“Skibidi toilet,” “rizz,” “hawk tuah,” and “aura” are some words and phrases you might have heard circulating in conversation or on social media apps such as TikTok, Instagram, and X. After becoming popular online, phrases like these have been classified into their own subcategory on the internet titled “brainrot.”
Brainrot is a term used to group phrases that are of extreme low-quality and are said to have an effect of harming the attention span or cognitive ability of frequent watchers. Originating in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, brainrot is rooted in internet memes. Among Us, a popular video game which is modeled after another game called Mafia, was one of the first ever internet trends determined as brainrot. Its popularity throughout early 2020 spanned across teens and young adults because of its fame on the social media app TikTok. The term that came from Among Us is “sus” which is short for “suspect.” TikTok helped grow the term so much that it can still be heard even four years later.
Around the same time, a popular Twitch streamer by the name of Kai Cenat popularized the term “rizz,” which is an alternative word for someone having “game” or the ability to talk to someone in a way that makes them attracted to you. Just like “sus,” the term “rizz” started as a funny meme but as it became over-popularized on social media, it lost its original humorous effect and quickly became an overused term that became annoying to hear.
As the years have progressed, brainrot has expanded into something unexplainable, as it often applies to words and phrases that make such little sense that it has the effect of physically deteriorating one’s brain. For example, the term “skibidi toilet” holds little to no meaning, and it refers to a video posted to Youtube on Feb. 7, 2023 of an animated man sticking his head out of a toilet while a song plays in the background. Now, “skibidi toilet” has evolved into an entire animated series of short-form media on YouTube with 77 episodes and 24 seasons.
The fame brainrot carries with it has the ability to put people on the map and completely change their lives. Hailey Welch was randomly picked for an “on the street interview” by social media influencers and YouTubers Tim and Dee TV. Her response of “hawk tuah” immediately garnered attention especially on TikTok where it became one of the biggest internet memes for a while. Prior to the video of Welch, Tim and Dee TV, the original creator who interviewed her, only had around 27,000 subscribers and averaged 700 subscribers a month. Once they released the video of Welch on June 23, they gained 14,600 subscribers in seven days. During July, they gained 6,100 subscribers. Said video is also their most popular video by a considerably large margin. The video with Welch has 8.2 million views, and the next most popular video only has 145 thousand views. Tim and Dee TV’s fame was short lived, though, as in August they only gained 1,700 subscribers.
Welch, on the other hand, became a celebrity of sorts. She started a YouTube channel on Aug. 20 and amassed 153 thousand subscribers in less than two months and around 5.5 million views in just September alone.
Even though brainrot has become a subcategory on the internet that garners a lot of negative attention, many people fail to realize the long-lasting effects and impact that it might have.
