It’s because the backslash is a special character called an “escape” character. The same way you make italics by putting *asterisks* around something, you can use backslashes to tell the system to ignore other special characters and use them literally. In this case, the underscore, which if you had no backslash would cause the face to be italic, becomes “escaped” by the backslash so we see the underscores as normal. But then you don’t see the backslash.

So you need to “escape” the backslash itself. Put two backslashes, and you’ll see one. ¯\(ツ)/¯ ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

But then you’re no longer escaping the underscores. So now you’ve got one backslash, but the face is italic and you don’t see any underscores.

So instead, as a final step, add a third backslash. The first backslash escapes the second one, so we see the second one. Then the third escapes the underscore, so we see the underscore. (For a bit of extra security, you can optionally also escape the second underscore. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯