A plotline that seems better suited to an unsettling hallucination, an army of toilet-headed villains—depicted as singing while peeping out of the bathroom mainstays—has taken over the world. To the point that it is YouTube’s top trend of the year, headlining 2023’s “Year On YouTube” recap.
In February, a YouTube channel debuted an animated series called Skibidi Toilet and it’s since exploded on the platform. But an outsider coming across it for the first time while browsing YouTube Shorts might be confused by its massive popularity.
Skibidi Toilet is a web series of YouTube videos and shorts created by animator Alexey Gerasimov and uploaded on his YouTube channel DaFuq!?Boom!. Since its February debut, the trend has proved to be as popular as it is bizarre, garnering millions of views and earning its creator a following of more than 21 million subscribers.
The absurd series follows a talking head that pops out of a toilet and sings a variety of upbeat songs. The premise is that these toilet people are taking over, and people with cameras, TVs and speakers for heads are fighting back against their multiplying. The videos are extremely short and some don’t even last a whole minute.
The first season shows versions of Skibidi Toilet causing chaos in public while belting along to a sound snippet of Biser King's "Dom Dom Yes Yes". Skibidi Toilet has over 54 episodes at this point, which are being uploaded almost daily. By the tenth episode, it becomes clear that these toilet men are in a war against humanoid-looking creatures of the Cameraman race.
There are multiple layers to the story as it's shown that some Skibidi Toilets are police officers, others are priests, and the Cameraman resistance has trained in using plungers and other methods to take them down.
Alexey Gerasimov, who has nine years of animation experience, uses a 3D computer graphics software called Source Filmmaker and builds the characters from the video games Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source.
But what’s the secret behind its immense popularity?
The story and efforts behind this meme are the two key reasons that it has seen so much success. Some people have called it "Gen Alpha's Slenderman", referring to a supernatural creature that originated from an old creepypasta internet meme. For all who are not Gen Z, Creepypasta posts are short pieces of original horror fiction and sometimes scary images that are shared in online communities dedicated to people who love to read horror.
Now Skibidi Toilet is being touted as THE creepy character of Gen Alpha — which counts anyone born between 2010 and now. Gen Alpha is supposedly as obsessed with Skibidi Toilet as Gen Z was with Slenderman. The oldest members of Gen Alpha are 13 and have grown up on the internet.