Everyone Else's Brainrot
The Italian label stuck, but the characters were not Italian. Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Boneca Ambalabu came out of Indonesia's own AI-horror genre; there was German brainrot, Balkan brainrot, a pigeon spy from the former Yugoslavia. Each region made its creatures out of its own jokes and its own language, and the internet filed them all under one nationality that none of them had.
Part of Brainrot
30 moments in this segment.
- - Balkan brainrot before the Italian wave. Posted in May 2024 under #balkanbrainrot, months before the Italian roster existed. The Croatian caption asks 'is something missing?' over a joke built on regional in-references rather than AI creatures.
- - A Balkan brainrot ranking, late 2024. A ranking video tagged #balkanbrainrot and #blokblok, captioned only 'ludo' ('crazy'). Balkan meme accounts were already sorting their own canon into lists a full quarter before the Italian characters arrived.
- - Katze? - German brainrot before the wave. A seven-second AI cat clip from a German 'Germanrot' account, posted weeks before the Italian wave began in January 2025. The record puts it past 1 million views.
- - The Germanrot pigeon. A minute-long German-language animation built around a pigeon, tagged both #germanrot and #brainrot. It shows the format running in German while the Italian roster was still forming, and the record puts it past 3 million views.
- - Faltbare Giraffe. A German brainrot animation about a 'foldable giraffe', the same recipe of an impossible animal plus a nonsense name that the Italian characters would use. Past 1.3 million views on the record.
- - German brainrot opens the year. A #deutschememes post captioned simply 'Toaster!'. The German-language scene ran its own absurdist object humour through the first days of 2025.
- - Croatian brainrot trend post. 'Ovo cu bit ja' - 'this'll be me' - tagged to Croatia and the Balkan brainrot trend, at 762,000 views. Filmed the same week the Italian sound was breaking on other corners of TikTok.
- - Going out to eat, German edition. 'Essen gehen' with a fish emoji, to 2.8 million views. German brainrot leaned on seven-second animal gags rather than invented Italian names.
- - Die Frühstücksparalyse. German brainrot applied to an ordinary scene, 'the breakfast paralysis', a supermarket bit rather than a creature. The counter sits past 1.6 million.
- - Germanrot pigeon goes to the Backrooms. A 94-second German pigeon animation crossed with Backrooms and cartoon-villain references. At past 8 million views it is the largest German-language post in this set, and it landed the same week the Italian wave started.
- - The pigeon character appears. 'Angeln gehen' - going fishing - and the earliest post here tagged to the Taube, the pigeon that became this account's recurring lead. Just under two million views.
- - Taube geht spazieren. 'The pigeon goes for a walk', a German brainrot animation running in parallel with the first Italian characters. The record puts it past 5 million views.
- - Boneca Ambalabu arrives. A 13-second Boneca Ambalabu clip, a frog head on a car tyre, dated to 2 February 2025, the day the character enters the record. Boneca Ambalabu is Indonesian, not Italian, and at past 13 million views it is one of the most-watched posts in this collection.
- - A small Boneca Ambalabu post. A ten-second clip with nothing but the character's name as a caption. It never travelled, a few thousand views, and shows how many brainrot posts stayed tiny for every one that did not.
- - The character in full, a carved kentongan. The full-body image, released to the public domain through Wikimedia Commons and credited to @noxaasht. The creature is an anthropomorphic kentongan, the Indonesian wooden slit drum, holding a pentungan, a club. The Commons description makes the point that matters most here: despite the Italian brainrot label, this anomaly comes from Indonesia.
- - German brainrot takes a phone-network ad. Labelled 'Anzeige' and made with Vodafone Germany, the pigeon gag became a paid brand spot in March 2025 at roughly 2.7 million views. An early sign the format could be sold.
- - Keep me company at sahur. An Indonesian post asking for company at sahur, the pre-dawn meal eaten during Ramadan. It was posted mid-Ramadan 2025, while the sahur character was at its peak at home; past 2.4 million views.
- - Bye bye Tung Tung Tung Sahur. An Indonesian farewell video for the sahur character, part of a joke format that sent it home once Ramadan was ending. The record puts it past 11.9 million views.
- - A mock obituary in Indonesian. An Indonesian post written as a news bulletin announcing that Tung Tung Tung Sahur has returned to his planet. The joke ran across Indonesian TikTok in late March 2025; past 1.2 million views.
- - Russian brainrot: the bibizyan. A six-second Russian-language clip built on 'bibizyan', a slang word for monkey. Russian accounts ran their own vocabulary through the same format; about 149,000 views.
- - Spijuniro Golubiro. The Balkan brainrot pigeon, posted by an Italian football club's account and past 3.8 million views. The character's name is Slavic rather than Italian, the roster had stopped belonging to any one language.
- - The Tung Tung Tung Sahur original, reposted. The Indonesian creature's first video mirrored by an archive account six weeks after it went up. The character is a carved kentongan - a real Indonesian slit drum used to wake a neighbourhood - and the original landed on the eve of Ramadan 2025.
- - Boneca Ambalabu, the Indonesian one. The frog-head-on-a-car-tyre figure, spelled here the Indonesian way as Boneka. It came out of the Indonesian anomali scene in February 2025 and was pulled into the Italian roster afterwards.
- - Boneca Ambalabu. A frog's head mounted on a car tyre, first circulated on 2 February 2025, three weeks before Tung Tung Tung Sahur and likewise Indonesian rather than Italian. Two of the roster's best-known members came out of Indonesia's own AI-creature scene and were filed under an Italian label afterwards.
- - Boneca Ambalabu, Jun 2025. A flat cartoon drawing of a green frog's head resting on a car tyre, two human legs sticking out below. Boneca Ambalabu is the Indonesian entry in the brainrot roster.
- - A payments brand books the pigeon. Almost a year later the same character was still taking sponsored work, here for Mastercard Germany with a snowstorm gag, marked '#Ad'. Regional brainrot had a durable commercial life.
- - Tung Tung Tung Sahur meets Ta Ta Ta Sahur. A spin-off Sahur character shares the screen with the original, to 549,000 views. The Indonesian branch of the roster kept generating its own descendants.
- - An Indonesian Brainrot series. A separate strand titled Indonesian Brainrot, featuring Boneca Ambalabu and Uh Din Din Dun. Splitting the series by region concedes that the wave was never only Italian.
- - Where Tung Tung Tung Sahur came from. An origin explainer for the most-travelled character in the set, at 443,000 views. Its roots are Indonesian rather than Italian, and tied to the Ramadan wake-up rounds.
- - What Tung Tung Tung Sahur actually means. A meme-archive account explains that the phrase is Indonesian and tied to the pre-dawn Ramadan meal, to 3.6 million views. Published a year and a half after the character first appeared.
