\ . markdown is a mysterious beast. if you put a backslash before a character that would normally be invisible, it shows up, like typing \* asterisk \* to display *asterisk* , so you can also type a \ in front of a \ to make it visible, so \\ in markdown displays just one \

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is typed here with 3 backslashes to actually be able to see everything lmao