Cancer

Pictured: Cancer infecting a thread.

"This thread gave me cancer."

"______ is the cancer that's killing /tg/."

From the Greek noun 'karkinos' which meant both the hard-shelled crustaceans you find on the beach, and the hard cysts ("cankers") you find under your skin when you're infected with a plague. When the term is used on 4chan, it means a meme that the speaker fears will kill the host organism (ie. anyone who looks at it), and likely infect others to kill them as well, "degrading" a board and its community as a whole.

Just about anything can be called "a cancer," because butthurt fa/tg/uys will use extreme reactions as a first resort. Some ideas seem to attract this label more than others. Here's a short list:

• My Little Pony (supporting or hating it; /tg/ just wants to get on with its fucking life)
  • Any and all obsessive fandoms, to a similar extent.
• Chris-chan They're something worse now.
• F.A.T.A.L. in general (though extracting humor from it is well and good)
• Lengthy, marathon discussions about Matthew Ward, when everyone already knows how much he sucks, and why, and /tg/ just wishes it (and GW) could move on...
• The fights that break out when someone compares 4E to other editions of Dungeons & Dragons
• Tryhard "humor"
• "Stat me" threads
• "This is how I X" threads
• Skub vs. Anti-Skub discussions by idiots who don't understand the meme involved
• Old memes, new memes, borrowed memes, blue memes
• /b/, and /b/-related anything
• /pol/ and /pol/-related anything
• SJWs forcing their ideas on everyone
• /leftypol/ and /leftypol/-related anything
• Using a lot of italics for emphasis.

And to a Lesser Extent

• Anything you hate about any site you are on, from your perspective
• Anything you like about any site you are on, from someone else's perspective

IRL Fluff

In your body, right now, cells are shitting the bed. And they do it nonstop, all the time, and such is life.

Sometimes, however, a dying cell gives death the middle finger and decides to persist, often due to a mutation that stops the cell from Blamming itself once it picks up one too many genetic defects. And then it multiplies, squatting on valuable real estate in your body while picking up even more mutations. Before you know it, one of two things happen;

• You either get a benign tumor, which grows and grows without invading its neighbors or is successfully contained by your body, but crowds out vital shit, and can be cumbersome and/or ugly if its big enough to show from outside. The moles that dot your skin are such an example;
• Or, you get malignant tumors, the "proper" cancers by definition, which are basically the cellular equivalents to plague zombies. And malignant ones are hard as balls to remove (since the cancer cells can travel through lymphatic vessels to create new tumors elsewhere even after the original tumor is dealt with) unless you know what you're doing and nigh impossible to get rid of outside hospital settings. Doctors can catch cancer early and give you medicine to kill it off (which causes a lot of collateral damage since the drugs are geared to kill all cells that divide rapidly, which includes a lot of cells that you generally need- for example, the ones that produce hair or line your intestines, hence the hair loss and nausea/vomiting that occur as common side effects), or Exterminatus cancer via radiation therapy (which might induce mutations in other cells and has similar downsides to chemotherapy) or surgery (which doesn't always remove all of the cancer if parts of it are too small to see and might not be possible if the cancer is so big that it can't be removed without critically damaging the organ it's attached to). When 4chan says "something" is cancer, this is the type of tumor that particular "something" is compared to.

Sometimes, benign tumors become malignant through a process called tumor progression that causes them to mutate further, and yes this includes those moles, where something tricks your body into grafting a blood vessel or two onto the once-harmless growth, or the tumor snags another defect that allows it to cut loose and move beyond what was otherwise a relatively confined space. Going back to the 4chan analogy, what was once properly contained might spread out to other threads or boards either because of trolls, newfags, or current events just allowing them to spiral out of control.

In Conclusion

/tg/ is the cancer killing /tg/.