Bombardiro Bodies: Masculinity, Fascism, Marinetti and a Millennial Transmasc in the Age of Italian Brainrot

I grew up in Italy in a left wing lower middle class family and in a small horrible village surrounded by parking lots and Lega supporters.¹) Everybody made jokes about the Holocaust. Everybody was either inbred or related to half the village. I was referred to as la forestera (aka the foreigner) ‘cause my family and I had just moved from a place that was 15 mins away by car. Imagine how they treated my Indian classmate. 

Lesbian was just a slur and nobody knew I could be one.² Transmasc? Butch? Dyke? Enby? Such words still don’t exist in Italian, so we have to use the English ones. The most genderfluid terms you can hear to define a lesbian are lella (hate it) and Iveco (like the trucks) which is used to refer to a  butch lesbian. The term maschiaccio can be used to refer to a tomboy. To this day, I don’t know how I made it out alive. 

I did, however, spend a considerable amount of time online. Chatting on MSN, sharing files on eMule, shitposting on my blog, and writing on Uncyclopedia. These were spaces where the absurd was free to roam together with misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and transphobia. I had to learn all of these terms later at my liberal university in the UK and I digested them throughout the years as I became more abware of my lesbianism, of being gay, of my transness, and so on, but before then it was perfectly ordinary, accepted, and expected that people be transphobic, ableist, racist and all the rest.

I have never bought into right wing propaganda nor have I felt indoctrinated or somehow programmed to support fascist sentiments. I was, however, born in a fascist country, one that hasn’t digested and reflected on its past yet and doesn’t seem to want to do it anytime soon. 

Before I became a better person and left Italy, I had to be transphobic and homophobic to survive and exist on- and offline. All the phobias and -isms were customary: they became a language, a code to use to exist online. Using transphobic jokes and roaming the absurd spaces of the internet allowed me to feel part of an online community. It gave me a mirage of recognition and at the time felt like an accessible way to develop different areas of my character and identity. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that queer teenagers in Italy are still dealing with similar kinds of issues regardless of how many people with pastel hair and piercings they see on TikTok.

In these spaces I felt that I could roam male dominated environments, become part of them, and kind of be accepted with whichever identity I chose (provided it was guy-adjacent). Using diverse identity facets, I was free to disguise myself in a sea of incels, nerds, alt right dicks, and pedos. 

In the introduction to her book Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell writes about her experience navigating online spaces, chat rooms in particular, as a black and queer teenager living in East Village.³) She fondly recalls having access to these spaces and exploring new selves and experimenting with different identities through them. Talking about her chatroom handle, LuvPunk12, she mentions that the handle was “a nascent performance, an exploration of a future self. I was a young body: Black, female-identifying, femme, queer. There was no pressing pause, no reprieve; the world around me never let me forget these identifiers. Yet online I could be whatever I wanted.”⁴

While I recognize the possibilities of these online spaces and how they could harbour potential to remake and renegotiate our relation to identity, I also feel that for years many of them have been dominated by right wing sentiments. These have often been expressed, and collectively minimised, through the use of irony and a certain aesthetic of the absurd (I’m thinking in the past at forms of shitposting, Uncyclopedia, or more recently memes and brainrot). I also experienced it myself, while having to pretend and perform online to be accepted. Indeed I had to align myself with a specific type of humour and follow ideological undertones that the community upheld, regardless of whether I agreed with them or not. I was not a girl and I was not a boy, even though I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time. This complicated things. On one level, I wanted to move away from expectations of femininity as much as possible and loathing some aspects of it seemed to exorcise it. On the other hand, irony, humour, and sarcasm were things I could exercise with boys only. Girls weren’t meant to be funny. Girls had to be pretty, squeamish, perfect. They had to be mean to one another and compete to get boys’ attention in the process. Playfulness, messiness, immaturity, blasphemy, and smoking bongs—those were mostly reserved for boys. In this gendered prison of a society, I learnt to dance with the toxic dominant masculinity that seemed to be the only alternative to an imposed narrow ideal of femininity. I learnt to misogynise so I could be funny, though never one of the boys, (and thank god for that ‘cause I found them revolting). 

Years later and I’m just a millennial scrolling TikTok so I can debunk the boomer allegations and try to still be in the loop. I come across Italian brainrot videos. I’m obsessed. I watch them over and over again. I crave and laugh and instantly feel the melancholic vibe, the conflicting emotions that make them so appealing with that touch of stoner humour. The sinister tunes are giving conspiratory content but also AI slop but also just the right amount of trashy and emotional tension. A bestiary of nonsensical creatures. A compilation of randomly misplaced references. Or so it seemed. And then, back from a protest for Palestine, I come across Bombardiro Crocodilo,⁵ a military bomber merged with an alligator and it hit me like a truck: 

“Bombardiro Crocodilo, un fottuto alligatore volante, che vola e bombarda i bambini a Gaza, in Palestina.”⁶

I had been laughing and obsessing over some fascist, alt-right memes all along. I started looking into brainrot characters and their relations between one another. There’s a war between them. Bombombini Gusini, Bombardiro’s brother, is also implicated. There’s Cappuccina Ballerina who’s one of the very few feminine coded characters and all we know is that she’s married to Cappuccino Assassino, likes music, and is in love with another character. A few things stand out to me: the obsession with war, with fixed gender stereotypes and a certain aesthetic—a choreography of repetition and destruction. I see these elements of Italian brainrot as connected in many ways to fascism and Futurism. The fascist aesthetic, partly produced by Futurism and centering the ideal of a new white and hegemonic machine-like man that protects and affirms colonial and imperial ideologies through war, is connected with the fabrication and solidification of rigid gender division and structure. 

Dominant masculinity is a social fascist colonial construct, a standard that sees the white, middle-class, able-bodied male as a symbol of power, legitimacy, and privilege. Masculinity, as once articulated in Italian Futurism and revived in today’s brainrot trends, reveals itself as a mythic construct: absurdly rigid, technologically augmented, and violently performative. Gender stereotypes are deeply embedded in the aesthetics, ideology, and language of Italian Futurism and the concrete poetry of Marinetti, as well as in the Italian brainrot trend. Binary gender and essentialism, I argue—particularly a militant, accelerationist, virile masculinity—are not just a theme but a foundational principle of the Futurist movement, of fascism, and of the current obsession and circulation of Italian brainrot. 

In The Queer Art of Failure, as well as in Female Masculinity, writer Jack Halberstam writes extensively about how fascism is not only to be considered in relation to political implications, but also in how it has influenced and continues to have an impact on cultural production, representation of gender, sexuality, and power. Fascism thrives on the purity of the body—on its form, its language, its architecture, and its vision of order. Aesthetic fascism is a kind of fascism that proceeds not from state-sponsored violence but from an insidious cultural project that presents an ideal of control, of normalised behavior, of purged difference. What happens then when fascism is concealed behind a cute AI character that utters nonsensical gibberish? What happens when fascism mutates, learns from queer theories and practices, and applies some of the methods to disguise itself online where no agency or responsibility stands because it is just AI generated? What happens when fascism meets neoliberal discourse?

As a trans dyke/faggot and a millennial observer of the Italian brainrot trend, I’m interested in dissecting how this cultural machinery both excludes and entices, enforcing a binary while also exposing its cracks. In the collage construction of brainrot characters, I recognize a certain playfulness and performativity. A pastiche of identities, bodies, genders, and possibilities. I wonder whether these elements could be reconsidered and hold potential for a trans-futurity,⁷ a poetic that can dismantle the machine-men tropes by reenacting them queerly. Through the lens of queerness and transness, we can see masculinity not as a fixed destiny but as camp theatre—ripe for deconstruction and perversion. However, neoliberal discourses surrounding gender and sexuality, which are often antitrans, can also, and very easily, find fertile ground as the new shape shifting fascist protagonists of the current online playground. 

It’s 1914 and the literary magazine Poesia publishes Zang Tumb Tumb, a concrete poem by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. It is considered one of the first artist books of the modern Western age. In it, Marinetti sketches an account of the Battle of Adrianople—glorifying war, explosions, gun fire, and the sounds of battle. In this poem he applies his theory of ‘Parole in Libertà’,⁸ a key concept of Italian Futurism in which language is transformed and freed from traditional literary constraints and rules. 

Grammar, syntax, and punctuation are left behind and words become vehicles of the senses, visual and graphic representations taking on diverse meanings. Basically a 1914 brainrot poem. Zang Tumb Tumb was an ode to war. Zang Tumb Tumb was written by a former fascist who co-wrote the PNF’s⁹ final manifesto and was besties with Mussolini. They remained friends forever despite their growing politically divergent views later in the history of the movement.¹⁰

It goes without saying that as soon as I saw the Tung Tung Sahur brainrot video on TikTok, I thought about Marinetti’s concrete poem. There doesn’t seem to be any meaningful content relations between the two, but I started to think and focus more on the form of both the TikTok video and Marinetti’s text, conscious of this tension at play between Italian brainrot, Futurism, and fascism, between military fixation, imperialism, and gender essentialism.

The hypnotic nature of brainrot videos, the repetition and assonance used in some of the AI generated voice overs, and the materiality of the body are all such a big part of Marinetti’s text as well. Brainrot characters often appear through flames and explosions, with fast and angular cut ups, infusing us with speed and trepidation. Through this lens, Marinetti’s text also becomes a detonation, a machine. The poet’s name we see at the top left corner of the book’s cover,  is fused with  the concrete poem itself and seems to suggest the author is merging with the text. He also becomes a war device, becoming debris, fragmentation, destruction. 

In Zang Tung Tung a cannon blasts together with gunfire signalling that the text is a body. Text is a weapon.  Just as the Futurist manifesto exalted speed, aggression, violence, and a mechanized masculinity, stating “we want to glorify war—the world’s only hygiene” so too does Bombardiro Crocodilo function as Marinetti’s ghost and Futurism as a kind of proto-brainrot. In this parallel Bombardiro reveals itself as a fascinating trope in a theatre of mechanized masculinity that is both horrifying and magnetic. The body is a machine and the future is purification through war. 

Fixed gender stereotypes, racist and misogynistic undertones, and military obsession, have been some of the focal points of Italian brainrot, as well as Futurism. Together, I argue, they have contributed to broadly fuelling and validating past and current fascist and far right sentiments in Italy. I recognize a certain fabrication of masculinity, a white patriarchal kind of masculinity that is central to the glorification of war, the rise of fascism, and its cultural expressions.The cultural phenomenon of Italian brainrot has found fertile ground on social media precisely because it plays with familiar ideological and aesthetic signifiers. The masculine body in both Marinetti’s work and some of the TikTok videos of Italian brainrot (such as Bombardiro Crocodilo) are depicted as a kind of machine—a symbol of progress and vitality, meant to dominate. These videos are also indicative of the current obsession and discussion surrounding AI and the hopeful promising futures it seems to evoke for many.

It’s August 2024 and I don’t know why but I’m on X and Hiero Badge reposts Eylon Levy’s¹¹ content: A bunch of AI generated characters waving the Israeli flag. Badge comments: “I’m convinced that AI is the aesthetic of fascism in the 21^st century a la Italian futurism…Art without the artists subordinated to political ends but (literally) untethered from reality…”¹²

It doesn’t take much to realize the parallel. A bunch of cute characters, waving a flag and not just any flag, the Israeli flag. A state that has been responsible for killing, besieging, starving, and trying to exterminate the entire Palestinian population in Gaza. 

Bombardiro Crocodilo, or some crocodile that highly resembles him, sits there sipping a coconut on the beach and is the perfect fascist symbol. Here it is in all its cuteness. Bombardiro is both an aggressive animal and a cute mascot. He has racist and anti-Arab sentiments and his body is quite literally a military weapon dropping bombs. Far from being harmless and absurd, it seems to me there is a clear and concise statement signified by this image. Bombardiro and the voiceover narrating him dropping bombs seems to suggest we can laugh and detach ourselves from the genocide taking place in Gaza, just as long as the jokes have been AI generated. After all this is just nonsensical gibberish coming from TikTok. Indeed, Bombardiro has a few things in common with Israel. As the voice over in the TikTok video reminds us:

Bombardiro Crocodilo, un fottuto alligatore volante, che vola e bombarda i bambini a Gaza, in Palestina. Non crede in Allah e ama le bombe. Si nutre dello spirito di tua madre. E se hai tradotto tutto questo, allora sei uno stronzo. Non rompere la battuta, prostituta. ¹³

Not much irony, incoherence, and absurdity after all. These imaginaries, while upholding a clear political message, also reveal dominant masculinity as a myth: absurd, tragic, and violent while exposing, in my view, codes ready to be mocked, symbols and archetypes ready to be transformed. Bombardiro is the epitome of the white masculine myth: a mechanised, aggressive, strong guy who loves war, domination, and destruction, and lives for it. He might have a cute sounding name, but he will crush you if need be and he is a proud racist, misogynistic, Zionist. Simultaneously, we see other characters in Italian brainrot like Chimpanzini Bananini who at first appears just as a monkey merged with a banana. The voice over however pronounces his name with a strong African accent, impling the long standing European and white tradition of the “ape insult”¹⁴ and exposing white bioessentialism and racism towards Indigenous people as well as people of African descent. Is Italian brainrot a sort of AI white supremacist darwinian collective hallucination? What would Marinetti say if I showed him Tung Tung Sahur? Would he also see parallels between his “poesia sonora” and Italian brainrot? Would he also recognize Bombardiro Crocodilo as a potential Futurist and fascist mascot?  

Trying to explain Italian brainrot is like clarifying a joke or trying to dissect cisheteronormativity with my very cis and very het uncle. Everyone gets defensive, someone says something very paternalistic, nobody laughs, others might even argue and throw hands. Whenever I’ve shown videos of Bombardiro Crocodilo to someone who was unfamiliar with it, responses have oscillated between complete and utter bewilderment, disregard, or a need to extend intellectual superiority. Still, I hear Italian kids around the age of 4, jumping around outside and chanting Italian brainrot anthems. On the 27th of July 2025, an amusement park in Rome organized a brainrot day where you can finally meet your favourite AI characters in real life. On the 4th of September 2025, Broadway also had the first ever musical and theatrical show featuring brainrot characters, a success which marked a crossover between internet culture and mainstream entertainment.¹⁵

Reflecting on the extent to which brainrot culture has populated the internet and people’s lives in recent months, I’ve been asking myself if we can reduce a collective effort with such potency and reverberation to a bunch of bizarre random figurines or should we instead dig a little deeper into what this trend might evoke. I believe there is a cultural machinery that is taking place, contributing to the cis-constructions of masculinity through such hyper-masculine hallucinations, a revival of fascist symbols, and a simulation and reverberation of an aesthetic of control through repetition and dominance.

What if this was part of a genealogy? Part of a current digital mythology? What if behind Ballerina Cappuccina, Trallallero Trallalla, and Chimpanzini Bananini was not only an attempt to preserve and crystalize the absurdity of our contemporary lives but also political implications and fascist nostalgia reminiscent of dark times, roaming freely in the total anonymity and lack of responsibility that the internet and AI provide? And how does that relate to the construction of gender roles on- and offline and the upholding and circulation of a certain kind of toxic masculinity? I don’t have definite answers to these questions but I think it is worth interrogating the extent to which we minimize the power of humour and absurdity, specifically within the Italian brainrot trend, and largely in other online trends too, as communication and cultural tools.

I saw the cyberspace that facilitated the rise of far-right nonsense and absurdity growing up on the internet in the early 2000s. Years later, I feel that very little in that process was nonsensical or absurd. It reflected precisely what, as a teenager, I experienced life to be, as well as the political climate then and now, which might have changed form but has remained intact in its roots.