As a man of culture and refined taste, I have not once downloaded the app known as TikTok. My gigantic brain could never imagine letting myself be immersed in such algorithm-driven short form content. That’s why I instead use YouTube Shorts when I need a quick-fix of a few videos to hold me over. One day this past week while using shorts to eat up a few minutes, I stumbled across a small part of an animated music video. I had no idea of the rabbit hole that awaited me.

You see I initially couldn’t stop watching the fluid dance animation. Not only was the artstyle cute but the way the little mascot moved around was smoother than butter. The song was alright too, though I didn’t understand anything about what the meaning was .That was until I took a peak at the comments one time and learned that apparently this was a case of happy upbeat instrumental paired with dark, sinister lyrics. After coming back to watch the damn animation a few more times, I realized I needed to learn what the fuck was going on. 

Shigure Ui is an illustrator who designed the appearance for Hololive’s Subaru, and later appeared in multiple of her streams. Ui then decided to become a Vtuber herself in May of 2019, going on to release her own projects. She released her first full album in May of 2022. One of the tracks on that bad boy, Loli God Requiem, was (according to some fan information I found) a song that encapsulated a bunch of inside jokes between her and her fandom. Ui had supposedly made a character of herself acting like a nine-year-old for some stream content, and during those interactions with fans they developed a series of loli-related jokes that culminated into this song. That was that, until September 10th of THIS year when Ui released an official music video for the song. For a smaller creator the shit basically went viral garnishing over 18 million views and becoming the #36 global music video on YouTube at the time of writing. The fantastic accompanying animation gave the song new life, and it has now been covered by other artists and dancers with more and more people being drawn into the contrast of catchy beat and ridiculous loli-driven lyrics.

I never knew there was so much backstory to discover about this song, but I’m glad I dove into the history. It’s crazy how artists can produce something that just sort of sits in the catalog, then suddenly shoots off into stardom. This song had the perfect storm of jokes and actual quality to allow it to devour the internet, it just needed a little girl mascot dancing in a ridiculously clean way to realize that potential. Are you familiar with Shigure Ui? Have you heard Loli God Requiem yet? What do you think made this song go viral? Grab your safety whistle, call the cops, and don’t let any of these weirdos ruin your requiem in the comments below!