Zalgo

"He comes..."

- Message of Zalgo's presence.

"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!"

- Invocation of Zalgo.

Z͠a̛'l͘ga̶t҉ot̡h, also known as Z̤͂â̢ḷ͊g̹̓ȯ̘, is an eldritch horror depicted as the personification of chaos and evil, and is considered one of the most popular Creepypasta characters to date.

Origin
On July 27, 2004, on SomethingAwful website, a user named Goon Shmorky uploaded several versions of the comic Nancy and Archie in which the term Zalgo was used. On August 22, 2009, Shmorky explained the creation of Zalgo on the SomethingAwful forums, making a post in which he explains detailed the origin of Zalgo. He claims that he likes how people are trying to solve the meme, while no one knows Zalgo's true origin. He goes on to say that he is the creator of Zalgo and that he just made it up.

On forums and image boards, scrambled text began being associated with Zalgo with phrases like "he comes" and "he waits behind the wall."

Background
Zalgo lives in a palace of tortured glass, served by legions of monsters forged from the tears of the undead, and each one clad in armor carved from the concentrated suffering from grieving mothers. He also is said to live within all mankind, waiting for the thin glass wall within them to crack, so that he may take over.

Zalgo's Manifestations
Zalgo's coming is heralded by the fabric of reality itself snarling or screaming "He comes!", and the horrific mutation of web comic characters and fonts. Gaping, toothy maws, stingers, and masses of tentacles are the norm. Invariably, the eyes turning to black slime and run down their cheeks like tears of oil. Font scrambles and loses coherence.

Corruptions
While Zalgo has yet to break our universe, the dreadful entity has already plagued numerous worlds. Zalgo usually corrupts three-strips comics, by twisting the characters, the fonts and the story line itself into a nonsensical, yet horrific travesty of the original material.

The pattern of a Zalgo's manifestation within a comic is often the following: first, a message will occur. This message might be the classic line "He comes", or a character casually mentioning a cursed object (e.g. the root of T'Char), song or Zalgo itself. Then, the victims begin to lose their limbs, which are replaced with black tentacles that grow exponentially. In the meantime, their eyes are drained by the same supernatural influence; they might bleed excessively in the process. Then, they can no longer talk coherently; any speech they might still produce is reduced into either a string of indistinguishable symbols or nonsensical babbling. Eventually, their whole faces and bodies are horribly mutated beyond the imaginable in an extremely gruesome and bloody way. The victims are unable to do anything since they're all under Zalgo's influence and most of the time they won't even react (or no longer react) to what is happening to them.

It is worth to note that this process, while it always consumes the whole universe affected, is gradual and that some characters might notice the events unfolding, even if it's too late. It is also possible, though quite rare, that Zalgo "skips" parts of the process, such as his "announcement", and immediately twists everything into whatever he wants.