B
y October 2025, Boom, the mysterious creator of Skibidi Toilet, was heir to the YouTube throne. He had grown his twisted brainchild into the world’s most popular animated web series. It was a Happy Meal toy away from irreversible domination.
The Skibidi Toilet story had started just two years earlier. On Feb. 7, 2023, Alexey Gerasimov, a Russian-Georgian animator known as Boom, uploaded an 11-second clip. Shot like a video-game cutscene, it saw the head of a bedraggled, grinning man emerge from a toilet. “Skibidi dop dop dop yes yes,” the man sings over a bouncy, Eurotrash techno beat as his face crudely spins. “Skibidi double u reeh reeh.”
That nonsensical microdrama took off. By late 2023, the series had racked up 65 billion views, earned Gerasimov more than 30 million subscribers and was named YouTube’s top trend of the year. In classrooms and living rooms across the globe, crazed children parroted its maddening theme song to the dismay of teachers and parents.
It was widely seen by these exasperated adults as a prime example of “brainrot” — but over the next couple of years, the meme became a multi-dimensional series with a cinematic universe. Slightly older fans entered the fray. The intellectual property, or IP, had the potential, as a character animated by Gerasimov once joked, to make “Skibillions.” A network of Skibidi Toilet “analysts” emerged, making fan edits and, in some cases, their living.
Then came Emergence, a spinoff series surprise-released on Oct. 26, 2025. It came at a critical juncture; the absurdly popular main series had hit some minor snags and hardcore fans felt the quality of the most recent episode, 79 Part 3, wasn’t up to scratch. Maybe Emergence could fix that. “Things are just getting started,” teased the tagline.
In reality, everything in Skibidi’s weird-ass world was about to stall.
Controversially, Boom hadn’t even animated it. Instead, a studio team had been assembled; they introduced a new style, sanitizing Boom’s edgy style with a more juvenile sheen. Diehards took to the video’s comments section to air their disappointment. Was Skibidi Toilet turning into the lousy cartoon detractors had always said it was?
The fans had a new big bad: Invisible Narratives. In October 2023, the studio, known as Inviz, had begun a purchase of Skibidi Toilet’s IP (the deal would be finalized in May 2025.) They had promised to propel the series even further into the pop cultural orbit.
In July 2024 news broke that Transformers director Michael Bay was working on a Skibidi Toilet feature film. That October, Bonkers Toys launched a range of figurines. In December 2024, Skibidi Toilet character skins premiered on Fortnite. Gerasimov continued his relationship with the diehard followers, replying to their messages, encouraging them to help shape the series’ narrative.
But soon after Emergence premiered, Boom’s replies became less frequent. Fans started to claim that he was being separated from his own series — there’s no way, they thought, he would have given the green light to the spin-off, which appeared to be so different from the one he created.
Nine months since its release, the Emergence trailer is still the most recent upload on the series’ YouTube channel. The “escalating war” it teased didn’t happen between the Skibidi Toilets and the Alliance — instead, it started to break out between the fans and Inviz, and it’s far from reaching a ceasefire. Now, the series risks haemorrhaging its lifeblood: the fans.
WHEN TALK OF SKIBIDI ARISES, most people picture an image from that first 2023 video: the head of a grinning man bulging out of a toilet bowl. “A lot of people know the thumbnail version of Skibidi Toilet,” says writer Aidan Walker, author of On Skibidi.
It didn’t take long for “Skibidi” to enter the slang of Gen Alpha. “It’s what we call a non-lexical vocable. It’s scat singing,” explains linguist Adam Aleskic, known online as the Etymologist Nerd. It became a shibboleth for preteens, armed with a secret phrase that didn’t really mean anything. “There’s a feeling that this is a funny in-joke. Once the adults catch on, the joke is no longer funny.”
The plot of the original YouTube series began to follow the Skibidi Toilets, a conqueror race armed with futuristic weaponry and an intention to colonize the galaxy. Led by the G-Toilet — one of the toilet heads — they invade Earth and turn humans into toilets through the siren-like power of the Skibidi song. But humanoids with electronic devices for faces (Cameramen, Speakermen, and TV Men) help defend the humans. Later, the Astro Toilets, a more powerful force, descend from space and a civil war erupts.
New fans got on board when Boom began to turn Skibidi into this more cinematic franchise. “People still know it from that first meme and song, but it’s really evolved so much it’s basically unrecognizable,” says Cat, a superfan known as Plunger_Camerawoman on Reddit. (Cat is her online pseudonym; many of Skibidi’s devoted fanbase stay anonymous.) Since it premiered, the series has propped up an unofficial network of creators, such as Iron Cameraman (800,000 subscribers) and Ibio75 (4.6 million subscribers, before he recently archived his channel), who post fan edits, discussions, and imagined plot summaries for future episodes on YouTube.
But Gerasimov remained the master of the Skibidi canon. “It’s like an art expert identifying the work of a specific painter,” Cat says.
He is also a genuine enigma. While fans have a deep understanding of his animation style and impish personality, little is actually known about the creator’s backstory. The 28-year-old’s current whereabouts are a mystery. Only a couple of images of him exist online: the most commonly shared shows a young Caucasian man with shaggy hair, dressed in a black tee and leather jacket.
“It made me have a strange feeling of toilets being some kind of divine and unexplored entity. Thus, Skibidi Toilet was born.”
From 2017 to the start of 2023, Gerasimov built up more than a million subscribers on his DaFuqBoom! YouTube channel by churning out animated parodies of Transformers, Grand Theft Auto, and Squid Game. (He has also been embroiled in controversy: in the past, he has appeared to mock George Floyd’s death and used the N-word on a Discord forum. “You knew that my content is inconsistent,” he wrote in Discord as part of an apparent explanation.) But after being tormented by recurring nightmares about heads coming out of toilets, he told Forbes in 2024, he began rendering his lavatorial dreams. “It made me have a strange feeling of toilets being some kind of divine and unexplored entity,” he said. “Thus, Skibidi Toilet was born.”
Gerasimov brought his characters to life using Source Filmmaker, a movie-making tool released in 2012 by video game developer Valve. “There’s a gritty feeling to SFM, which gives it enough detachment to understand it’s not real, but also offers a sense of eerie realism,” says Bab. Repurposing characters and objects from Valve games like Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source, Gerasimov began posting episodes on YouTube every few days.
Fans were drawn to the immersive quality of the edgy, glitchy graphics. “When you watch the series, you’re thrown into this world where you have no idea what’s going on, no context of past events, no names of characters,” Cat explains. “It’s like found footage.” Iron Cameraman, one of the most popular Skibidi YouTubers, thinks it simulates playing a video game. “You feel like you are the character in that episode. Like you are in the battle.”
These dramatized conflicts in Gerasimov’s early videos can get brutal fast: Toilets are beheaded, machine men are crushed, and robots are burned with an ever-expanding arsenal of futuristic weaponry. Walker connects it to the proliferation of first-person footage of war online. “It is not a children’s cartoon,” says Ibio75. “It is a series where, if you look closely, [there are] feelings, action, and a constant fight between good and evil.”
IN APRIL 1917, ARTIST MARCHEL DUCHAMP purchased a urinal, reoriented it 90 degrees, and called it “Fountain.” The art caused scandal — he was barred from the exhibition at the Grand Central Palace in New York, and was forced to resign from its board. But by the 1950s, Duchamp’s work was reappraised as a smart reaction to the bleak absurdity of World War I. In 2004, a group of 500 artists, curators, and critics voted “Fountain” the most influential artwork of the 20th century.
In the same way, Skibidi Toilet had the potential to become a creation of enduring value. Adam Goodman, who had worked on the Transformers series as president of Paramount Pictures, started Invisible Narratives in 2018. Around this time, he stumbled across Gerasimov’s early Transformers parody videos. When we speak over Zoom in February, he tells me that he admired the “aggressiveness in his vision” and the “ballsiness” of Gerasimov’s approach.
When Skibidi launched, Goodman was on the hunt for assets for his new venture. “I wanted to capture IP at its source, where we could get things that young people were feeling a sense of ownership and discovery of,” he says. He knew the nascent franchise had potential to spawn merchandise. “I don’t think that to win in the entertainment business, it’s about getting paid for your content. It’s about getting paid for all of the stuff that your content spins around.”
In early 2023, a talent executive at Inviz reached out to Gerasimov. The young creator was “holding on for dear life” due to the channel blowing up so quickly, Goodman says. “[I had been] locking in, spending sleepless days beside my computer,” Gerasimov said in April 2025. “I wake up — I do Skibidi Toilet, throughout the day I do Skibidi Toilet and before I drop dead to sleep I do Skibidi Toilet.”
So Goodman forged a partnership with Gerasimov to help with both the “unbelievable opportunity” and the “unbelievable chaos” of the contemporary creator economy. After the initial deal was signed in October 2023, Gerasimov continued to release episodes as new Skibidi Toilet toys hit the shelves at Walmart and lucrative partnerships with Fortnite and Roblox were announced. By the end of 2024, Skibidi Toilet was a titan of the online entertainment industry.
In January 2025, Inviz launched the Creator Alliance, a group of “top level” Skibidi Toilet YouTubers that were allowed to use the series’ assets in return for 30 percent of their video revenue. “The big thing for me was to have a community of trusted talent that could help us guide where this was going,” Goodman says. Robert Kozinets, a fandom expert and professor at the University of Southern California, says it’s a familiar pattern: “They’re certainly not the only ones to try and shove a contract in front of super-fans and say, ‘We want to control the product in some way.’” An Inviz spokesperson defends the contract: “These clauses are standard in our industry and they are important for brand protection.”
“They’re not the only ones to shove a contract in front of super-fans and say, ‘We want to control the product.’”
The most exciting development from Inviz, in its first year of work with Boom, was the rumored Skibidi Toilet movie. “The controversial animated internet sensation is being developed for TV and film treatment by director Michael Bay and former Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman,”reported Variety. Goodman tells me that it was in the trial phase, rather than production, comparing it to Bay’s pre-visualization tests that he did for Transformers. “That’s what he was exploring with Skibidi early on,” he says.
In May 2025, Bay posted an Instagram Reel saying he was not directing a Skibidi movie. “Let’s just stop the lore right now,” he wrote. OK. “You’re hearing it from me,” Goodman explains he was “playing around” with the fans because of the rampant speculation. “He came out and he’s like, I’m not making a movie, I’m doing a test, I went to a sound stage and I shot some stuff,” Goodman says. When asked this July for any updates, a spokesperson for Inviz said simply, “It is in development.” (Bay’s representatives did not return Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
Also in May 2025, Gerasimov sold all of Skibidi Toilet’s copyright and trademark rights to Inviz. In return, according to an Inviz spokesperson, he received a “substantial” payment and was granted “meaningful participation” in future revenue streams. He was also appointed the sole executive producer of the franchise, meaning he, on paper at least, would oversee the creative direction of the series.
Gerasimov’s release schedule began to slow. Episode 79, Part 3, released Oct.7, 2025, disappointed some fans. But it was Emergence, released a few weeks later, that was the real punch in the guts. It didn’t use the fans’ beloved Source Film Maker: it was swapped out for Unreal Engine, the slick software that powered Fortnite. “Professional animation studios don’t work in Source Film Maker,” Goodman says.“It wasn’t a pipeline we could invest in.”
More importantly, for the first time, Boom hadn’t animated it. Fans started taking aim at Inviz. “The reaction to it was pretty tepid and then it became pretty aggressive,” Goodman concedes. They began to frame the deal as a Faustian bargain, claiming he was coerced into the contract. (Inviz maintains that entering into the deal was Gerasimov’s choice.) A DM Gerasimov sent to ibio75 during the making of Episode 79, Part 2, circulated in November, which read: “I’m just not being paid out anything,” leading to concerns that he had been conned.
“This message has been taken out of context and timing, never recognizing the realities of a multi-year partnership and that revenue flows over time. The full picture is larger than a screenshot,” a spokesperson for Inviz says.
Followers were heartbroken that their idol had, potentially, signed away his creation. Goodman, recognising the rising anger, wanted to patch things up with the fanbase. “If it’s not great, then let’s just take a pause and make it great, because there’s no reason in the world to antagonize the audience if they’re not liking this thing,” he figured.
To try to quash the backlash,Inviz shared two statements in November and December 2025. They revealed that Goodman had flown to the Middle East to meet with Gerasimov in person for the first time. “I went to Dubai to finally meet Alexey, give him a hug, celebrate the partnership — and not spend the entire trip talking about toilets,” he says. (It’s unclear whether Gerasimov had moved there, from either Russia, where he may have faced issues receiving payment due to economic sanctions, or Georgia, where Goodman has previously stated he is from. When asked where he was based when the working relationship began, an Inviz spokesperson said, “That is a question for Alexey.”)
The late 2025 statements also included a rare public comment attributed to Gerasimov: “I know some fans are worried about what this expansion of the series means. I ask you to trust the process. In my new role as executive producer, I’m still guiding the stories, characters, and the energy that make Skibidi what it is, but now I’ll have a larger support structure helping me bring it all to life,” it read.
In the statement, Inviz also revealed that Gerasimov was taking a break from animating: “Alexey deserves space — real space — to breathe, recharge, and rediscover what inspires him next.” But many fans didn’t buy it. They wanted to reinstate their leader.
SO BEGAN THE BRING BOOM BACK movement, which mobilized on Reddit and Discord in November 2025. Fans started to act as super sleuths, investigating Inviz’s actions and trying to track down Gerasimov. Many looked for Easter eggs they believed he had left in his final messages and videos, ranging from secret messages in occasional emails he continued to send to fans, to a theory that he was running DoorClozer, another YouTube animation channel.
“The elite group of hardcore superfans are some of our most important. But they’re not the majority.”
“This kind of detective work is a very fannish activity,” says Kozinets. Goodman, though, stresses that this faction does not represent the entire fandom. It is, after all, a miniscule part of the viewing audience. “The elite group of hardcore superfans are some of our most important,” he says. “But they’re not the majority.”
By the time Bring Boom Back gathered speed, the Creator Alliance had fractured. Several high-profile Skibidi YouTubers had leaked their contracts, complaining that various clauses were unfair. The agreements rapidly broke down. “Internal calls were leaked and confidential contracts were shared publicly. As a result, trust eroded on both sides, and progress stalled before Invisible Narratives ever fully launched the Alliance,” says an Inviz spokesperson.
Goodman laments the dissolution of the Creative Alliance and the incendiary action of its former participants. “I was a little frustrated. I wanted to rely on our Alliance members, to show them things and get feedback. But now, we were all of a sudden in this dynamic where that cone of silence, that protection [the Creator Alliance agreement] wasn’t something that felt like an actual resource. It felt like it was being weaponized against us.”
Last January, 57 prominent Skibidi YouTubers signed an open letter to Inviz, demanding that Gerasimov be made lead animator again. “You literally stole a part of our lives from us,” wrote animator NoCap! “Without Alexey, it’s not Skibidi Toilet,” declared animator ZacDoor.
Soon after, Goodman took to X, wading into the saga publicly for the first time after a series of calls with fans and increasingly public spats. “We show facts, you hide,” goaded one post from an account belonging to Goodman. Ten Skibidi Toilet YouTube channels, no longer protected by the Creator Alliance, would be hit with copyright strikes by Invisible Narratives LLC and affiliated firms in the same month — ZacDoor’s channel risked being permanently deleted by YouTube. (“As part of an ongoing IP protection strategy, a number of videos were struck,” the spokesperson says. “After a manual review, Invisible Narratives retracted all of those strikes – including those on ZacDoor’s videos – within 24 hours.”)
Astonishingly, on April 4, Inviz revealed they had bought the URL “BringBoomBack.com” and posted a “message to the community” to clear things up. “Over the past months, the story around Skibidi Toilet, Alexey, and Invisible Narratives has grown increasingly disconnected from reality,” it begins. “Accusations, assumptions, and speculation about who we are and what we’ve done have circulated widely across the community.” Inviz used the site to share screenshots of private conversations with Gerasimov.
In one WhatsApp conversation, dated May 7, 2025, Gerasimov tells Goodman that he’s ready to sign the contract. “My brain is finally at peace with the idea,” he writes. On another, Gerasimov says Emergence “looks great,” and says the initial reaction is “mostly positive.”
In one sprawling message, Goodman pleads with Gerasimov to stop letting “people mythologise you as the martyr” and reach out to prominent fans including Iron Cameraman, Ibio75, and ZacDoor to say he “wasn’t robbed.” Gerasimov quips: “Didn’t I tell you these fans are crazy sometimes?” For some of these fans, who believed Gerasimov was unconditionally on their side, it was hard to stomach — did their king just call them crazy? And did he actually like Emergence?
When reached by Rolling Stone, Gerasimov declined an interview, citing contractual restrictions. A spokesperson for Inviz says that Gerasimov and Inviz must “speak with one voice about the franchise,” and that there are confidentiality clauses in place, they note that they previously asked him to set the record straight. “We encouraged Alexey to update fans and correct the false assumptions that have damaged the franchise we both love,” they wrote.
But it’s not clear whether he’s actually asked for permission to engage in media interviews. “To date, Alexey has not requested Invisible Narratives’ consent to participate in an interview concerning Invisible Narratives or the parties’ business relationship,” says a spokesperson. “Invisible Narratives has previously expressed its willingness to enter into a formal, written agreement permitting both parties to discuss the relationship publicly.” These mixed messages have made it difficult to decipher whether Gerasimov is at least partially staying quiet out of choice, to dodge bullets, or out of necessity, bound by small print.
THIS FALLOUT HAS LEFT INVIZ with a potentially cursed IP. The fatal error, it seems, was underestimating what Gerasimov meant to fans. “There’s a lot of people [in entertainment] that think they can come into this new arena of influencers and apply tactics like, we’re gonna just run this channel. It’s not easy to do,” says a former Inviz employee, speaking to Rolling Stone on condition of anonymity. “Authenticity is so, so crucial. It’s the lifeblood of the creator economy. People have this direct relationship with the influencers. They look at every aspect of the new video coming out. It’s not Hollywood, right?”
Kozinets thinks it’s a typical trajectory. “Name a fandom who hasn’t had its founder eventually bought out when successful, and then handed off to a large conglomerate that fans then hate, and long for the good old days of when it was authentic.” Fanbases are now exceptionally powerful, especially when it comes to anything so esoteric. “Companies don’t know how to build alliances and to build respectful relationships. They see them as resources to either control or exploit,” says Kozinets.
In trying to make it a slicker venture, Inviz has risked sacrificing Skibidi’s edgy weirdness. “This sense of community only happens when it’s a little bit freaky, a little bit weird, not for everybody. When you try to make Skibidi Toilet for everybody, it ends up being for nobody,” Walker says. Ultimately, you can buy a franchise, but you can’t buy the fanbase. “Legally, Invisible Narratives owns it. Spiritually, the fans own it,” Walker says.
“Companies don’t know how to build alliances They see them as resources to either control or exploit.”
Theoretically, a substitute for Gerasimov could save Skibidi Toilet. “If you had someone who was a real, hardcore member of the community and really understood that vision, and [they] became a showrunner, that would be, I think, very close,” says Walker. Strider, a longtime associate of Gerasimov and a fellow animator, has previously confirmed he is working with Inviz on future Skibidi Toilet episodes. He’s exasperated by the heat he’s got from fans for joining what they see as the dark side.
“The reaction has been very mixed. Some people have been supportive, or at least fair, but a lot of it has crossed the line into hostility and personal attacks,” Strider says. “There is a difference between criticism and harassment, and in my view that line has absolutely been crossed.” He says he has been paid fairly by the company, and treated respectfully. “Fan narratives can spread much faster than actual verified information.”
But the hardcore contingent aren’t willing to accept a new animator. The Bring Boom Back’s official Discord server, known as Inviz Archive, is now 9,216 members strong and counting. In May, the resistance movement launched a dedicated website, LetBoomSpeak.com, featuring an archive of screengrabs, grievances and receipts. “Until we receive a statement from Alexey where all contractual restrictions preventing him from speaking freely are lifted, we will not stop promoting our movement to bring him back,” read a statement from ZacDoor. “Honor is more important than money.”
Boom and Inviz, though, seem to be estranged. “Every episode to date on our YouTube channel was either animated by or executive produced by Alexey Gerasimov,” said a spokesperson when asked if they still had a working relationship. “While the parties are not currently collaborating on new Skibidi Toilet content, the existing agreement remains in effect and provides a framework for future collaboration should Alexey choose to participate.” When asked when fans can expect a new episode, the response was: “Soon!”
While nothing seems concrete, the official Skibidi Toilet Instagram account has continued to post cryptic cutscenes, the most recent a carousel post that ends with a Secret Agent holding a phone that’s screen reads: COMING SOON.
Ultimately, the Skibidi saga is a risk case for studios wading through YouTube to find the next big thing. Creators and audiences are indispensable; the “You” feeds the “Tube” as much as the other way around. When the fandom gets pissed, the creator gets caught in the chaos and the corporation fights back, every side is plunged into a paranoid conspiracy. “Dealing with this level of passion and fandom can be incredibly exhilarating, and it can be incredibly difficult,” Goodman said.
But in a parallel universe, Gerasimov could have been the wunderkind director behind an A24 hit. He recently took to X to make a statement, in response to Backrooms — another recent movie based on a successful YouTube series — blowing up. “This is the kind of dream many internet creators strive for, and as someone who spent years solo grinding entire projects, seeing that actually materialize for another creator is really inspiring,” he wrote. “Hopefully, Backrooms receiving this level of acclaim and commercial success sends a clear message to the industry: creator-led projects can reach incredible results when given the right opportunity and support.”
Inviz may yet survive the battle; in June, outlets reported that the firm had received $25 million in investment from private equity firm Verance Capital. In the same month, they successfully faced off a lawsuit from Next Level Apps, a Dubai-based company that had, bizarrely, been trying to claim Skibidi Toilet assets as their own.
But there may also be a secret weapon for Gerasimov. After endless requests from Skibidi fans, YouTube creator Law By Mike — real name Michael Mandell — released a video about the legal saga on June 30, running through the chronology and sympathising with both Inviz’s duty to protect the copyright and the fans’ frustrations. It was a coup for the fanbase: it’s already earned over 2 million views. “Alexey, if you’re watching this, you may have signed something that prevents you from publicly discussing aspects of your contract,” Mandell says in the video. “But I got good news for you. No one can keep you from talking to a lawyer. Reach out to me. We can see if there’s a legal way to help.”
For fans, it’s the ultimate test of Gerasimov’s character. If he takes up Mandell’s offer, it’s proof that he still cares about the franchise they love and is willing to fight to regain some sort of public control. And if he doesn’t reach out? Then the nightmare, that became a meme, and then a dream, really is over.
But on Aug. 3., Gerasimov sent a reply to a fan animator known as Chameleon. “It’s been quite some time since we heard from you. There wasn’t a decent episode on your channel for so, so, so long. It’s crazy,” Chameleon had posted. “Just rewatched [episode] 78 out of nostalgia, and I legit almost dropped some tears of joy. Thank you Boom for what you did for the Skibidi Toilet community. We will never forget your authenticity, love towards the series and us.” Gerasimov replied: “Thank you for the words of support. Really really missing the community at this time.”
