With equal parts confusion and shame, I regret to inform you that Skibidi Toilet is coming to Fortnite

I had made it this far in my life without knowing what "Skibidi Toilet" is, and I did my damnedest to keep it that way. But as of today my streak is flushed, because it seems that Epic Games is putting Skibidi Toilet in Fortnite.

Word of the cursed collaboration came our way via a cryptic tweet posted earlier today, which quite frankly meant nothing to me. A toilet, a plunger, and a video camera might make for a good Sesame Street instructional, but as far as how it relates to Fornite I was entirely in the dark.

It was PC Gamer features producer Mollie Taylor, far hipper than I in matters of pop culture, who made the connection, which upon further investigation (because I am a professional) was confirmed by various Fortnite dataminers including HypeX and SpushFNBR. Skibidi Toilet is indeed coming to Fortnite in the form of a Plungerman skin, Skibidi Toilet back bling, and Plungerman's Plunger pickaxe, available for purchase individually or in a bundle.

There will also apparently be an emote, because sure, why not:

Skibidi Toilet, as I've been forced to learn, is a machinima series created with Source Filmmaker by Alexey Gerasimov and released on his DaFuq!?Boom! channel on YouTube. It is, according to Wikipedia, particularly popular with Generation Alpha—those born after the early 2010s—but it's also become a broader pop culture phenomenon: You can, for instance, buy a range of Skibidi Toilet merchandise from Walmart.

Interestingly, the response to the imminent skibidization of Fortnite is not universally positive. Reaction memes abound and some of them get a little grim, but this seems to sum up the emotion of the moment rather succinctly:

Some have also questioned whether Epic is asking for legal trouble from Valve by adding Skibidi Toilet to its game. The singing head from the debut episode of Gerasimov's series is actually the head of the Male_07 civilian character model from Half-Life 2. Valve might be cool with its assets being used in an unrelated video series, but I imagine it might have different feelings seeing it in someone else's game, especially when that "someone else" is doing its best to muscle in on Steam's turf. Then again, I can't imagine Epic would launch into a project like this without ensuring all the legal bases are covered. We shall see.

What I find most interesting about the whole thing (or maybe just amusing) is the timing. The reveal of Skibidi Toilet in Fortnite comes literally one day after Borderlands narrative director Sam Winkler said he would "cry real tears" if Borderlands 4 even contained the word "skibidi." Quite a thing to be told that your humor falls below a baseline set by Borderlands.

Despite the skepticism, I won't be at all surprised if the Skibidi Toilet crossover turns out to be a big moneymaker for Epic. The DaFuq!?Boom! channel currently has nearly 45 million subscribers, and the most recent episode, released four weeks ago, has drawn 27 million views so far. And in case you'd forgotten, Michael Bay is currently looking at bringing the "Skibidi Toilet multiverse" to television and movie screens. The naysayers are out in full force over this collaboration, but in the broader view, the strange tale that began with a head in a toilet remains massively popular.