Why this viral photo of the world’s largest cruise ship is polarizing opinion

The world’s largest cruise ship hasn’t welcomed a single passenger aboard yet, but it’s already set the internet on fire.

The Icon of the Seas — which recently completed its first set of sea trials in preparation for its maiden voyage in January 2024 — has amazing credentials: 1,198 feet long (316 feet longer than the Titanic), 159 feet wide, 20 total decks and a maximum capacity of almost 10,000 people including all passengers and crew.

But when an image of its stern section went viral in July, it polarized opinions, eliciting passionate reactions on all sides. The artist’s impression depicted the fully laden ship in vibrant colors, emphasizing its massive water park — featuring record-breaking water slides — and conveying the ship’s extraordinary size and density.

Not everyone interpreted it as a delightful vision of lavish fun and relaxation at sea. It got billed as a “monstrosity,” a “pile of decadence,” and one user suggested a better name for it would be “Icon of Disease.” It was called “intricately tacky and vulgar” and compared to “being stuck on a floating Walmart” or “a barely balanced stack of full plates of food; chaotic, messy, possibly precarious.”

Many juxtaposed it to visions of hell, with one commenter suggesting a parallel with Hieronymus Bosch, a Dutch Renaissance artist known for his intricate infernal landscapes. Another gave a more contemporary cultural reference, saying the ship looks like the Candy Crush version of the dystopian underground world in “Silo,” a TV show in which humanity survives the apocalypse by retreating to a subterranean city, hundreds of levels deep.

But what is it about the image that provokes such strong emotions?