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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

#141

Post by aj_hackman »

dusted wrote: post #136
aj_hackman wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All major religions are essentially meme-conglomerates. 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…

> This is quite the reduction, ... 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.

> insist that the depth of their own experience of love, religion, or meditation can’t possibly be reduced to neurotransmitters

To bring things full circle and quote a dead meme, why not get you a girl who can do both?

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#142

Post by epiccoleman »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #110
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…

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.

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#143

Post by epiccoleman »

candiddevmike wrote: post #37
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…

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.

> 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.

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#144

Post by epiccoleman »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #95
hirvi74 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> weird shows on Adult Swim like metalocalypse and squidbillies Those masterpieces belong in the Louvre.

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, 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.

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#145

Post by epiccoleman »

edd25 wrote: post #67

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…

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTUH_wRrZZo

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#146

Post by mallowdram »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #69
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.

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] [0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar…

These aren't random, toilets vs cameras, and they're not even arbitrary. In neurobiological terms, they're references. Eyes and anuses.

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#147

Post by _9ptr »

Devasta wrote: post #20

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...

SNAKE SNAKE OH GOD IT'S A SNAKE

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#148

Post by rufius »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #110
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…

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.

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#149

Post by robocat »

balamatom wrote: post #85
marcuskane2 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 eve…

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.

Re: Nightmare Fuel: Skibidi Toilet and the Monstrous Digital

#150

Post by mallowdram »

dangus wrote: post #139
sedawkgrep wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

I think in doing all this analysis it prescribes too much to the art. 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-9/1…

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