Skibidi and the Beast
Introduction
I can’t prove it. But right now, on a screen that may or may not be an Apple Watch, a Samsung fridge, or an iPad with bite marks all over it, a 5-year old is discovering Mr. Beast and/or Skibidi Toilet for the first time. Having watched YouTube Kids for years, they’ve gained enough autonomy to glide past some filters and start watching something real. Maybe they’ll grow a lifelong friendship with a classmate because of a shared appreciation for something expressed in those videos. Maybe their teacher will take twice the amount of CBD gummies that night because this already rats ass of a kid is now armed with Generation Alpha-isms. Likely, both of the above would happen simultaneously. Nonetheless, how this new experience will affect that person is unknown, probably even to them, but in a small or large way it will affect how they believe the world to be and how they regard themself.
Basically, I’ve been watching Mr. Beast and Skibidi Toilet. I’m too tired to make a decent thesis, but my overall thought is that Mr. Beast is representative of and perpetuates societal evils, while Skibidi Toilet is genuinely terrific art.
Mr. Beast
I am largely unaware of Mr. Beast lore, and my only reference points are a few videos, namely “I Paid a Real Assassin To Try To Kill Me”, “50 YouTubers Fight For $1,000,000”, and “I Spent 7 Days In Solitary Confinement”. That’s all I need to pop off.
Purposefulness/Lack Thereof
3 days after entering solitary confinement, Mr. Beast effortlessly promotes a water bottle cap that flavors your water. Huh?
Although any content posted onto YouTube in some way is designed to gain attention, Mr. Beast videos are quintessentially connected by viewership for its own sake. Nothing more. Not a bad thing at all, simply is! For the “Solitary Confinement” video, whether Mr. Beast is genuinely in solitary confinement is both never adequately addressed nor is it what the video really seeks to achieve. The success of the video hinges on Mr. Beast simply experiencing, this time within the constraints of “solitary confinement”, although the constraints vary video-by-video. Who Mr. Beast is doesn’t really matter, but the whiplash of experiences he takes on slaps our brain around like a pinball, hitting bumpers and oddly-themed balls before we have time to think about what’s happening.
Sensationalism
Content doesn’t need to follow a certain progression. Calling artwork “good” or “bad” is so silly, and I instead find greater meaning in attempting to analyze art’s impact within given contexts. So, to Mr. Beast’s credit, in the YouTube context where so much content exists for its own sake/money, the videos are tremendously successful and poignantly representative of both what kind of media is currently consumed and as the epitome of its form. I just personally hate the form and what Mr. Beast represents. I hate the way that he walks, the way that he talks, et cetera. Fuck his corny ass mobile game advertisements and just how damn lazy these videos are.
In these terms, each Mr. Beast video strictly develops with “and then” between each point of a given video. The videos explain themselves as they progress, with rationale and stakes molded throughout the content’s duration. In “I Paid a Real Assassin To Try To Kill Me”, nothing connects each scene besides that they exist next to each other. Smoothing over these otherwise harsh transitions is sensationalism. Cars are obliterated by tanks, banks are blown up, Lamborghinis and helicopters act as taxis, and all is flaunted towards an ultimately anti-climactic fake injury bit with a rubber knife. Sensationalism retains the viewer; Although each scene by itself doesn’t provoke anything more interesting than its sheer existence, the scale and implied aplomb throughout the video continually reinvigorates surprise and interest.
“Survivor”, one of my favorite shows, similarly connects distinct scenes of high production value and visual appeal. “Survivor” is both connected by an overall theme of survival on an island and the high stakes of the competition, facilitated through deliberate actions by the show’s producers. It’s tense, where any given decision is edited by the producers as though it directly determines shown outcomes, ensuring peak drama. Comparatively, because Mr. Beast videos exist in clearly controlled environments where total success is both created and obvious, the stakes are minimal and disconnected from any larger theme entirely. Watching a Mr. Beast video is like being a cat scurrying to catch a laser, void of the satisfaction of the kill yet consumed by the activity. While “Survivor” player’s choices seem to have consequences towards an overall goal, Mr. Beast player’s choices have little consequence as they’re presented with downright dumb pathways to success that are smoke screened with scale and grandeur. I think it’s also important to note in this section that Mr. Beast videos are edited by someone with the attention span of a hummingbird and the bloodstream of Charlie Sheen.
Distance from Reality
There’s always a distance between a creator’s intention and how we as participants interpret it. Reality TV, while presenting itself as bridging that divide, is of course not “reality” at all, although still being a reality of its own creation. It’s style is intoxicating, and I often catch myself getting sucked into the drama and goss before regaining consciousness and wondering where I am and what led me to this point in my life. How we get lost in the conditions of the “reality” we’re presented is worthy of a longer analysis, but I’m currently too busy overwhelming myself in many ways to get into that.
With both reality TV and Mr. Beast videos, what is genuinely occurring during filming has gotta be so different from what’s ultimately being shown. Take for example Miranda Cosgrove in “50 YouTubers Fight For $1,000,000”, who appears as a food-making competition judge. Even including her sparse lines of dialogue, Miranda is presented so little and so passively that it’s almost as though she’s simply the idea of “Miranda Cosgrove”, which satisfies a need for the segment. Personally, I’m dying to know what the vibe in the room was during that competition, and if Miranda and Joey Chestnut engaged in awkward small-talk about iCarly/hot dogs/Israel/etc. There’s no way that Logan Paul didn’t try to hit on her, and I want to see her reject him so badly. Fuck Logan Paul, that fucking baby bitch boy. Nonetheless, like other content including reality TV shows, and certainly “Survivor” too, “Mr. Beast” videos are a produced amalgamation of the genuine moments that are filmed. Mr. Beast videos are simply a newer incarnation of this dynamic which has always been present, so I guess I’m just hooked by how goofy and obvious it is. Nonetheless, while I bemoan its crudeness, I find myself succumbing like hundreds of millions of others.
Above is lot of pseudo-intellectual jibber jabber to all basically say that I don’t like Mr. Beast videos. I also haven’t even gotten into recent allegations about Mr. Beast’s work conditions, which I sadly don’t have the brain power right now to loop in. Overall, it’s that’s no good for your chakras, or mine! What a relief that there’s something I can write glowingly about with wholehearted love: Skibidi Toilet.
Skibidi Toilet
I think he took it down, but my interest in Skibidi Toilet started from this guy praising it as mythological, abstract, and profound. He was clowned (everybody loves shitting on anything whenever the words “modern art” are invoked), and although the clowning was well-founded, I really resonated with his more serious analysis of those videos. It prompted me to binge the show in its entirety (so far totaling at just about 2 hours), which was both exhausting and transformative. I have many thoughts.
Description
Skibidi Toilet is in the genre of machinima, where video game graphics are used to create other plots/content. Although humans are seen at the show’s beginning and emerge in facets later on, the core characters introduced are toilets with faces emerging from the bowl (the titular “Skibidi Toilets”), and humanoid figures with electronic devices like speakers and video screens as heads (I call them Tech-Heads). Both sets of characters retain these essential features but vary widely as the show progresses in scale, color, movement, weapons, and abilities among others. The setting, beginning in a liminal yet recognizable cityscape, morphs into war-torn stretches of desolation, abstract enough for a viewer to project associations onto it without distracting from the overall narrative. The music, almost entirely being a remix of Timbaland’s “Give It To Me”, is annoying as hell, but its initial un-bearability quickly develops into a plot device where the annoyance is both in-character and furthers the plot. Other songs become a part of the narrative later on, and similarly speak to an overall narrative. Sound effects are primarily coming from each group’s weapons and the damage they cause, and, like the music, is changed with effects to reflect contextual differences in the narrative or changes in scale. Basically, big booms feel big.
The first episodes of the show establish the base elements of what will become the narrative: creepy faces in toilets are moving in militaristic formations, jumping at the viewer aggressively. The viewer, presumably as a Tech-Head, is often victim to and/or a perpetrator of the war of escalating scale, violence, and technology.
Progression
Where I find Skibidi Toilet to hold such narrative excellence and aesthetic originality is in its progression. Succinctly following the narrative device of Chekhov’s gun, Skibidi Toilet’s developments in the war follows what has already been established while adding new developments and upgrades. Although there is action implied to happen off-screen as credit to the world-building, everything you need to comprehend how the war is fought and what the sides/characters represent is shown to the viewer.
Watching this video was a wonderful thing for a young me to do, both as it’s best enjoyed by tweenage boys but also is quite well made, and is relatable as hell to Skibidi Toilet. As the Mega Man game deliberately introduces all aspects of the game experientially for you to organically learn, so too does Skibidi Toilet. If you watch the 52nd episode of the show out of the blue, you’d be rightfully confused by the apparent randomness. But, by watching each episode consecutively, you’d be able to follow the distinct language of Skibidi Toilet’s world and its characters. And I just used the word “language” deliberately of course! In language acquisition, basic blocks are built upon others, in both vocabulary and grammatical structures, to create increasingly complex things.
Abstraction and simplicity is Skibidi Toilet’s strength in forming this visual language and overall narrative. Back to this earlier bit, and very unlike Mr. Beast, the scenes happen because of what has preceded them. Even the progression of the episode’s length and scope changes, where the first episode’s 10-second brainrot content turns into 7-minute odysseys of plot twists and clever cinematography, culminating into sheer drama. As a further example, let’s go back to Skibidi Toilet’s sound and music. There is practically no dialogue, but the crashing sounds of explosions and metal scraping sets stakes even though the violence seems endless. The Timbaland remix is shown to be the language of the Skibidi toilets, which contrasts to the protagonist’s lack of spoken language as well as any given viewer’s own language around the world. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears For Fears (GREAT song btw. The video is iconic too.) later becomes an anthem for the protagonists, underscoring victories in the war campaign and also making me personally consider the values and themes present throughout.
Themes
While the viewer’s perspective is always seemingly of a grunt-like Tech-Head, God-like figures become the main characters, who wrestle for power while destroying environments and gaining acolytes. These gods are fallible, corruptible, and biased. There’s no scale or spectrum to base their powers from except that sometimes they win and sometimes they lose. Maybe we can postulate about where these divine powers come from, but that postulation only goes to further the myth of these titan’s existence.
And for real guys, take your pick at what themes can be analyzed in this plot: xenophobia, the nature/escalation of violence, evolutionary philosophy, what it means to be alive, and propaganda are there to name some. The further the war escalates in scale and violence, the further distance we have from the war’s purpose and a belief in its initial causes. How war changes its victims and what victory truly means are questioned through the viewer character’s actions in moments of sorrow of civilian deaths, or the violence through which Tech-Heads destroy Skibidi Toilets. Like with other critiques of war, how war changes its victims and what victory truly means are presented, and Skibidi Toilet explains itself entirely by showing these consequences without needing to explain itself.
In Contrast, and In Conclusion
As mentioned at the top of this thing, both Mr. Beast and Skibidi Toilet are extremely popular, regularly receiving hundreds of millions of views on the original creator’s channels, and are culturally dominant for Generation Alpha. Both are short too, where typical Mr. Beast videos come in at 10 minutes while Skibidi Toilet episodes range from Youtube Short length to seven minutes. Bright colors, big explosions, and Fortnite dances can be found in both. You can watch the entire Skibidi Toilet show in the same amount of time as 2.5 “Survivor” episodes, and if anybody’s willing to watch both simultaneously for science I will exalt you indefinitely.
There’s so many differences between these two, but perhaps the differences are too great to come to a succinct conclusion about in this essay. The only thing I feel comfortable contrasting is this disconnection from reality. Skibidi Toilet is still sensational and disconnected from reality, but neither aesthetically or thematically makes a case for itself as being authentic to our shared human experience. Mr. Beast being live action brings it “closer” to the viewer, and its video’s titles declare an intention to reach something that isn’t even the point of the video. Mr. Beast’s charismatic explanations of the terms of the video, developing throughout each video, re-set what the reality of the situation is, constantly resetting the viewer to buy-in to what he’s selling.
I’ve noticed myself beginning to become an old man yelling at clouds regarding various technologies which I believe seek to take advantage of the next generation. That generation, Generation Alpha, will be born into a world of ultra-surveillance and data collection, a thorough exacerbation of our decreasing attention spans, and rapid development of AI in its many forms, all of which is created by ever-expanding corporations that threaten the power and legitimacy of national governments. And I haven’t even brought up climate change!
I imagine that those people in Wall-E were probably watching a lot of Mr. Beast videos. It seems that our brains are built to be hijacked by the techniques in Mr. Beast videos, leaving us paralyzed to inhibit, be entertained, and die slowly. Conversely, that the absurdity of Skibidi Toilet can portray so many profound themes satisfies me that new media can continue to poignantly question humanity, necessarily in ways unimaginable to previous generations. What Skibidi Toilet communicates is on a through line of history which we continue to travel on, separated by culture and medium but connected in a way that’s difficult to describe. I can’t prove it, but right now something frightening, cool, and absurd is happening. Maybe that’s just because I’ve been blasting Tears for Fears and drinking whiskey highballs, but who gives a shit man.
