2 pairs of fake anchor tags I can't remove are messing up something on my page

I've found the problem, but let me walk you through how because it's useful to understand!

First, I wanted to see the problem. From your screenshot I knew I was looking for a naked <a> before a <div class="plainlinks">. So I used by browser debugger to run:

Code

document.querySelectorAll('.plainlinks')

This then output to my debug console all of the things of class="plainlinks" on your page. With a little exploration I was able to find this one. Then I right-clicked it and chose "reveal in inspector" to jump across to the DOM inspector. Now I was seeing what you were.

Now the thing with the DOM, as you might already know, is that it's not the same as the HTML code you wrote. Here's the process that actually happens in your web browser:

1. It receives HTML (which is just text with funny symbols in it, amirite?)
2. It parses the HTML to build a DOM, which is a "tree" of elements and how they relate to one another
3. When you use "inspect element", it re-builds the HTML from the DOM... it's not the original HTML you wrote; more like... if you translated it to another language and back again: there's going to be differences!

Just for example, suppose I wrote this (horrible) code:

Code

<ul>
  <li>
    Hi
  <li>
    <p>
      There
      <div>
        Dan
      </div>
    </p>

When I look at it in my DOM inspector, it'll look like this instead:

Code

<ul>
  <li>
    Hi
  </li>
  <li>
    <p>
      There
    </p>
    <div>
      Dan
    </div>
    <p></p>
  </li>
</ul>

See the differences? The browser has interpreted my HTML in a few ways, e.g.:

1. I didn't close my <li>s or my <ul>, so it guessed where they should have been closed
2. I tried to put a <div> inside a <p>, which is forbidden, so it split my <p>...</p> into two paragraphs and put the <div> in-between them

This is important because it helps explain what you're seeing.

Now... try View Source. View Source is a different feature in your browser, and it doesn't show the stray <a>. So long as you're confident that it wasn't added by JavaScript (e.g. because you tried turning it off), this tells you that the stray <a> was put there by the parser. I.e. there's something you wrote in your HTML that didn't make sense to the browser... so it "corrected" it for you when it created the DOM.

A HTML validator might be able to help you find it... but I can give you a clue right off the bat! In your HTML source, a few lines before the  comment, you've got the following code (line feeds added by me, for legibility):

Code

<a>
  <textarea cols="10" readonly>
    <a href="https://rubbereon.nekoweb.org/">
      <img src="https://rubbereon.nekoweb.org/img/button.gif"/>
    </a>
  </textarea>

Your code:

1. Starts an <a>
2. Inside that, starts a <textarea> (I don't know off the top of my head if it's invalid to put a textarea inside a link, but it's probably not what you meant!)
3. Inside that, starts another <a> - it's invalid to put a <a> inside a <a> and can result in exactly the kinds of problems you're facing
4. Adds the image, ends the inner [/url], and then ends the </textarea>
5. Does not end the outer <a>

There's a few problems here:

1. You open more elements than you close, leaving an <a> unclosed
2. (You probably didn't want that <a> in the first place!)
3. The contents of your textarea aren't escaped: amazingly, the browser's handling it pretty well, but the <a>-nesting is clearly too much for it!

Here's how that code should look, IMHO:

Code

<textarea cols="10" readonly>
  &lt;a href="https://rubbereon.nekoweb.org/"&gt;
    &lt;img src="https://rubbereon.nekoweb.org/img/button.gif"/&gt;
  &lt;/a&gt;
</textarea>

There might be other instances of invalid code like this. Run it through a validator to see if it can help, or run it through a beautifier to make unclosed elements "stand out" in the nesting order (just be aware that some beautifiers work by creating a DOM and then reverse-engineering to HTML, and as such can change the meaning of your code!)