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Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

journal.media-culture.org.au

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Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#101

Post by sedawkgrep »

dangus wrote: post #8

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.

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.

I find that to be quite hopeful.

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#102

Post by greesil »

egypturnash wrote: post #75
greesil wrote: post #58

It makes as much sense as All Your Base, no one predicted a non-narrative future based on that.

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.

Marketing dollars were focused in other cultural areas at the time.

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#103

Post by furyg3 »

fxwin wrote: post #11

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). Also recommend this one with "German Brainrot": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mJENuEN…

Wow that's just excellent. German classes paying off already!

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#104

Post by m_fayer »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #52
rufius wrote: post #22

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…

> 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 genera…

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.

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#105

Post by asielen »

lunias wrote: post #19
xrd wrote: post #3

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…

> There was a half wall of skibidi toilet merch 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 aud…

> feels more authentic and grassroots than most things being foisted upon them.

And then corporations squeeze any last drop of authenticity from it through merchandising it to death.

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#106

Post by troyvit »

walkabout wrote: post #24
xrd wrote: post #3

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…

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…

Seriously this. I got some Firefox click-bait about it a few years ago and was hooked. My kids (13 and 16 at the time) were appalled. Now they call me Skibidi Troylet. But it's damn good! Passionate, tragic, funny as hell. There's back-stabbing and alliance-shifting and nested realities and all the things. Even though on the surface it's just nonsensical smashy smashy it was definitely better than Marvel.

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#107

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

josefx wrote: post #51
jrm4 wrote: post #27

I'm most reminded of not the movies as much but -- Monty Python's Flying Circus? Same kind of ... "uh what?" vibe.

We also have SPAM, SPAM SPAM SPAM, eggs bacon sausage and SPAM. 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.

> complete and utter nonsense

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.

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#108

Post by RGamma »

thesz wrote: post #48
fxwin wrote: post #11

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). Also recommend this one with "German Brainrot": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mJENuEN…

And the (possible) origin of Skibidi (by Little Big): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDFBTdToRmw

Also notable is Gmod Idiot Box by DasBoSchitt, which is arguably a spiritual predecessor: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF41B4E15D5443537

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#109

Post by DocTomoe »

mallowdram wrote: post #92
DocTomoe wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all fairness, as someone who never 'understood' the 'collective mind' behind skibidi toilet (and would argue there is none, he absurdity itself is the 'meme' - a term used very loosely here, considering memes of yesteryear did in fact transport messages), the Zeit critic sounds like he 'got' the cultural references pretty spot on (and he himself points out that the references themselves do not have to be understoo…

The point is that memes replace stodgy narratives, which are dinosaurs (news, history, novels), with semantic options. You can experience this as meaningless, or in well designed memewarefare, you can sense the density and how/where it applies to the culture today and sense that it has something to add when it's archaeology.

By definition, a meme is an idea, image, phrase, or piece of behaviour that spreads through imitation—usually because it captures something funny, relatable, or sharply true about human experience.

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.

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#110

Post by pavel_lishin »

rufius wrote: post #22

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…

> 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.

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