zalgo is often associated with scrambled text on webpages and photos of people whose eyes and mouth have been covered in black." (Know Your Meme)

Why he doesn't qualify
Zalgo is an Internet meme and thus doesn't really have much of a defined interpretation or personality and in most of its interpretations isn't Pure Evil. He doesn't even originate from any specific story, but rather a series of images uploaded to the SomethingAwful forms depicting edited versions of comic strips. The vast majority of appearances by Zalgo are played for shock value and have little depth or substance to them. As Zalgo is an Internet meme and thus is open to interpretation, in most of its depictions, Zalgo doesn't have much of a personality beyond being an entity out to corrupt others.

In doing research for my Removal Proposal, I visited TVTropes to see if they had any entries for Zalgo under their similar "Complete Monster" category. The only Zalgo approved to be a Complete Monster on there was its depiction in a Jeff The Killer fanfiction.

In addition to that, Zalgo is another villain who was autoapproved for Pure Evil on this wiki rather than being put through a legitimate PE approval submission process.

Final Verdict
Easy cut. Zalgo is an Internet meme with little defined personality and in most of its interpretations is not depicted as qualifying for Pure Evil. An individual depiction of Zalgo may qualify, but the overall meme does not.