2023-10-18
4 months ago the youtuber DaFuq!?Boom! released this video.
It's a silly gmod animation about singing toilets, but it sparked off a craze that's led to not only a long series of videos from him with millions of views, but an entire ecosystem of creators feeding off of the success and mystery around it.
These channels have tens or even hundreds of thousands of subscribers. It's amazing to observe how these communities and channels pop up, each one adding their own spin and most of all riding on the success of the original creation.
This creates a conundrum, however. DaFuq!?Boom! has made such a name for himself on this series that he more or less relies on it for his youtube career. As do all of these other creators. It's a case of single point of failure; if one person goes down for whatever reason (creator burnout, perhaps) the entire things comes crashing down.
And DaFuq!?Boom! hasn't released a new episode in 11 days. That's an eternity for all of these other channels that ride in the wake of his success.
A small team of animators based in Iran that built their channel on video game-inspired animations. And they have struck gold.
They decided to go with the Skibidi Toilet Multiverse which has only been speculated about among others. Instead of doing analyses they create new worlds, with their own slightly different versions of characters introduced in the main series as well as genuinely interesting (well, comparatively) original characters. These guys are professionals and they've stepped in just when there was a gap.
All of the creators doing analyses of the main series have now branched out to cover the Skibidi Toilet Multiverse as well, in some cases comparing the quality and story lines with the main series.
I'm not a fan of either series, but I do watch a lot of it because my kids are. I see the appeal of it; I see the humour and the action. It's easy to see why it's so liked. I, however, marvel more at the universe, or should I say multiverse, that's been growing around it. I'm not savvy enough in either cultural analysis or youtube to fully understand the dynamics around this, but it's pretty cool to see.
-- CC0 Björn Wärmedal