What hafen, brainrot?
It began, innocently enough, with Kristen Stewart.
There I was, reading the news in the new normal way, i.e., by scrolling through Internet pages like a millennial, when I stumbled upon the actress at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival to promote her directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, which was based on Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir. I gathered that the film had everything: trauma, poetry, gender, water. Supposedly, it screamed postmodern malaise (translation: I didn’t understand a single sentence of the synopsis).
I should’ve stopped there, but something within nudged me down memory lane. I was curious at how Stewart had become Cannes red-carpet material.
And just like that, I was sucked back into a vortex I thought I’d long escaped: Twilight. The brooding Bella Swan, the sparkly vampire Edward, the perpetually shirtless Jacob were the stars of a cultural juggernaut at a time when I was already a little too old for it. And yet, I knew all the plot points, against my will, I might add.
Kristen Stewart became the reluctant icon of a generation. More than a decade later, her name had led me back into a corner of the Internet I didn’t know still existed: Filipino Twilight memes.
Apparently, the kids have unearthed a gem from 2013. A contestant named Cristopher Diwata appeared on a segment of Kalokalike on It’s Showtime, impersonating Taylor Lautner’s Jacob. His earnest, endearingly mangled delivery of a line supposedly from Twilight—“What hafen, Vella?” along with “I know! Vamfyr, right?”—set the stage for a massive comeback. No one could have known that Christopher was way ahead of his time.
Ten years later, his lines are being lip-synced on TikTok by kids born after New Moon premiered, or being dubbed into school presentations, group chats, and meme threads. I’ve overheard it in the mall and in coffee shops. Even I managed to insert it in casual office banter, eliciting smiles and looks of wonder from Gen Zs and blank stares from elder millennials.
In a recent interview, Christopher shared that he studied the script all night for the segment, even if it only lasted a few seconds. Such dedication!
This is what the kids now call brainrot. It doesn’t mean you’re getting dumber, only that you’ve been consumed by the absurdist and context-less nonsense of the modern meme economy.
Once I fell down the “What hafen, Vella?” rabbit hole, there was no going back. Suddenly, every app I opened was showing me something even stranger. Which is how I met OIIA Cat.
This delightful, dizzying feline burst into collective digital consciousness in April 2023, when a user of Bilibili (the Chinese version of YouTube) uploaded a remix of the strange, bouncy “Oo Ee A E A” sound effect alongside an animated spinning cat named Ethel. The video garnered over 12 million views in just five months. From there, OIIA Cat took off like a rocket, spinning through Justin Bieber’s Baby, The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights, and Blueby Chinese-Canadian singer Yung Kai.
Blue was released in August 2024, and instantly became a TikTok staple, layered over dreamy montages and #softboy aesthetics. A year later, it had racked up close to a billion streams.
As strange as the popularity of many memes, OIIA Cat’s absurdity has manifested in a positive way: Some teachers are using OIIA Cat to teach phonics. The same spinning feline is showing up in classrooms, on YouTube, helping kids learn their vowels. Say it with me: Oo, Ee, A, E, A. In this world where memes and education seem to collide, I dare say brainrot could be pedagogical.
This is where I start to lose the plot. I wrote about memes back in 2024, in a piece called “Memes: Head-Scratchers for Boomers and Gen Xers.” It was a desperate attempt to decode what felt like an alien language. Just a year later, I’m more confused than ever. Memes no longer try to be clever. They’re just... loud. Or blurry. Or, in OIIA Cat’s case, spinning in infinite digital space to the sound of vowels and ennui.
I crave structure, an intro-body-climax-ending kind of storytelling, a punchline (if it aims to be funny). These memes give me none of that. But they do give me feels—laughter, nostalgia, secondhand embarrassment. Sometimes all at once. Is that...growth?
Ironically, we haven’t seen the best, the worst, or the last of these memes. Even if no new ones gain traction for a digital gap, old clips are being resurrected to provide new-found amusement. At times, you have to search for the joke, for that cultural link that somehow shoves the not-so-funny past into the shallow, easy-to-please present.
There are times I question my own intelligence: I don’t get it, but I’m too proud to ask anyone what it’s all about. So, why do I persist in spending hours on memes that promote brainrot? Maybe it’s because in today’s world, I agree with millions of people who believe that the desire to smile and to laugh with everyone else outweighs any self-indulgent need for recognition as a smart or cultured individual.
At the end of the day, perhaps that’s all that matters. The kids have it down pat.