By Nick Walters, CSO, SuperAwesome
What K-Pop Demon Hunters, Brainrot, and a community of violent cats teach us about the nature of modern fandom.
“The stupidest sh*t I ever saw”.
That’s how one (Gen Z) YouTuber described Italian Brainrot to me. If you haven’t seen Italian Brainrot then… well… it’s kinda… Oh man. It’s basically a series of memes featuring fantastical creatures with weird accessories singing dumb songs. There’s a shark with sneakers, amongst other things.
Brainrot emerged from the primordial content soup of TikTok and went viral earlier this year. [Insert stat on consumption]. Unlike other viral moments that distracted us for an afternoon, interest has sustained [insert Google Trends stats here]. As best anyone can tell, the trend had no single creator. Instead, a series of TikTokers spawned the concept, remixed it, and generated their own content using the key characters, all while maintaining a recognisable canon.
Brainrot has crossed the chasm and become more than just a series of memes. It’s inspired by top-performing games on both Fortnite and Roblox. My best guess is that the Roblox game is probably making at least [$5m a week] right now. That’s more money than Channel 4.
In other words: Brainrot is currently making a bid to become a fandom: a community of shared interest, built around an IP. Fandoms are what sustain franchises. It’s nice to have people who watch your shows, but, as Disney shareholders will happily attest, it’s much nicer to have fandoms.
Historically, franchises originated top-down. The studio made a show, marketed a show, and if enough people liked the show, the studio made some merch. Fans could vote with their wallets (and eyeballs), but they didn’t get much say.
As Brainrot demonstrates, that’s changed. Gen Alpha has more ways to engage with their favorite stuff than ever, and they have a heap of control. In a world of near infinite content, they are entirely unshackled from the linear schedule – and have absolute choice about what they choose to watch, and more importantly, share. They, and the creators they follow, can clip, remix, and react to content ad infinitum. Meanwhile, over on platforms like Roblox, a legion of creators stands ready to jump on any trend that looks like it’s going viral and experiment with interactive content before your commercial director can say the words “minimum guaranteed licensing deal.”
All this revolves around communities of superfans on platforms like Reddit and Discord, who scrutinise and celebrate their fandoms in exhaustive detail.
That ecosystem has equipped Gen A communities to spawn and sustain their own fandoms. But that doesn’t mean the conventional model is dead—far from it. Instead, smart studios need to lean in to the dynamics of modern fandom.
One way to do that is creatively. Everyone’s favorite summer smash, K-pop Demon Hunters, is an awesome movie, but it made life easy for itself by harnessing the surging popularity of the K-pop fandom. And the movie does so with genuine love – it’s replete with iykyk K-pop visual nods and references. The movie’s whole premise is that the absolute worst thing a demon can do is steal the souls of the group’s fans. It’s a love letter to the K-pop fandom.
Smart studios also need to recognise the power of creators. Fandoms are about talkability, and SuperAwesome’s research repeatedly shows that YouTubers and TikTokkers excel at sparking conversations among Gen A. One great way to tap the power of content creators is to give them something to make content about. One of the benefits of KPDH’s deep lore is that it gives creators and their communities a near-Tolkienian level of background material to feast on in their posts.
And of course, in a world of community-powered fandoms, professional IP owners are well advised to engage respectfully with those communities. When Coolabi, owners of the Warrior Cats IP (Game of Thrones but with cats, began life as a series of YA novels, over 40M sold so far), stumbled across a community of hardcore fans running a Roblox game inspired by the books, they didn’t reach for their cease and desist pens. Instead, they partnered with game makers. The result? A game with over 600M lifetime plays and a vibrant Discord community that forms the beating heart of a fandom that’s become a genuine shared project between “professional studio” and enthusiast fans.
Gen Alpha is perfectly capable of constructing their own fandoms. When they do, we should learn from them.
