Italian Brainrot: post-Irony and imaginary in digital culture

Postironía e Imaginario en la Cultura Digital

Abstract

This paper analyzes how the images associated with the Italian Brainrot trend articulate playfulness and post-irony to produce new meanings within digital culture. It first discusses imagination as a fundamental human faculty involved in the ambiguous construction of post-irony. It then examines the meme as an antinihilistic and iconophagic form characterized by overlapping meanings. Drawing on the archetypology of the imaginary, the paper further investigates the recombinatory nature of the images emerging from the trend’s aesthetic. The methodological procedure of symbolic reading, grounded in Gilbert Durand’s Theory of the Imaginary and applied to a corpus of characters widely disseminated across TikTok and digital forums, reveals that these images can be organized into at least four thematic groups: war and violence; artifacts and the following questions life; body cult; and humans, fauna, and flora. Each axis interrogates dimensions of the contemporary imaginary: the banalization of brutality, the technification of everyday life, the obsession with bodily performance, and the crisis of boundaries between nature and culture, demonstrating how the trend aesthetically resignifies saturated symbols through post-ironic playfulness.