Skibidi Toilet

Remember Slenderman? For all the nightmares and underlying fear of woods-based activities that urban legend gave me, I think back on the iconic creepypasta fondly as one of the first internet experiences I ever had that translated to real-world bonding with my friends. Slenderman — with his faceless glare and his abducting tendencies — transcended the confines of the internet to become a recess topic of conversation. This was still a time when life was something that the internet existed within, rather than the other way around. Some other highlights from this time, during which I was lucky enough to be in late elementary school into early middle school, include the ASDF movies and Potter Puppet Pals and Loca the Pug. Now regarded as classics as well as relics of a bygone era, these were some of the first cultural references which required not only an internet connection, but an understanding of the spaces online in which you could find them. In addition to making sure you were keeping up with the latest fads in books and movies, now there were these funny, catchy, sometimes scary internet posts and videos that your friends knew and constantly (constantly) referenced.

Given that the internet has only become more enmeshed in daily life since the late 2000s, it comes as no surprise to me that the kids of today have their own internet content to watch, reference and one day lovingly look back on. What I was entirely unprepared for, though, was what form it would take. That form is Skibidi Toilet, an ongoing animated YouTube series surrounding a class of autonomous disembodied heads in toilets who dance as if they have been electrocuted, or perhaps possessed. The channel which posts Skibidi Toilet videos, DaFuq!?Boom!, is operated by Alexey Gerasimov, a Georgian animator who has given surprisingly cogent interviews about his animating program and has failed to comment on the clear derangement of this entire enterprise. DaFuq!?Boom! was the single most watched YouTube channel during the month of June this year. Wikipedia seems to be unconvinced of the notability of this phenomenon, but I disagree. Each video garners a completely preposterous amount of views, more views than I thought there were children alive. Because the videos are each only around a minute long, they appear in YouTube Shorts feeds, expanding their reach. An audience of primarily children tune in religiously to watch these toilet men navigate a world which repurposes imagery from early 2000s video games like Half-Life 2 and Counter Strike: Source, all while singing a demonically synthesized approximation of scat (skibidi dop dop dop yes yes, and so on). Almost more unsettling than this music are the episodes that are conducted without any music at all, recalling for me the feeling of standing over a friend’s desktop computer in their basement in 2007 as they anxiously watch you watch that horrible fake car commercial with the zombie jumpscare. 

The Skibidi Toilet series, now on its 21st season, has established such extensive lore that it requires a sprawling wiki page. The series is big enough to have a mobile game based on it with over 1 million downloads. Skibidi Toilet has even become a discrete character who appears on other channels, and in other worlds crafted with visual cues of Minecraft and those incomprehensible iPhone games you always see in ads while playing Solitaire. The videos invariably feature a bunch of the stock iMovie noises used in clickbait YouTube videos scattered throughout like breadcrumbs for a confused child. “Here,” these videos seem to say, “you’ve heard the shock sound effect that you know and love. You’re in safe territory.” 

Every article I’ve read about Skibidi Toilet takes a cautious, noncommittal approach to explaining the plot, leaning heavily on “it seems” in lieu of making any real statements about this bewildering phenomenon. I, however, am not a coward, so I will describe it to you in detail now. Skibidi Toilet is a character, often duplicated in ranks, who has instigated a war in this abstract, indeterminate location, which is grounded only by reference to the City of Columbus. The Skibidi Toilets are killed in each episode by the Alliance. The Alliance consists of the Cameramen, who look like Secret Service agents with security cameras for heads (a visual which startles me more than I’d care to admit) and who have banded together with the Speakermen and the TV Men to beat back the tide of the oppressive Skibidi Toilets. There are also female variants; I am overjoyed about the diversity of the Skibidi universe (the skibidiverse, as I’m proposing we call it). These agents form the Alliance, and the goal in each episode — here we’re using “episode” in the absolute loosest sense of the word, in the sense that anything technically could be an episode of a larger series — is for the Alliance to kill the Skibidi Toilets. A recent post, which received 43 million views in three days, is from a first-person shooter perspective, accompanied not by music, but by constant audio of helicopters and gunfire. The videos have become increasingly martial over time, as war ravages our beloved skibidiverse. If I were a parent, I would be unnerved to hear this video playing from my child’s device. 

Whether or not the Skibidi Toilets are killed does not appear to have any impact on subsequent episodes, though I could be mistaken, as I have yet to fully grasp the plot. I only became aware that there was a plot to be grasped after reading breathless speculation in the comment section about the next plot points. In the comments of “skibidi toilet 63,” @RagingSpartan24 reverently remarked that “Every time you think the episode is wrapping up, they just hit you with something else. I love it.” Another is from a man who announced he had gotten into the series because of his son, and now “hate[s] how compelling this web series is. This man should be fined for making such addictive content.” This, interestingly enough, is the diametric opposite of the emotional response I had to watching these videos, which was more one of concern and great confusion (though I agree Gerasimov should be fined). 

In true internet fashion, Skibidi Toilet is a result of several colliding trends, stitched together rather nonsensically: the jerky, unsettling head movements of the Skibidi Toilets were inspired, said Gerasimov, by the TikToks of Paryss Bryanne, who was dancing to a remix of the raunchy, already-trending song “Dom Dom Yes Yes,” sung in Hindi and Bulgarian by artist Biser King — popularized in its own right by the TikToks of @yasincengiz38. Arguably, Skibidi Toilet is bringing the world together. The remix layers in “Give It to Me,” by Timbaland, sped up in the now-traditional stylings of TikTok, which renders so far removed from the original “Give It to Me” that it sounds positively foreign. It’s a catchy hook, necessary for capturing the imaginations of children everywhere. The approximation of European club music guided by a straining, mechanical voice bounces around the wasteland of the skibidiverse. “Give It to Me” is such a random pull from the club hits of the 2000s, and its use is an illustration of one of the only positive impacts I think TikTok is having: to unearth old favorites that these kids would otherwise likely not know. Other inclusions range from “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” (anthem of the Speakermen, naturally) to the glam rock deep cut Japan. A music education is a music education no matter where you get it, but more than anything, these diegetic music selections are just mystifying — why these songs? Why not new pop music? Is Gerasimov just using his own personal favorite songs? What does skibidi even MEAN? Does it need to mean anything?

Great media can be strange, and hard to follow, and unnerving, and I think it’s healthy for kids to engage with all those things. But kids need to see a clear narrative in the media they devote their time to in order to learn how to understand and tell stories. You might argue that some of the classic late 2000s content wasn’t super big on plot either, but those were primarily quotable one-liners from home movies or animated sketches — these are highly-produced, yet almost unparseable worlds of intentionally distressing imagery, from uncanny valley faces lunging towards the viewer to the ceaseless noise of ear-splitting gunfire. It doesn’t make sense. I already feel like my brain is scrambled from my brief foray into this world, and I had a firm grasp of narrative structure going into this. 

The creativity inherent in viewers being able to remix and imagine possibilities by creating their own Skibidi-based content is really cool, and I see why the complex lore is so engaging for kids. The series faintly echos that sort of “random” humor that drew us to ASDF movies all those years ago. But the random factor has grown so far as to overtake the plot or character arc of the media itself. The post-nihilist memes of the 2020s are funny to those of us lucky enough to have been born at the only point in history to have witnessed the entire lifespan of memes as a concept, but Gen Alpha is coming in blind. There doesn’t have to be some overarching lesson about kindness, but a winding, disjointed collection of short, fast and loud videos with inexplicable and frightening imagery has the potential to rot a child’s brain. Skibidi Toilet deserves close scrutiny, like all children’s media.

There is already a dearth of well-written, well-produced educational children’s media, as Danny Gonzalez famously noted in his video about Billion Surprise Toys. I know there’s Blippy (who inspires in me an existential dread so profound that I cannot look him in the eyes, even with the protection of the screen), and Bluey (why do these characters all have whimsical B names?), but they still live on the same platforms, and I’m sure the algorithmic leap from one to the other is not far. I know that Skibidi Toilet is not intending to be educational — neither was Slenderman, in the traditional sense. But Slenderman taught us about compelling storytelling, community-generated lore, and the power of horror. Skibidi Toilet teaches us what? Be afraid of toilets, because you never know when a small man composed primarily of toilet and skull will lurch out at you, singing a decade-old Lady Gaga song?

As a child of the internet myself, I don’t want to immediately disparage Skibidi Toilet. The possibility for community formation around internet content is real, as I experienced in elementary school. But instead of being a single Paint song that everyone learns and competes to recite the fastest at school, Skibidi Toilet is an unending web of hours of content, only accessible through increasingly time-sucking social media platforms. To be caught up on the lore, and therefore able to participate in conversations with your friends, requires much more screen time, endlessly scrolling because there’s always something else. 

During the reign of Slenderman, it was a fairly low-stakes time to be on the internet, even for kids. Sure, sometimes you saw a terrorist beheading, or “2 girls 1 cup,” but you knew instinctively that it was something dangerous, or inappropriate, and above all, something you shouldn’t be seeing. It was fairly easy to file away in your mind under Don’t Ever Think About That One Again and move on. Skibidi Toilet is not so black-and-white. On its face, there is nothing inherently dangerous about it. This is not a case of the Tide Pod Challenge — which I think was made up by Big Nightly News in a sort of “It’s 10 o’clock, do you know where your kids are?” manner — or of Devious Lick. *** But scrolling through YouTube shorts after searching Skibidi Toilet quickly starts feeding you other popular videos that have nothing to do with the searched topic, like trending songs or video game playthroughs. While this suggested content may not be as glaringly hazardous as the alt-right radicalization videos that are often suggested by the YouTube algorithm alongside political content, the same process of algorithmic unpredictability can still become dangerous fast, especially for kids with enough knowledge to know how to operate an iPad but not enough media literacy to understand how to contextualize or interpret creators or types of content. 

Not only that, the sheer impact of so many hours of screen time on a developing child’s brain has yet to be fully researched. The internet and all it contained used to be something you visited quite intentionally, then returned to regular life to share what you’d gathered. Now, the internet is so enmeshed with our lives that it’s hard, even for me as an adult, to disentangle real life from the internet, if there even is a distinction anymore. To be a child who has never known a world without constant access to a phone and the internet within it is an unforeseen experience, a development which major media outlets have recently begun to take more seriously. It’s a shame that this is the best we have to offer the kids. The media landscape is becoming indecipherable, constantly grabbing at our attention and sneaking in advertisements to monetize every square inch of the internet. There is so much to see, and it’s more of a matter of what content you get hit with that’s being flung at you rather than setting out to find things you like. I cannot imagine being a small child and trying to contend with any of these platforms. This is bad enough for adults, but it could be potentially disastrous for children.

I don’t want to sound like a scold, or a fearmonger, or a “think of the children” type. I’m on Gen Alpha’s side. I want my generational neighbors to have a cool time on the internet, just like I did. Being on the internet during a crucial time of identity formation in my youth — while it certainly had its risks and detriments — is an experience that I still cherish, and one which has made Gen Z so unified in outlook and able to engage head-on with societal issues. But I also know that the internet and the world has changed significantly since I was in elementary school, and I fear that not only do they feel obligated to spend a bunch of time, but they also are engaging with much more mind-rending content than we ever had to. At the risk of repeating myself, if I had tried to engage with Skibidi Toilet as an eight-year-old, I would have lost touch with reality. Maybe the kids these days are built different, but isn’t that even scarier? That their minds can process something so unprocessable and then talk about it at lunch?

Despite my concern, I have to admit that I saw something kind of beautiful and hopeful about the security camera people doing Fortnite dances to “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” ushering in a brave new world. I can’t deny that the series is creative — I just hope the kids are able to take away that creativity, rather than brain mush. Maybe I’m coming around on Skibidi Toilet. Holding hands with Gen Alpha while the walls come tumbling down.