this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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A Reddit thread from April 2017 (possibly its first appearance?) does try to critique it. Notably, for example, there's a hexagon instead of a pentagon at the base, and the top shelf has three edges instead of four.
It's easy enough to explain this away given that you have to make it a shelf and therefore level, but humans have recognized more credible-seeming patterns before (I can't cite them because I can't remember exactly what they were, but I've seen some really funny ones in the Bible), so it also seems plausible that people are just pattern-recognizing. This is professionally animated, so time went into this, and you could imagine, for example, that the bulb hanging down from one of the shelves would've have been included since it changes the structure of the compound (but then you could equally argue that the shelf was there and some other animator put a light bulb on it).
All-in-all: eh. Seems neat as a harmless fan conspiracy.
Nothing wrong with having fun. My complaint is people complaining about references that were in the wholesome original works. ๐
Animators also tend to take a lot of shortcuts, though; especially when it comes to backgrounds in shots. I could definitely believe that some animator was like, "ok, we need a science-y looking decoration back here" and so they went on a royalty-free stock 3D asset website and downloaded this one based only on what it looked like.