German newspaper "Die Zeit" has a few videos where they get art/cultural critics to watch and comment on modern meme culture which i find quite entertaining.
Here is the video about Skibidi Toilet: https://youtu.be/z-oAtxjnDlQ?si=FjpcVJxMoLv537RZ (Audio is mostly german, but the subtitles are quite accurate from what i can tell).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Maybe I'm too old, but... I thought Skibidi Toilet was kind-of funny 2 years ago, when it spiraled from a fun memey Gary's Mod shitpost into a full-on story, but then... it's kind of stuck there for 2 years?
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.
Its completely destroying the minds of the youth. Back when I was a kid, we had proper narrative videos online like badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger MUSHROOM MUSHROOM...
Initially I was irked by Skibidi Toilet and considered it to be peak of brainrot content. Though at one party we decided to do an ironic Skibidi marathon and I genuinely had a fun time watching the shorts, it was quite fun trying to piece together was was going on in the series, we even started to root for some of the characters. When GMod/TF2 videos were just starting to appear on YT, I recall watching/making a lot of very similar videos, I'd say it was even worse and with more brainrot. Skibidi Toilet is exactly the same, except with higher production quality, and I no longer think it's a bad thing after the marathon, just more of the same.
The first thing that came to mind the first time I saw Skibidi Toilet was this kind of TF2 SFM memery, which I love. The expressions in the second verse and the Spy's slow turn to look to heaven still really amuse me:
I find Skibidi Toilet fascinating because it's one of those things that looks like random garbage but is probably anything but. It takes a special kind of skill to achieve that. Just the right comedic timing, exaggeration of facial animations, instant narrative cues that make immediate sense even if the story itself is nonsense, all distilled into a few seconds of video. I gotta respect that. It's garbage, but it's high quality garbage, and I tip my hat off to the author.
I sometimes dip my feet into this universe and read the fan theories. The theories are part of the story, like the TV show LOST, the lack of explanations keeps people watching and making up their own interpretations. The resulting theories are kind of simplistic or superficial which isn't at all surprising considering the audience who watches it. We shouldn't expect deep criticism from children but we should expect children to understand deep concepts.
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...
But does it really matter if the theories are simplistic? They are thinking about it, forming a basis for, well, thinking. They're allowed to be wrong, because with time they will look back and think "haha I was wrong but man did I learn a lot from that".
This is one of the most wild over-analysis pieces I’ve ever read in my life, to the point where I’m wondering if this paper itself is an elaborate prank.
Never underestimate the ability of smart people to be overconfident in their understanding of the world, even in fields they know very little about. This is how you get a lot of very articulate nonsense, news papers are filled with this and so are many small blogs.
I tend to view the world through a psychoanalytical lens. I'm always curious about the unconscious drives of individuals and the collective, and how we interpret and interact with the world we live in.
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.
We're through the looking glass. Post-ironic paper taking random memes seriously?
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]
Especially the stop motion animations, they were just absurdist / surreal, not unlike skibidi toilet and italian brainrot content.
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.
> Skibidi Toilet began as an animated YouTube Web series early in 2023 that quickly spiralled into a wildly popular cultural phenomenon sprouting fandoms, wikis, threads, merchandise, and its very own moral panic (McKinnon and Harmon). It has recently grabbed the attention of Hollywood, and there are rumours that it is on its way to TV and a possible film treatment by Michael Bay (Wallenstein and Steiner).
That last part there sounds like a joke. Weirdest timeline.
Over 20 years ago I saw this cable access TV show that was very absurd called Midget Master Blaster Television Spectacular. At the time it just had no context for me, and made no sense. But for every cultural movement there are always precedents like in this casae German dada movement, Russian absurdists like Daniil Kharms...
All Your Base didn’t sprawl into a hundred episodes of vaguely continuing story, with toy deals and a major Hollywood director involved in a film, though.
> The series follows an increasingly epic war between two factions: the antagonists who take the form of human-headed singing toilets, led by G-man—or G-Toilet—and a group of mechanical humanoids with cameras, TVs, and speakers for heads, called The Alliance (or informally, Cameraheads)
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.
Or, lore is a dinosaur, and the fractal, chaotic idea of reality becomes clearer by the day in our dystopia.
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.
It was better when it has less narrative, tbh. Just surreal unsettling videos of manic toilet-heads busting into a restaurant or rolling down the street with Gmod characters doing weird shit in the background.
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.
Same for me. Of course, I'm much older than the target audience, so I have seen many of the tricks already. The series was entertaining for the first very episodes, but then it would have required actual storytelling talent to properly handle the universe that was created, but lacking that, the series fell flat. I still appreciate that the videos serve their purpose, entertaining millions, and that I could have also been part of it, even though for just a little.
For the connoisseurs who enjoy such content, I also recommend The FlexAir series (on YouTube). Similarly absurd, similarly "terminally online", but the audience, and the culture it references is older.
I went into Target yesterday with my daughters. There was a half wall of skibidi toilet merch. Right underneath the Mr. Beast merch.
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."
I watched the first video a long time ago to see what the deal was, and reckoned it was just one of those silly, absurd videos that become well-known for whatever reason. The tradition of very stupid, absurd stuff taking off on the internet goes back to at least “Mr T Ate My Balls” and hell, I love the long-running, weird YouTube channel “How To Basic”, so, I didn’t mind it but thought that’s all there was to it.
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.
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.
The article explains it pretty well. If you want to understand it better, watch the first video, then skip 20 videos, repeat, and you'll see the development over time as it morphs into what it's become now (I.E: watch episode 1, 21, 41, 61). I also dismissed it at first, but as the article points out, there's a lot more to it than it looks.
It's just something dumb to pass the time. When I was a kid we had Charlie the Unicorn, Potter Puppet Pals and YouTube Poops.
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.
Eh it's just another meme like Hamster Dance or All Your Base Are Belong To Us - not sure anyone needs a moral panic over it (though it won't stop some of them either).
The only nightmare is the scale at which these meme trends move now. 6-7 anyone? I haven't seen a teacher of a certain year that hasn't been dealing with mass disruption from it in only the first few months of the school year.
My 11yo son was totally into this, and I was shocked his mother had let him watch the whole series.
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.
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.
How is it slop? If you look closely and get over yourself for a moment, it has a powerful political message.
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.
The choice of making the “good guys” camera heads and such does give one pause about wholeheartedly rooting for them. Intended or not, it really did have that effect in me.
And one does wonder whether that has anything to do with their enemies being, basically, clever, organized zombies…
I think this is retcon. The thing started as dumb fun, and people tacked on episodes and meaning after the fact. Just pareidolia, but with symbolism instead of faces, and also the meta-game of explaining the deep meaning of things that are not that deep.
The title of this piece is "Nightmare Fuel" and mods removing it are editing out the central thrust of the article. Please reply here why this was done, thanks.
fxwin|4 months ago
Also recommend this one with "German Brainrot": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mJENuEN_rs
the_gipsy|4 months ago
IMO the interesting part of "memes" is the information density not in the meme "data" itself but in the collective mind.
thesz|4 months ago
xdfgh1112|4 months ago
furyg3|4 months ago
rufius|4 months ago
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.
Cthulhu_|4 months ago
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.
pavel_lishin|4 months ago
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.
ChrisGermano|4 months ago
jandrese|4 months ago
Skibidi Toilet is pretty old hat at this point. It is well off of the radar. Current trends include stuff like 6-7.
candiddevmike|4 months ago
hirvi74|4 months ago
Those masterpieces belong in the Louvre.
karel-3d|4 months ago
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.
svantana|4 months ago
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
d0100|4 months ago
Devasta|4 months ago
InspGadget4343|4 months ago
Cthulhu_|4 months ago
MalbertKerman|4 months ago
guerrilla|4 months ago
and my absolute favorite: Charlie the Unicorn!!!!!!!!!!!!!
tizzy|4 months ago
_9ptr|4 months ago
jandrese|4 months ago
edd25|4 months ago
epiccoleman|4 months ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTUH_wRrZZo
krapp|4 months ago
Balinares|4 months ago
thinkingemote|4 months 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_|4 months ago
scns|4 months ago
Have you seen the one fxwin linked?
yunwal|4 months ago
kranke155|4 months ago
teekert|4 months ago
dangus|4 months ago
drdrek|4 months ago
sedawkgrep|4 months ago
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.
Cthulhu_|4 months ago
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...
[1] https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/91/article/424939/summary
mallowdram|4 months ago
jrm4|4 months ago
Cthulhu_|4 months ago
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.
josefx|4 months ago
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.
ipnon|4 months ago
guerrilla|4 months ago
That last part there sounds like a joke. Weirdest timeline.
josefritzishere|4 months ago
TimedToasts|4 months ago
greesil|4 months ago
iceyest|4 months ago
egypturnash|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
dkarl|4 months ago
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.
mallowdram|4 months ago
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.
Jordan-117|4 months ago
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.
npteljes|4 months ago
npteljes|4 months ago
xrd|4 months ago
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."
walkabout|4 months ago
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.
lunias|4 months ago
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.
Moomoomoo309|4 months ago
nancyminusone|4 months ago
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.
citizenkeen|4 months ago
I get why it’s popular. I didn’t enjoy myself but I completely get why kids soaked in memes might love it.
noir_lord|4 months ago
ChrisArchitect|4 months ago
analog8374|4 months ago
Like Smiling Friends.
dusted|4 months ago
ElijahLynn|4 months ago
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.
gjsman-1000|4 months ago
Newer generations: “Modern art? Brutalism? You like this trash?”
Nothing new under the sun.
Cthulhu_|4 months ago
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.
Nursie|4 months ago
bgwalter|4 months ago
npteljes|4 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_brainrot
Cthulhu_|4 months ago
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.
replete|4 months ago
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
jrm4|4 months ago
mallowdram|4 months ago
JohnClark1337|4 months ago
[deleted]
iamleppert|4 months ago
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.
walkabout|4 months ago
And one does wonder whether that has anything to do with their enemies being, basically, clever, organized zombies…
npteljes|4 months ago
guerrilla|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
mallowdram|4 months ago
socrateswasone|4 months ago
[deleted]