The Horrors of Adulting: Nonsensical Niche YouTube Trends

My four-year-old son Jack is autistic, and for limited, supervised periods of time, I hand over my phone so he can browse YouTube and indulge in his short attention span/repetition-loving urges. He’s not into anything bad, but some of the stuff he likes can verge on unsettling to me.

5. Nerdcore

He’s been watching nerdcore since he was a wee baby, when his siblings put it on. It’s when gamers make music videos for songs they wrote about video games, and they often perform in costume as the characters. His favorites are The Stupendium, Dan Bull, and Random Encounters. (Though to be honest, I love them too.) Below is his top pick of the moment. He doesn’t scare easily.

4. Disorder

There are videos consisting of people pouring things into a toilet, sometimes to see whether they will flush, sometimes just…because? Jack also enjoys the ones when people fill balloons with various colored liquids and pop them on the floor, making an absolutely unholy mess.

3. Demolishing Things

These involve people ruining things just for the sake of destruction. They run over colorful items with their car or huck breakable objects down a flight of stairs, or in one trend that particularly makes me cringe when I think of how I would fall down and bust my head, jump on alternating steps to squash a balloon.

2. AI Atrocities

People make AI videos for a variety of reasons, sometimes trying to pass them off as real, but Jack likes the ones that are purposely fantastical, like a series of ladies getting into beds made of distinctly un-bed-like materials. It’s seriously supposed to be relaxing, but often the woman starts sinking and merging with the bed. Or there are the ones that are meant to be cute, like the anthropomorphized fruit globes that are squashed open by disembodied hands to reveal animals. In the picture above, that watermelon has eyes and appears sentient–what kind of Cronenbergian body horror is that?! I can’t decide which are more nightmarish: those or the ones of babies made of fruit practicing cannibalism.

1. Me

I have a YouTube channel for movie reviews. It’s been basically defunct for oh about the last four years, but it’s there. He prefers my video about Season of the Witch.

Overall, to me the creepiest aspect of these channels is the randomness and surrealism. But it makes sense to my son, so carry on ya weirdos. Thank you for making him happy.