There has been an increase of ‘brain-rot’ throughout the decade revolving around the influence of recently released memes. In the past, social media humor made sense; now it doesn’t, and only makes sense if you actually look into and research. Brain-rot is the supposed intellectual and mental decline attributed to the pervasive consumption of low-quality, trivial, and often chaotic online content. Brainrot used to be meaningful and funny; meanwhile, brainrot stays funny, but the terms are less meaningful.
This content is found on media platforms like TikTok and YouTube. From “Pen, apple, Pineapple pen” and “what does the fox say” to the new-gen brainrot featuring “6 7”, “sendy”, Italian brainrot, skibidi toilet, sigma, alpha wolf, and John Pork. In contrast, the older generation would be familiar with phrases like “he needs some milk”, “Gottee”, the Drake’s Hotline meme reactions, the Doge image, and the “Just Do It” Nike commercial.
There has been a significant discrepancy between old memes and those we have today, from having a sense of meaning behind the memes to having none at all. In my opinion, Brainrot is amusing to an extent, but only if used at the right time and place, and not as a last resort or a poor attempt at humor. Most people, when quoting a meme or trend they do it at the randomist of times and have no meaning or plot leading up to it. In that poor attempt it barely is even humor, and is more cringe than what they intend it to be.
All brainrot is overused, and for people on YouTube Shorts, they get the memes and the trends later than people on TikTok do, because of which makes an annoying meme last way longer than it should, and it becomes generally irritating. The repetition of sayings can make them tiring to hear, resulting in a poor attempt at humor. Some trends stay around longer like “sigma”, “no cap”, “clock it,” and “rizz” are very overused, and sometimes, people need to accept that memes are dying and stop trying to bring them back.
Most brainrotted trends die because of the wrong usage and other words replacing them: for example, the ‘6-7’ trend. People refuse to think 6-7 is lame. It’s become almost too popular to be used correctly, which is going to cause the trend to die. 6-7 originates from the 69 trend, but when “7 ate 9”, it became 6-7, and most people don’t even seem to understand that or know where it came from. A rapper, Skrilla, includes 6-7 in the song because it sounds cool, not even for it to mean anything, mostly just trying to start a trend. Some people use 6-7 when counting or when telling someone the amount of something.
Another lousy brain-rot term is “sendy”. Sendy is an action, and when people say “sendy,” they usually don’t mean anything by it other than to just participate in the trend. Most people just say “sendy” out of context and for no specific reason, but similar to 6-7, I feel like Sendy could have some potential if people actually got its meaning. Sendy would be funny if people did the action of actually “getting sendy”.
The majority of other brain-rot memes don’t make sense and just aren’t funny. Italian brainrot that contains A.I. Italian characters such as Tung tung sahur, Cappuccina Ballerina, Brr Brr Patapim, Tralalero Tralala, and many, MANY more, which don’t have anything funny about them and are just there. People started regurgitating the popular AI audios and saying their names, thinking it was funny, only to realize later that most people were only laughing at them for being cringy and annoying. The Skibidi Toilet Trilogy is very similar to Italian Brainrot, and Skibidi Toilet is interesting because I don’t know exactly where it originated and how it became so popular. The YouTube videos of Skibidi toilet showing events that happen in the trilogy just repeat the theme song and are also quite random, as there is no right time or way to quote them. Skibidi toilet is used as a horror figure in some games or videos for children. Some, including myself, often use it like: “What the Skib” or “Holy Skib,” without truly knowing how it’s intended to be said.
Another term that came with Skibidi toilet was “sigma”, which is a word to describe an independent and rebellious type of man/woman, often described as a ‘lone wolf’ who doesn’t need to follow social hierarchies to be successful or admired, which brings me to the Alpha Sigma Wolf term. In my opinion, I find the “Alpha wolf” funny when describing someone. People in the school, such as Principal Ayonna Sutton-Chaplin and Michael Poller. The images that follow of the Alpha Wolf were amusing at first, but people soon grew tired of them, again due to overexposure.
One trend the public hasn’t gotten over is the John Pork Meme. The whole plot of the brainrot could be found mostly on Vexbolt’s TikTok page. John Pork is a pig and the leader of ‘Eye of Rah’. The lore behind John Pork is that he was murdered by Tim Cheese, and it is surprisingly very complex. As opposed to other trends, this one has a whole storyline, instead of random things put together, hoping to be funny. There also isn’t just one creator of the plot and characters, which I find very interesting. The John Pork Meme has more plot than the other memes like the italian brainrot, which sets it apart from the others, making it long term interesting.
The brainrot of this decade is definitely called ‘brainrot’ for a reason. The terms that I discussed prove that most of the brainrot of this day doesn’t make any sense and were just randomly strewn together for no reason at all, just to be “tuff”. Compared to the 2010s, memes used to be meaningful. The 2010s created many jokes and videos that are nostalgic to people today, and I think, instead of these fleeting brainrot trends, we should bring back Vine memes once again.
