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Comment by rufius | Hacker News Reader

Well my trip to Costco make infinitely more sense. I saw these 3 foot tall dolls for sale of the camera head characters. They were titled “skibidi toilet titans” but I was only familiar with the song mashups, not the web series.

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.

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> Kids are always gonna love stuff that pisses off their parents.

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.

Salad Fingers! That lives rent free in my brain, near Magical Trevor and Schfifty Five, and a bunch of 90s TV ads. It's my money and I want it now!

It’s your _settlement_ and you _need cash now_.

Remember: if you have a phone, you have a lawyer.

In case you didn’t know, Filmcow’s Charlie the Unicorn and Llama’s with Hats series are finished now.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bKd_2vqPrmU

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XPj_1XzPCj4

JG Wentworth...this guy is stuck in other people's brain's too!? I thought that was a locally aired commercial when I was younger, but apparently that earworm went nationwide!

> I think desensitized the millennial generation, to the point where there's nothing that really weirds us (well, me) out.

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.

> Especially South Park I think desensitized the millennial generation

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.

Jokes are serious business, more so when they're funny. It's best to leave that sort of thing to accredited professionals.

Lachwerkingenieur is a registered title in German that is related to your point.

It is a little known fact that Germans have rigorous state controls over who can build humour for their media.

For sure. Im the parent of a couple Gen Alpha kids on the younger side. I showed the skibidi toilet videos to my wife and her response was a shrug and “looks like dumb videos we watched in college”.

But as other posters say, not everyone was into that corner of internet culture as millennials. Especially the weirder offshoots.

What is or isn't edgy is defined by the dominant culture of the time and place. It changes over time. Stuff probably does weird you out, but maybe it's on a different axis than Cartman accidentally joining NAMBLA. I mean, if you think South Park is mainstream, what do you think about Paramount pulling a handful of episodes from their streaming platform? Surely if your peers, your kids, etc., stopped treating pedophiles as distasteful butts of jokes and started fighting for the censorship of media, that would weird you out, no?

The difference between these generations is that millennials would consume the stranger or more “offensive” stuff sporadically, as a thrill or pleasant provocation. Even among those who wanted this thrill, I think the majority of the media diet was more traditional narrative stuff.

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.

> Kids are always gonna love stuff that pisses off their parents.

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.

the 6-7 thing has been a source of constant amusement for me. my kid told me that one of their teachers had (with good humor) banned saying "6 7" and we immediately went down a rabbit hole of how he could "side-channel" 6 7s into conversation - like "hey, $teacher, what's the next prime number after 61?"

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 think it does for a substantial portion, especially those with more traditionally aligned values. We know families, through our extended social groups, that would cringe at the Skibidi Toilet stuff.

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.

On a similar note my parents didn't love the [AS] shows with more narrative but always sat down to watch stuff like 12oz Mouse with me. I still enjoy that kind of loose narrative content but I really don't get a lot of stuff these days, Skibidi included.

I don't think it is even so much about angering their parents as just having something they know that their parents don't.

Skibidi Toilet is pretty old hat at this point. It is well off of the radar. Current trends include stuff like 6-7.

Idk, I wouldn't consider adult swim and friends brain rot. Whereas kids these days celebrate brain rot ("Italian brain rot", specifically). I see this as part of the larger anti-intellectualism gripping our species and really dislike it. A lot of these kids are glued to screens and are fed just a constant stream of ads and algorithmic shit while forming parasocial relationships with fake personalities.

I was at the bookstore and they Italian Brainrot keychains.

> Idk, I wouldn't consider adult swim and friends brain rot.

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.

> weird shows on Adult Swim like metalocalypse and squidbillies

Those masterpieces belong in the Louvre.

Maybe in 20 years people will say the same about Skibidi Toilet, if it isn't already in there. Corporations are embracing it already, a local chain had a campaign titled "skibidi school".

Most of adult swim is trash. Metalocalypse is definitely better than average but squidbillies is slop, so is a lot of stuff people here might claim to like including and especially robot chicken.

Squidbillies is more clever than you’ll ever understand. Definitely not “slop”.

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.

I liked Moral Oral, and the PJs, Venture Brothers, and even really whacky stuff they did like Xavier: Renegade Angel. I could even sort of get stuff like Superjail. But Squidbillies is a bridge too far. So was home movies.

Some of those are aren’t Adult Swim originals fyi.

squidbillies, i think, is a good example of something that appears on the surface to be completely stupid, but actually has a pretty clever core. South Park is kind of similar, I think I'd have a difficult time convincing my parents generation, for example, that South Park is at times one of the smartest shows on TV.

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