Learning Day: Troom Troom Redux

My dearest fellow Hot Dogs,

I hope this letter finds you well. I am away this week pursuing a quest of personal vengeance, but hold you always in my heart. I have included here a memento of a better time, updated for your pleasurement.

Wellest regards,

-Your Brockway

If you haven’t heard of Troom Troom, good. That is a perfectly reasonable way to exist. It is far more unreasonable to recognize the reality of Troom Troom. The space its riddle occupies in your brain will doubtless show up on an MRI 20 years from now when a somber doctor tells your heartbroken kids he’s found the epicenter of your Wacky Dementia.

Troom Troom is definitely a YouTube channel, but everything else about it is an argument. It might be a craft channel, but one that doesn’t make anything for any purpose and somehow still does it poorly. It could be a prank channel, but from a dimension that only received the setup part of comedy, while the concept of ‘punchlines’ was lost to a quirk of alternate evolution. It’s certainly from the Ukraine… by way of a splintered multiverse where the Breadbasket of Europe lost a war to Lisa Frank.

Princess Twin Fun Update: This wasn’t a random location I picked as a joke, Troom Troom is headquartered in Odessa, Ukraine. You can turn lipstick into glue, wow!

By far the strangest part of Troom Troom is that every single video has monster traffic, like possibly more viewers than there are people in the world, which means they’re either the only tutor allowed in Russian reeducation camps, or else Troom Troom is deploying a whimsical bot-network for sinister purposes beyond comprehension.

Princess Twin Fun Update: When I wrote the bit about Russian reeducation camps, it was a joke - Russia had not yet begun abducting Ukrainian children. Put sparkles on your dog!

There are definitely too many thumbnails of women sucking on tubes for this to be entirely clear of a fetish thing, but it is in no way delivered upon in any of the videos, so how much of your business model can really rely on tricking horny elves suffering from short-term memory loss?

Even the fanmade Troom Troom Wiki has no idea what they’re actually fans of, and seems reluctant to guess:

Money laundering for Care Bears? Unethical advertising for a dangerously zany new clown drug? Phishing aimed at hungry gay children? Nobody has any proof, only an uneasy hunch based on the grime they feel congealing on their souls whenever they watch a video. Troom Troom feels like a mean-spirited, poorly executed parody of something that doesn’t exist yet and possibly never will. Like a savage takedown of the exploitative marketing tactics deployed by Sparkolchim, the slavic candy giant that poisoned 92% of Earth-14.

Princess Twin Fun Update: There’s now a subreddit just for analyzing what the fuck Troom Troom is – they’ve made no progress. Use gelatin to make edible guns for uneasy strangers!

Any screencap you try to pull from a Troom Troom video winds up oversaturated on every level save for one terribly wrong object which somehow stays rendered in disgusting detail.

They’re filmed in this off-kilter color palette that makes everything look both sinister and delicious:

It’s like a laughably obvious trap laid by fairies… which is actually just there to give the illusion of safety so you don’t spot the real trap, already sprung and closing around you.

Troom Troom videos have the budget and cinematography of mid-grade pornography but spend all of it on rough-salvaged Saved by the Bell costumes.

Every clip is full of bizarre transitions at strange times, so you’re just constantly being blindsided by wipe effects purchased from the impulse bin at Ikea.

“Illya, here to apply Storkimbop then NO! NO, ILLYA! Storkimbop is NOT Hepflrod. What, is your first day? Is your last day! Ah, here is Yegor, a man who does know. Give me that sweet Storkimbop action my best man!”

The things Troom Troom fails at are made all the stranger by the things it pulls off: Their Disney-obnoxious narrator will execute a flawless translation of some complicated idiom, then swing and miss at basic syntax with the idiot fervor of an America’s Funniest Home Videos toddler playing wiffle ball next to dad-crotch.

Here’s a prank video where they explain all of the steps in passable English, then switch to Strokese at the last minute:

And all of their pranks are just inexplicable vandalism, without even the desire to draw laughter. A Troom Troom prank doesn’t want mirth, it actually shoots for ‘baffled annoyance’ and the weird part is they show that in the videos. You can see every wacky prank victim quietly thinking “is it worth it, to know this person?” and the director does not cut away. You get to watch friendship die in their eyes.

Prank videos are almost never funny and always infuriating, but usually the prankster doesn’t know that. What are we doing if all parties acknowledge that this is a bad idea to be met with a terrible reception? Are we just openly advocating for minor hatreds? I’d expect that kind of фігня from a Sparkolchim Goomi-shill, but have we learned nothing from the Plague Culls?

Princess Twin Fun Update: Troom Troom never missed a post. Not when Russia invaded their country, not when the war started, not when the bombs fell on their cities. Absolutely nothing could stop them from making these videos for… alien children mocking Earth? I don’t know. A bad twin’s locker is full of empty books, a good twin has many small animals!

Troom Troom videos operate in an entirely separate logic-bubble, full of strange repeating motifs like smuggling food into various situations where food should be allowed anyway, and in ways which ruin both the food and an unrelated product:

This girl chopped all of her pencils off at the top so she could hide a chocolate bar in her pencil box, then took the chocolate out of the pencil box, now tasting like pencil shavings, only to have it immediately confiscated because it still looked like chocolate when she tried to eat it.

This one comes from a video advising children to first craft notebooks that look like food to bring to class, but a key component is that they can’t really look like food, or your teacher won’t allow them.

Then you swap in real food for the notebooks, and…?

You hope your teacher malfunctions and assumes that the things that did not look like food but now do look like food are still not food, and also it’s cool if you eat notebooks? I’m not sure who this Jenga-brained ruse is for, but if you are starving, Ukrainian children, please cry for help in a less obtuse way. If you’re trying to tell us you have to playfully smuggle food under the Crayola warlords’ noses just honk your trembita twice and we will send aid.

Princess Twin Fun Update: Again, please understand this joke was written a full year before Russia started actually stealing Ukrainian grain to fuel their war efforts. Make your secret banana blue with glitter! Oh wait, that’s a real one.

This gif is from a video on how to secretly cover a banana in glitter. This is for nobody. To do nothing. I suppose it could prepare you to fight back if forced to give Captain Planet a blowjob, but there can’t be an audience in the hundreds of millions for that, right? Just mark this ‘for Linka’ and stop turning a blind eye to abusive men in power, Wheeler.

What are you looking at here? An uncooked sausage hidden in a box of diaper wipes. Why are you looking at it? Because there is something terrible going on in the Ukraine but we don’t share enough common metaphors to explain it visually. There are several minutes dedicated to hiding cold sausages in packets of wipes, which sure sounds like a disgusting euphemism, but it’s somehow not.

Here we’re trying to smuggle beef jerky and loose Kraft singles inside a file folder like a sad communist-era Spy Kids. I am terrified at the reality of the situation that necessitated this video, but I can only guess at its nature. Was there some sort of UNICEF mixup that replaced all food donations with craft supplies? I know you’re a resilient and proud people, Ukraine, but your kids don’t have to die licking spare calories out of glue sticks. Just send a polite email with a copy of the invoice and attach a photo of your schoolchildren holding forks and frowning at 6,000 staplers.

There’s another whole subgenre within this inexplicable channel that is somehow entirely out of line with the rest of the videos even though there’s no coherency to any of them, and it is the hardest thing in the world to skim madness from madness. I’m talking, of course, about the unicorn wars:

If I had to guess, they seem to be predicated on the understanding that fursuited unicorns are a huge demographic in Ukraine, and they will only use certain products and eat certain foods that are carefully ruined in a playful way. Also there are actually two types of unicorns, and they are locked in a brutal racial conflict. This is a war that is never explained -- that you are simply born into and forced to join, even though you will never understand it, much less meaningfully affect it. That is a stunning metaphor hidden inside this fourth grade Trapper Keeper nightmare, Troom Troom.

While the world’s fundamentally broken aid system clearly cannot save your shattered country, rest assured that we will one day make a meaningful Netflix documentary about the savage dichotomy between your art and your message.

Princess Twin Fun Update: The original joke here was that my wacky unicorn war theory made no sense. Now the joke is that the unicorn war is exactly mirroring real life atrocities occurring today.

Princess Twin Fun Update: Here’s the video Troom Troom released ON THE DAY RUSSIA INVADED.

This is bizarrely dark, even for Troom Troom. Are they commenting on the horrors of war to their audience of color-addled toddlers? I know they record in advance, and probably scheduled this post unaware of what a momentous day it would be.

Here’s the video they dropped two days later.

Turns out Troom Troom made total sense, it was just misplaced in time by two years. Replace your angry brother’s deodorant with jerky, help a nearby horse to look like a pop star, trick an invader into eating his grenade using food glue and cheerios!

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