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Recently, two worlds have been colliding in my head, my five-year-old sneaking onto “real” YouTube to binge AI generated K Pop Demon Hunters episodes, and rooms full of strategists at Observe Summit talking about fandoms, culture, and how audiences move long before the market catches up. Somewhere between PopPop’s giggles and those sessions, it clicked for me that Gen Alpha is quietly test driving the future of content.

Think of this issue as a dispatch from a few years ahead. Gen Alpha is already growing up inside an AI remix economy, where canon is flexible and brain rot is treated as a feature, not a flaw. I want to tie that reality back to the choices you are making today, how you time launches, protect and extend IP, and build content that can hold its own in a world of endless fan edits.

Appreciate you for being here. Let’s talk about kids, AI slop, and the future of fandom.

Let’s dive in 🎯

Table of Contents

1. StoryTime

2. Lil Surfing

StoryTime

Storytime: Italian Brain Rot, K Pop Demon Hunters, and the New AI Slop Kids

It started with giggles.

My five-year-old, PopPop, has figured out that his big brother’s Nintendo Switch is a portal to the grown up YouTube, not the walled garden of YouTube Kids.

So every now and then he sneaks off, cracks open the YouTube app, and disappears into whatever the algorithm thinks a five-year-old boy might love.

The giveaway is always the laugh. Not the cute laugh, the “I am absolutely watching something I should not be watching” laugh.

So I walk into his room and there he is, sitting on his bed, Switch inches from his face, cackling.

“What are you watching, man”

“K Pop Demon Hunters.”

He hands me the Switch. I take one look at the screen and freeze.

The characters look familiar, but uncanny. The animation has that slightly off, AI generated feel.

The voices are stitched together.

The pacing is weird.

I check the runtime: thirty minutes.

This is not a meme, not a short, not a clip. It is a full episode of K Pop Demon Hunters, rendered entirely by a fan using AI.

And it is one of hundreds.

Once I fall down the rabbit hole, I realize there is an entire parallel universe of K Pop Demon Hunters content, all made by fans with AI tools.

Some episodes are silly and harmless. Some are basically South Park, wrapped in kid friendly visuals.

Giggle sound effects, “bruh” sound bites, “oh hell no,” political references, satire that goes way over a five-year-old’s head.

Then it gets weirder.

An episode where all three of the girls are pregnant.

An episode where the boy group is at the pool, and one of them has IBS, and the entire plot is built around that.

And again, these are not quick hits. These are twenty to thirty minute episodes. Long enough to feel like “the real thing” to a child who just wants more of their favorite world.

Here is the wild part: the audience is there.

I start tracking some of these videos. Views jump from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands in forty eight to seventy two hours. The velocity is real. Gen Alpha loves this stuff. What I jokingly started calling “AI slop” is actually a legitimate content category for them.

If you have kids, you are already living this cultural loop. Skibidi Toilet. “Six, seven.” Random slang that seems to show up in your toddler’s vocabulary overnight. We had our own generational nonsense, from “these nuts” to “up your butt and around the corner.” Every generation has its phrases that drive parents up the wall.

The difference now is scale and speed, powered by AI and frictionless distribution.

So what is “brain rot” anyway

“Brain rot” is the word kids themselves use for this kind of content and for what it does to them.

Formally, it describes both the junk content and the way you feel after bingeing it, that foggy, overstimulated, slightly fried state after too much trivial, low effort media. Oxford University Press even named “brain rot” its Word of the Year in 2024.

In practice, Gen Z and Gen Alpha use it half as a joke and half as a warning label. It is the term they slap on endless meme scrolls, surreal edits, and “so bad it is good” videos. Brain rot is:

• Content that is loud, fast, repetitive, and often absurd

• A consumption pattern of mindless scrolling, watching one more clip, then one more

• A self aware admission that this is not high art, but they cannot stop watching

Think of it as digital cotton candy. It dissolves instantly, it is not nutritious, but it gives a quick hit of dopamine that keeps them spinning the wheel.

Parents and psychologists worry that bathing in this stuff all day might make normal life, homework, reading, even conversation, feel flat and boring by comparison, which is where the “rot” metaphor comes from.

Harrison’s K Pop Demon Hunters binge fits that pattern perfectly. He is not chasing narrative cohesion. He is chasing more. More of the characters he loves, more chaos, more laughs, more soundboard memes. The AI part is almost invisible to him. The feeling is what matters.

Italian brain rot: when brain rot becomes a whole aesthetic

If brain rot is the category, Italian brain rot is one of its most extreme subgenres.

Italian brain rot is a Gen Z and Gen Alpha trend built around hyper chaotic, AI assisted videos of “Italian sounding” characters, usually weird animal object hybrids with nonsense lore.

Imagine:

• A crocodile bomber hybrid named Bombardino Crocodilo

• A ballerina coffee cup called Ballerina Cappuccina

• Characters like Tung Tung Tung Sahur or Tralalero Tralala, all delivered in exaggerated, fake Italian narration

The visuals are fast, surreal, and overstimulating. The “Italian” phrases sound authentic if you squint, but are usually meaningless. That is the joke.

Fans then build lore around these creatures. They track relationships, rivalries, battles, tragedies. They trade edits and remix the clips. Comment sections read like a shared cinematic universe, but one that only exists inside TikTok and Shorts.

For kids and teens, it hits a powerful mix:

• Maximum novelty, every clip is a new creature or scenario

• Rebellion against “serious” adult content

• Participation, they can duet it, remix it, or invent their own characters

It is brain rot with branding, a fully formed meme ecosystem that runs on AI tools, fan creativity, and recommendation algorithms.

Now put Italian brain rot next to Harrison’s AI K Pop Demon Hunters universe and you see the same hunger. This generation is perfectly comfortable in worlds where:

• The canon is fluid

• The visuals feel AI weird

• The story never really ends, it just keeps mutating

To them, that is not low quality. That is just culture.

Zooming out: from Demon Hunters to brand worlds

Now zoom out from K Pop demon hunting teenagers and think like a brand.

It is not hard to imagine Nickelodeon spinning up its own brain rot universe, essentially an Italian brain rot style world with Nickelodeon IP. Recognizable characters dropped into an endless loop of short, chaotic, hyper watchable micro stories that live in Shorts, Reels, and TikTok.

Plot depth is optional. The dopamine loop is the product.

Would that help Nickelodeon’s long term brand, or cheapen it. Does it matter if it creates billions of impressions with Gen Alpha and cements those characters as part of their daily scroll.

I do not know the answer yet, but I am convinced of two things:

1. It is going to be incredibly easy for anyone to create “K Pop Demon Hunter 2” style AI content for any world that has a fandom.

2. The kids are already telling us they are fine with it. In fact, they are choosing it.

At Observe Summit, Jeff Yang framed fandoms as cultural beacons, held together by lore, jargon, symbols, and code. AI just handed those fandoms industrial tools. They do not have to wait for the next official drop. They can write their own canon in between.

For marketers in CPG, QSR, and retail, this is bigger than kids’ TV.

We are entering a phase where fans will not wait for your next campaign flight or your next seasonal launch. They will use AI to create their own continuations of your story, their own “what if” worlds, their own brain rot versions of your brand.

You can fight it on legal grounds, or you can treat it like an early cultural signal.

Who is already making AI content with your brand as a character. What lore, jargon, symbols, and code are forming around it. Which of those worlds feel aligned with your values, and which cross a line.

Most of all, what would it look like to meet these fandoms halfway, to build fast, reusable, intentionally low stakes content that belongs in their hamster wheel, not just in your media plan.

PopPop’s giggles were not just a parenting fail. They were a preview of a future where AI fandoms do not wait for us, they move ahead without us.

The question for brands now is simple: do you want to author the next chapter, or just watch the fan edit.

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Lil’ Surfing 🌊

Just interesting articles I find on “The Internets” 😜

It’s Mandatory IYKYK

He was flowing though 🤣

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