Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital
journal.media-culture.org.au
journal.media-culture.org.au
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.
The accuracy of the translation isn't that important. Who knows, maybe it was a bad video initially that got improved by "wrong" subtitles :-)
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.
This is quite the reduction, akin to claiming that my wife and I got married because human beings are a pair-bonding species - it checks out on the surface, but discards an incredible breadth and depth of human experience. I do not close my eyes at night and talk to a loose collection of ideas cobbled together by a bunch of random people attempting to outline a system of objective morality in the pursuit of societal control. I am participating in an eternal relationship with the author of truth and love.
> There's no payload, just absurd emptiness.
It's developed a commentary on internet culture vs. legacy media.
Thank you, that spawned this notion in my head, I wonder why. It’s funny, I think, how quickly people dismiss the subjective experience of a crackhead having an ecstatic conversation with God or the universe — yet insist that the depth of their own experience of love, religion, or meditation can’t possibly be reduced to neurotransmitters.
You can reduce all of human experience to chemistry, but you'd be missing most of the meaning, understanding, and wisdom of it. (If there is any, in the case of the cracked visionary.)
To bring things full circle and quote a dead meme, why not get you a girl who can do both?
I find the whole idea that thought equals memes to be excessively reductionist. It neglects the notion of coherence in thought, and the way larger coherent beliefs and narratives are built out of smaller parts. The thing about "dinosaur" formats like novels and books and such is that they can express large coherent bodies of thought.
The way memes have taken over online discourse tends toward a kind of anti-intellectualism where ideas are considered entirely in isolation and there is no effort made to relate them to one another. It leads to insane self-contradictory positions like "libertarian fascism" to give one random example. A lot of modern online discourse is what I might call meme salad, which like word salad lacks coherence.
It's sort of like describing a program as a bunch of functions or instructions. Yes, it is that, but there is a design, a coherence, a larger idea being expressed. There are also design patterns and motifs, layers of abstraction, etc. None of that is captured by the meme idea, and as popularly understood the meme idea tends to neglect and devalue that.
I also always found the selfish gene idea excessively reductionistic in genetics. Yes you can model evolution as survival of the fittest genes, but this neglects the way genes work together to form higher order systems that are themselves subjected to selection. Selection can operate at the genetic level but also at higher levels. In evolution look into group selection, the evolution of evolvability, epigenetics, gene regulatory networks, etc.
From what I remember, the spinning animal goes deeper, the videogame-like spinning food like items go deeper. There are so many layers to it, that is what's interesting.
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.
I tend to agree, there's a pretty big difference between writing and animating a full-on show and the weird tiktok/roblox/youtube slop I see.
Then again - Skibidi Toilet is like a whole saga, and there was some pretty stupid stuff airing on Adult Swim.
maybe i'm just getting old.
Those masterpieces belong in the Louvre.
From your comment it is very clear you don’t enjoy irreverent humor or animation really. Not everyone has $200 million to blow on Tron: Ares level animation.
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.
It is a little known fact that Germans have rigorous state controls over who can build humour for their media.
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.
he told me there's a small bustling trade in learning numbers in other languages - "seis siete" for example.
seems like harmless fun to me.
I'm not sure why? At least some part of it, I suspect, is related to the "outrage economy". That is, outrage that can drive social media engagement. You don't do it because you're, in good faith, bothered by it. You do it because you can raise a stink and rally others to engage and make yourself popular.
That last bit is just a theory of mine. It seems anecdotally supported though from my own observation, but I am not a sociologist so I'm not going to claim any expertise here.
Skibidi Toilet is pretty old hat at this point. It is well off of the radar. Current trends include stuff like 6-7.
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
and my absolute favorite: Charlie the Unicorn!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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...
Have you seen the one fxwin linked?
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.
One interview with the artist could essentially throw a giant wrench into the ideas presented here. If the author comes out and says “I was 12 and thought that toilets were funny” massive paragraphs of this paper become pointless.
> Gen Alpha may be "born into video games", but they have also been born into a disintegrating climate system, post-9/11 politics (such as the global austerity crisis, perpetual war, and the rise of right-wing populism), surveillance capitalism, and pandemic risk—much of which can be read in the landscapes and metaphors of Skibidi Toilet, serving to problematise notions of the ‘natural’ and the limits of the human in the context of climate catastrophe and technological transformation.
I’m sorry, this is a load of horse shit. This is someone with an advanced literature/journalism degree getting stoned and writing a paper. I don’t think any of this has to do with a series of toilet animations.
Sometimes it’s as simple as “little kids think that absurd toilet humor is funny.”
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 is deliberately absurd, but 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.
That last part there sounds like a joke. Weirdest timeline.
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.
Last I checked, each new entry was just another boring "epic" clash between giant titans with ever-larger explosions that never fully resolve or go anywhere interesting.
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.
That's probably because all the Marvel movies are professionals churning out the same green screen crap. Skibidi is not in my tastes, but it has the chance of being interesting because it's not an industry professional making it (afaik), at least until Michael Bay takes over.
Like Smiling Friends.
So, since he already already watched it, I watched a bunch of it too just to know what he actually watched. And it was so, Yuck for me.
But he was super into it so I met him where he was at and even made him a custom Skibidi Speakerman Halloween costume.
He wore it for Halloween and only one kid recognized his costume. And unfortunately the kid was like seven.
And he quickly lost interest in it after that.
So many interesting cultural things that we have to witness the younger generation go through. And then we remember that our older generations had the same level of disgust about things that we are/were doing.
And we think we turned out fine. And our younger generations will probably turn out fine too. Tons of mental health issues of course, but maybe we can all learn together.
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.
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.
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
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…