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NEW STANDARD DISCLAIMER: This newsletter aggressively spoils things.

If you’ve seen references to something called Skidibi Toilets recently and you were too afraid to click on the links to find out, I don’t blame you. Here is what they’re talking about:

Yes, that’s the first episode in one of the most popular video series on Youtube, and yes, it features a head in a toilet singing a surprisingly catchy song. As you might guess from watching this, these videos are incredibly popular among children under the age of ten, an audience not burdened by taste or the knowledge of Gary’s Mod or the video game Half Life, and who overwhelmingly find anything with a toilet to be hilariously entertaining.

Now, initially these videos seem like nothing but dumb little jokes, but if you keep watching ... well, to be fair these videos are incredibly dumb and you have to squint pretty hard to see anything aside from drug-inspired nightmare fuel for toddlers. But! If you do that squinting, something strange happens: They segue into a rather grim tone, with increasingly larger toilet people battling enormous humanoids with cameras or speakers for heads. That earworm of a song repeats over and over again, creating a hypnotic kind of atmosphere that, when combined with autoplay skipping seamlessly to the next very brief episode, kind of mesmerizes you. The episodes are very short, so you can watch all 70 or so in a very short time. And if you do, something kind of weird happens: You begin to piece together a story.

Skibidi Toilets is ridiculous, of course, and will likely be a footnote to history in the same way most memes go gently into that good night when their usefulness ends (or their target audience ages up). But what’s interesting about it is how it somehow conveys a story with characters, plot twists, and world-building without any dialog—or coherency, for that matter. Stories need a few things to count as stories after all, and the question of how little of those things can be present while still conveying a narrative is kind of fascinating.

On one end of the spectrum, you have maximalist stuff like A Song of Ice and Fire, crammed full of characters with deep back stories and finely-drawn motivations, detailed world building that includes artificial languages, sprawling histories, and intricate plotting. On the other end you have Skidibi Toilets, which constructs a story in short episodes that utilize clunky graphics, bits of music, and almost zero dialog, world-building, or sanity. The frantic singing and terrifying murderfaces of the toilet people, the ironic thumbs-up offered by the Screenheads when they figure out a new way to flush the toilet people (I wish that was a turn of phrase instead of something somehow disappointing), and other little details serve to give the creatures populating this universe a bit of personality, and the war follows a pretty clear escalation: The Skibidi Toilets invade and attack humanity in a large urban setting, the Screenheads arrive to assist the humans and bring a Titan—a gigantic, powerful Screenhead—along to help. The Titan is infected with some sort of mind-control parasite and briefly serves the Skibidi Toilets, but is rescued when the Speakerheads enter the fray, bringing along their own Titan. Eventually, the coalition tracks down the leader of the Skibidi Toilets and later a key science-type figure, but in both cases they turn out to be decoys.

And through it all, the Skibidi Toilets sing that damn song a lot, especially in the early going. I’ll admit: After just a few episodes I became physically terrified every time I heard the song. At this point if I woke up in the middle of the night and heard that song, I’d almost certainly freak out and possibly kill myself accidentally as I raced around the house in a blind panic.

I’m not trying to oversell this—the story being told here boils down to an invasion by toilet people followed by a slowly escalating war waged against them by humanoids with speakers and televisions for heads. The weaponry gets bigger, the titans get bigger, and the world is slowly reduced to an ashy apocalypse. That’s the throughline. There’s no protagonist, no clear goal. It will probably go on forever, just adding more and more rockets and lasers to the toilets.

But it’s interesting, at least to me, that you can actually perceive any story at all from something like this. It reminds me, a little, of Aeon Flux on MTV’s old Liquid Television. That show also had a vague story that was very open to interpretation, leading weirdos like me to scrutinize every single frame for clues to what I hoped was a complex and mind-blowing narrative that turned out to be largely in my head. That’s the beauty of crazy stuff like this—you can spend weeks having a blast trying to come up with plausible reasons for all the crazy stuff that’s happening, and then one day you wake up and you’re over it and you walk away, never to think about it again.

Now, if stuff like Skidibi Toilets had existed when I was 10 years old? Absolutely no doubt I’d be in some sort of mental institution by now. Ten-year Old Jeff was not strong.

NEXT WEEK: Indiana Jones and the proper use of handwaves.

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