I've seen a video or two of skibidi toilet, and it looks like something a 14 year old boy would make at his first pass with blender.
Is this the modern day "Adventures of Tom Sawyer", a masterpiece that no one over 19 is able to recognize?
I feel like we have ai slop and then we have 14 year old boy slop, and it is a race to see which one will win. Henry Kissinger can rot in hell, but as he said: "It’s a pity they both can’t lose."
If you feel morally panicked by Skibidi Toilet, you are old and out of touch (which is fine). It's the same as it's always been.
Edit: Well, not /just/ something dumb. Completely forgot about the associated lore some of these had, which makes them even more like Skibidi Toilet. I guess there's a whole category of "dumb things with underlying narratives." Filthy Frank is another one that comes to mind.
Everyone calling out my uneducated moral panic is right.
Maybe it's not the same as it's always been, but it's the same as it's been for 20-something years at a very minimum.
I think the comparison with Charlie the Unicorn is spot-on. Yes, there's a narrative, but any attempt to analyze that narrative automatically misses the point.
Pretty crazy... My hypothesis is that it's popular because it feels more authentic and grassroots than most things being foisted upon them. It has surreal comedy and doesn't take itself seriously; both traits that are in extremely low supply in the recent / current zeitgeist. It was not designed by a committee pre-conception to appeal to the most-profitable possible audience. It is now however, produced by a studio which has just partnered with the Creative Artists Agency (a major Hollywood agency). We'll see if they ruin the vibe or ride off into the sunset akin to Minecraft.
And then corporations squeeze any last drop of authenticity from it through merchandising it to death.
I get why it’s popular. I didn’t enjoy myself but I completely get why kids soaked in memes might love it.
The humour is practically the raw embodiment of how little kids joke and play. If you're around little kids (especially boys often), you see skibidi toilet antics erupt from time to time whether they've seen it or not. Goofy facial expression, nonsensical voices and singing, over-exaggersted comical violence, constantly escalating battles, etc.
But no. I eventually learned it was an hours-long series and gave it another try.
It’s a long, serialized silent film sci fi war epic told without intertitles. And damn, I was invested in it before long!
[edit] I am not joking that I cared more about and paid more attention to the long battle and infiltration mission near the end (at the time—I understand there’s more now?) than I care about or pay attention to at least half of the 30-45 minute final battles in Marvel movies. I would defend the series as outright better than, certainly, something like Quantumania.
I bet there's papers about Monty Python's animations too. Actually I don't need to bet, there's Google [0]:
> The animated interludes in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail demonstrate director and animator Terry Gilliam's interest in and use of images in the margins of Gothic manuscripts. [1]
[0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_sdt=0%2C5&q=monthy+pyt...
I thought the article was interesting and thoughtful. It did a marvelous job of making sense of something that, at first blush, is seemingly senseless, and I do not think for a moment the paper is a prank.
Quite the contrary. One of the main characteristics of today's world is the devaluation (or utter disregard) of meaning. Even in this thread the term "brain rot" implies that it's not only valueless, but harmful. The article is not only about finding meaning in the content, but that its ambiguous narrative can be a good thing, as it opens the mind up to multiple possibilities and perspectives.
I find that to be quite hopeful.
I mean granted, it's relatively easy to make stuff in the HL movie maker tool as well, but it's more work than AI.
Also recommend this one with "German Brainrot": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mJENuEN_rs
1. The interpertation 2. The execution
he means the second way, he didn't notice any english grammar mistakes or unnaturalness.
It's like how good translators make Donald Trump sound smarter.
IMO the interesting part of "memes" is the information density not in the meme "data" itself but in the collective mind.
These are as old as mankind itself. All major religions are essentially meme-conglomerates. 'Music to invade Poland to' is a memetic concept, so is the dies-irae-theme in all music since the 1400s. Memes itself are 'sodgy narratives, and dinosaur-like news, history, or novels (hell, novels are meme-machines - they have sprung everyhing from quintessential fantasy races to actual mythofascist-occult ideas to bona fide suicide waves).
I'd argue that behaviours/media/ideas eventually need to be at least explainable to a significant part of a culture to become memes. You can explain 'Courage Wolf' to a completely uninitiated person of average intelligence in 30 seconds. You can explain 'Trollface' in a minute (with the whole cast in two more).
Skibidi Toilet escapes such explanations and is thus not, IMHO, a meme format. It's viral, not memetic, it spreads, but does not encode universally-understood meaning. There's no payload, just absurd emptiness.
Imitation is mimetic. Not related to what a meme is.
Behaviors are actions, which are specific.
An idea is too vague as a definition. It's arbitrary what an idea actually is.
A phrase is always arbitrary, it's made from language which is arbitrary. And not necessarily translatable.
Images are always arbitrary.
Now you're conflating the too vague definition of Dawkins with "internet memes" which is a valid definition of what memes are, but altogether distinct from Dawkin's definition. "usually because it captures something funny, relatable, or sharply true about human experience"
And in conflating them, you've done what any layperson does, crafted an explanation from folk science cause and effect. The definition that suits your taste (and maybe others) subjectively.
And so the last part of your explanation descends from this subjectivity "behaviours/media/ideas eventually need to be at least explainable to a significant part of a culture to become memes"
Which is where you go off the rails in what appears to be a logical explanation, but actually is simply a politically digestible groupthink.
It's cameras vs toilets, dude. Eyeballs and shitholes. These are as old as the pre-cambian in vs. out. If these are not universals, then there are no universals.
It appears some of you out there only pretend to have media literacy, and look what it's costing us in imaginative skillsets.
Kids made this in the G-Mod sandbox for Half-Life 2.
If it feels dystopian, it's because HL2 is set in a dystopian world.
Honestly, it might literally be the toilet aspect that made this viral with 7 year olds
and my absolute favorite: Charlie the Unicorn!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Kids are always gonna love stuff that pisses off their parents. It’s just part of parenting and being a kid. My parents hated my love for the weird shows on Adult Swim like metalocalypse and squidbillies.
Big shrug - no one should be surprised this portrays a non-narrative future. The future feels pretty chaotic and undirected to me as an adult. I can’t imagine how it feels to a 12 year old.
Those masterpieces belong in the Louvre.
Thing is, gen alpha's parents grew up with weird shit themselves, edgy stuff that pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable. MTV and Comedy Central productions for a lot of people, stuff like Beavis & Butthead, Jackass, South Park, and then the 2000's internet of Newgrounds productions. Especially South Park I think desensitized the millennial generation, to the point where there's nothing that really weirds us (well, me) out.
I never watched skibidi toilet or much gen alpha stuff, but I'm not shocked by it or anything. I just think it's weird and surreal, but nothing worse than e.g. Salad Fingers.
You know, I used to think the same way, that so many of us got desensitized that none of this newfangled stuff should really be surprising, even less appear bizarre.
Yet out in the real world, I think you, me and the others are maybe a 5% slice of all the people out there, as many people get borderline offended by "weird stuff" and doesn't seem like they got desensitized like you and me when we were younger.
Desensitized some people, who understood and appreciated the irony, absurdity and inversion of norms.
It hyper-sensitized others, who often doubled-down on the type of authoritarian political correctness that South Park satirized.
There is clearly a huge segment of the millennial generation who don't agree with the South Park "make jokes about everyone and everything" ethos, and instead believe there are numerous individuals, groups, topics and issues which should never be joked about, and feel very offended when someone does.
But as other posters say, not everyone was into that corner of internet culture as millennials. Especially the weirder offshoots.
Gen alpha, on the other hand, seems content to consume the absurdity non-stop. I think this is another angle on what “brain rot” actually is - briefly shattering a reality that made sense was a thrill, while immersing yourself in sense-shattering media starts to actually sever the connection to reality.
Does this stuff piss off parents? Some of what my child is into is incomprehensible to me, but a lot of it is absolutely recognizable as the kind of things I was into as a kid, it's just their version of it in 2025.
I'm actually rather enjoying watching her go through this, trying to understand what some of it means, and just going along with the ride of some stuff.
Yesterday, my kid very excitedly told me about something funny that the whole class did with 6 7. The 6 7 meme is completely opaque to me, but it was still an amusing story, and while I don't understand the specifics, I love that all of it is happening.
It's kind of same-y, when I look into the latest episode. (Yes I am not at all caught up to the lore, and I don't want to.)
But hey it kind of fits Michael Bay storytelling style.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
Private chats -> TikTok -> Instagram -> Facebook -> TV/Newspapers
Newer generations: “Modern art? Brutalism? You like this trash?”
Nothing new under the sun.
South Park? You like this trash?
Salad Fingers? You like this trash?
Monty Python? You like this trash?
Rick and Morty? You like this trash?
Elvis? You like this trash?
It's tiring; people should let people have things. And get over themselves because not everything is or has to be for them or for everyone's liking. That's art.
Gatekeeping is good and please do it more aggressively in the future.
wikings: SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM ...
Funny, complete and utter nonsense and probably a lot older than most of the people complaining about "modern" brainrot.
As memes get explained and even used (shudder) by he olds, they must be discarded.
I don't think that it's complete nonsense. Or, it doesn't come from nowhere. Monty Python debuted in 1969. They often took the mick out of the generation before them, who on the one hand Won the War and saved the country, etc. But who on the other hand by 1969 could also be mocked as aging, uptight, officious, stuck in the past, "we had it tough, you kids have no idea", etc.
So: Spam. It's processed meat in a can, more like a wartime emergency ration than anything else. Fresher foods were in short supply in the UK during and immediately after the war.
The sketch is elements of the Zeitgeist around them then. Which would have also included funny, costumed college musical numbers, from their time in the Cambridge Footlights.
If people were a bit more media savvy and less kneejerk or pearl clutching about it, they'd realize that it's nothing new. I don't actually know anyone clutching pearls about skibidi toilet, the worst is a somewhat indifferent "I don't get it". And not getting it is fine.
The conflict between the Skibidi Toilets (with human heads sticking out of toilets) and the Camera/TV/Speaker-headed humans can be seen as a metaphor for how people consume and spread media. The toilets constantly repeat a hypnotic song ("Skibidi dop dop yes yes"), representing mindless media repetition and viral trends. The Camera Men symbolize those who "watch" or document reality —- observers trying to preserve truth amid absurdity.
It has themes of media control, surveillance, and propaganda, a battle over who shapes what people see and believe.
And one does wonder whether that has anything to do with their enemies being, basically, clever, organized zombies…
Like Smiling Friends.
I wonder... how many people decide they need to know names for these characters, and go online to find the names other people are using? Versus just watching, vibing, and referencing the explicit content with their friends?
The existence of lore doesn't mean the lore plays a significant part in the cultural phenomenon. For the purposes of the article, it's convenient to have terminology, and it takes terminology from the lore, but I wonder how many people consuming the skibidi toilet videos know and use the lore terminology, or invent their own, or are happy to accept the ambiguity and lack of terminology in the videos. The appeal of skibidi seems to be inseparable from the chaotic, absurd, unexplained nature of it. People revel in the nonsensicalness of it and how it enrages others who demand that it make sense. Lore, which is a sense-making exercise, goes against the grain of why people love it.
These are clearly toilets vs cameras, or out vs in. Resonant media doesn't have to explain itself. But simpler minds need the illusion of backstory, or the idea of good/bad, etc.
That last part there sounds like a joke. Weirdest timeline.
thinkingemote•3h ago
More grown up analyses of it are not that enlightening and overall the phenomena doesn't work (for me) as art as a kind of nutritious food for the soul or mind...
Cthulhu_•2h ago
scns•2h ago
Have you seen the one fxwin linked?