is it just me or is the internet looking weirder than usual lately I mean the internet has always been weird but this feels different it's almost like kid stuff is taking over or something like you can't escape it no matter where you go if there's any place you can see this happening clearly it's horror horror is like a petri dish for this phenomenon you can watch in real time as kids assimilate new ideas within the genre of warp them and then spread them back out to the rest of the world the back rooms were ruined
by thousands of kids coming up with new monsters and new floors for them if not for the SCP Wiki's careful review process it would by now almost definitely be drowning in submissions from kids remember what kids did to Creepy Pasta in fact there's an entire horror subgenre that's basically come to be defined by this interaction mascot horror we all know Five Nights at Freddy's how could you not poppy playtime bendy in the ink machine it's all sort of uniquely positioned to look like it's four kids right from the start and the more kids flock to
it the more tailor made it appears to be for exactly that outcome the more intentionally approachable it becomes to Children The Stranger it becomes to everyone else to me this doesn't just look like kids taking an idea and making it weird it looks like a spiral descending down into a core of absurdity and insularity that you can only understand if you're already in the middle of it and I have to wonder where does it end [Music] [Applause] [Music] sometimes the search for truth leads us down dark paths I don't think anything I've studied for this
show could ever prepare me for what I now need to talk about I suppose if we really want to understand this weird relationship between kids and their media there's no better place to start than skibbidy toilet I know it's kind of a tired thing to say at this point every newscaster in their Jerry cat has offered some kind of commentary on how perplexing and strange skibby toilet is and it is weird I never thought Gmod YouTube poop would be serialized into a culture defining phenomenon but here we are the confusion is understandable that reaction is
also in a way more interesting than skibbidy toilet itself as an adult looking at something like this what do you make of it the term I see apply a lot here is brain Rod it's not just that kids are consuming low quality or poor taste media now it's that there's something wrong with it it's making them Dumber making the world worse at least adults know when they're looking at brain rot an adult would have gotten the initial joke in skib toilet and moved on kids really don't seem to they have a different way of understanding
the world which makes them especially vulnerable to it and okay maybe skibby toilet is a little silly to worry about in particular but what if you apply all that same logic to something a little darker I mentioned poppy playtime earlier you may have heard of it it's one of the most polished examples of a mascot horror game kind of a flagship title one of the monsters in the game Huggy wuggy proved especially popular with kids much to the concern of their parents in 2022 horrified parents and teachers across multiple countries accused poppy playtime of corrupting
their children news outlets reported that kids would play a game where they hugged each other Whispering a Sinister song Huggy wuggy had taught them the head of one British primary school called Huggy wuggy a very deceiving character as hugs should be seen as something kind and loving except hugy wuggy doesn't even sing in poppy play time that song the kids were Whispering that was free hugs a fan creation by by YouTuber tryhard ninja turns out the panic over poppy playtime was about something that isn't even in the game it's easy to assume that this whole
situation is all just more of the same parents responding to what they identified as brain rot albe it of a darker variety as a flagship piece of mascot horror poppy playtime fits right in with content like skibbidy toilet and all those weird Roblox kids games I can see why anxious adults might naturally assume that kids were once again just mindlessly absorbing what the internet was feeding them but regardless of where it came from kids singing about murder is still pretty scary right there has to be something going on there they're pretending to kill each other
on the playground no wonder their parents were upset actually come to think of it this is sort of familiar isn't it haven't parents always kind of been anxious about this stuff I'm thinking of the satanic Panic of the80s the scare over comic books and rock music of the ' 50s even in the Victorian era there was a concern that Penny dreadfuls would lead children to a life of crime the fact that adults have always worried about this kind of thing sort of also implies that kids have always done it right before poppy playtime kids were
teaching each other songs about murdering Barney the dinosaur and before that they were summoning Bloody Mary and playing with Ouija boards in fact they're still doing all that stuff to this very day now kids who have never even seen Barney still pass down songs about killing him he comes to them through other kids classmates siblings friends if they transfer schools the stories Rhymes and games come with them and while kids have been trying to summon Bloody Mary for decades no two rituals are the same nor are the stories about who Bloody Mary is or what
she even does once you summon her it almost sounds like folklore doesn't it I know when you think of folklore it's easy to think of the old stuff ancient legends mythology campfire Tales famous Cryptids like Bigfoot or Nessie sacred rituals passed down across Generations all of those things are folklore but folklore is modern too it's created every day all the time by everyone even children there's a word for this actually child lore a unique branch of anthropology dedicated to Folklore are created by kids and it's more than just ghost stories and creepy Rhymes if you
played hand clapping games as a kid if you traded trinkets like pogs or silly bands or crazy bones if you and your friends pretended to be dragons or superheroes at recess you were participating in folklore according to Media scholar Henry Jenkins kids differ a little in their approach though they tend to create their folklore through a process that he calls poaching they take something they're familiar with like their favorite game where show and adapt it into child lore by subverting it in some way that's how you get Jingle Bells Batman Smells creepy pastas about Sonic
the Hedgehog kids pretending to be Huggy wuggy it's also how you get skibby RZ Stanley Cups as a status symbol weird infected My Little Pony 's for adults this is all just brain rot for kids it's culture a way for them to mature form friendships learn about the world on their own terms from a frame of reference that they understand playing pretend lets them develop their imaginations spooky games help them face their fears in a fun Safe Way even those songs about killing cartoon characters are a way to prove that they're growing up by challenging
what adults think kids should be whether something is brain rot is really just a matter of perspective I don't think there's anything wrong with that kids and adults are bound to see things differently and hey sometimes child Lord can get out of hand remember the devious licks thing a few years back where kids were just destroying things and vandalizing their schools for views remember the Slender Man stabbing in 2014 those two girls who stabbed a classmate hoping to summon Slender Man expensive skincare products have become a mark of popularity for some kids who are fed
impossible beauty standards from Tik Tok and Instagram the call of the coveted influencer lifestyle is never far away I think the Internet is just kind of a big place maybe a little too accessible in some ways and there aren't really very many spaces dedicated to kids anymore gone are the days of Neo Pets and Webkins and Club Penguin kids are going to run across things they don't understand and they're going to poach it whether that gets out of hand is less a matter of the internet rotting children's brains and I think more a matter of
supervision adults do have respons ability to help kids navigate this complex space more safely while also allowing them the freedom to explore the culture of being a kid as an adult you can tell the difference between a skibbidy toilet and a vandalism pad kids literally cannot they lack the experience that part is actually pretty simple to me but I find really weird is when the opposite happens when adults poach child lore back you may have heard of a little Channel called Game Theory back in 2014 it sort of set a precedent by reading a little
too much into the game Five Nights at Freddy's very quickly after this for both the YouTubers and the kids watching at home Theory crafting became perhaps the primary way to engage with this game and its forthcoming sequels in fact immediately in the second installment you can already see the impact of this the game's lean into the idea of hidden and fragmented lore now there are countless spin-offs books merchandise even a movie all feeding together into this Byzantine body of lore that is Five Nights at Freddy's which also makes it the perfect poaching ground for kids
this is a franchise that has actively encouraged narrative diffusion that wants you to take pieces of it and run away with them and the kids have been happy to oblige lunchroom speculation about what they think is is going on at Freddy Fazbear's pizzeria playground rumors that it's a real place and searches for it on Google Maps endless internet Theory crafting of their own spiraling off into total kid brain absurdity Five Nights at Freddy's is a generation defining phenomenon I don't think there was quite anything like it before but boy is there a lot of stuff
like it now bendy in the ink machine hello neighbor choo choo Charles my friendly neighborhood hello puppets Poppy playtime and hundreds if not thousands of clones that you've probably never heard of which is fine when something is this successful you expect other people to draw inspiration from it you also expect as a matter of course for a sort of formula to emerge which is more or less what happened establish some fictional Place associated with kids fill it with adorable bloodthirsty monsters allude to mountains of unseen lore to attract the YouTubers easy it worked for Five
Nights at Freddy's how could you go wrong enter Garden of banban the game is set a sort of kindergarten complex it has lore but even Game Theory seems to have found it ridiculous I guess it does technically check all the boxes but look at it the scariest thing in this game is how much some of the monsters look like Gumby bban is a horror game but it isn't horrifying if anything it's Blobby monsters and lazy scares signaled fence that the entire genre was on the decline it seemed to epitomize a trend in Mascot horror the
growing desire to reflect their most profitable audience kids any adult could see this happening could see the target audience being pandered to but kids continue to eat it up here's the fan Wiki which there is no way this wasn't written by a 10-year-old so we see the spiral forming children poaching mascot horror incorporating it into their folklore with their theories fan art and games mascot horror poaching child lore integrating those child loric understandings or at least trying to make itself appealing to them Five Nights at Freddy's was once a simple story about possessed animatronics over
time the franchise became so complicated it's impossible to understand without a YouTuber explaining it to you ban ban followed the same recipe for a successful mascot horror game but became the poster child for what not to do creators wanted this to work for them to have a game theory video dedicated to your creation was and I'm sure is still to this day a crowning achievement in the world of mascot Horror in a now famous series of tweets the developers of hello neighbor even begged Game Theory outright in public to make a theory video about their
game and in a sense they did get the virality they were after the tweets came off to most viewers as painfully desperate for attention and they were not shy about communicating this the incident popularized hello neighbors developers in the worst possible way imaginable they were deemed cringe all for trying to force the creation of folklore I wouldn't wish that fade on anyone I'm sure their game is great but I mean it was weird because folklore can't be forced it has to develop naturally that's what happened with the early Five Nights at Freddy's games they may
not have had that much lore to begin with but fans enjoyed speculating and making their own where culture emerges people engage with it it's just what humans do so this spiral we're seeing it may actually be more dangerous for the developers than the kids no doubt kids picking up your idea and turning it into child La is a short path to virality but think of what you might sacrifice in that Pursuit kids ultimately don't need you to appeal to them they'll steal from you whether or not you follow the formula maybe it's better to just
make something worth stealing I said at the start that the internet has just been feeling weirder lately I think that's true but I don't think it's because kids create child lore I think it's because as a result of an Ever more Consolidated internet adults are having to see it more often and just don't know what to do with it I see people all the time coning skibby toilet and mascot horror as existential threats signs of the times a problem that needs to be fixed somehow brain Rod but maybe it's just culture a way for kids
to understand their world even if you don't understand it yourself and if it is a culture you don't understand why would you ever try to appropriate it I mean there wouldn't be a kids horror spiral if no one was trying to poach child lore back so maybe kids stuff on the internet isn't really that weird maybe the adults are just making it weird you know even though child lore is nothing to be afraid of childhood is actually pretty scary for you humans right it's where some of your deepest fears originate in fact one of my
favorite authors ever junjiito draws pretty heavily on his own childhood for his work which has resulted in perhaps some of the best horror ever made we actually made a whole documentary about this process it's part of our worldsmith series which you can find over on nebula along with exclusive content like World Smiths you can watch all of our usual videos there ad free no sponsor spots at all there's even older tail Foundry stuff over there that you won't find here on YouTube and this might surprise you our future content is over there too don't want
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