Avengers for Toddlers
Elsagate is what happens when preschoolers try to direct the Avengers themselves
If media primarily exists to deliver emotions, kids’ shows used to have a chaperone. Before tablets, anything made for children had to survive co‑viewing. The kid on the floor, the parent on the couch with the remote. You couldn’t get away with much. The pacing had to be sane. The jokes had to throw in a few innuendos for adults. The designs had to stay well clear of the uncanny valley. No weaponized repetition, no jump‑cut hallucinations, no exploit of the raw child brain we now call “brainrot.” If something got weird, a grown‑up would change the channel and complain to the station.
Once children got their own screens, the loop uncoupled. A toddler with an iPad in the back seat is a one‑person focus group, mediated only by their own tastes and boredom threshold. Kids’ content no longer had to please two nervous systems at once. It was free to evolve toward the purest form of whatever held a preschooler’s attention. To us, the result looks deranged—garish thumbnails, uncanny voices, Elsa drinking from the toilet. To a three‑year‑old, it may feel just right.
That’s the decoder you need for Elsagate, the catch‑all name for a now mostly defunct network of hyper‑popular, hyper‑weird YouTube videos for very young kids. Ultra‑low‑budget clips dropped familiar characters—Spider‑Man, Elsa, the Hulk, Peppa Pig—into gross or taboo vignettes. They go to the dentist. They deliver babies. They get injections. They pee their pants. There are knockoff costumes, rubber spiders, a plastic syringe. It looks like spam made by malicious committee.
Adults reacted the only way we know how now, with a moral panic of explainer videos and longforms. The prevailing theories gave exactly zero agency to the millions of preschoolers who navigated to those thumbnails on purpose. “They’ll click anything.” “The algorithm is forcing it on them.” “It’s a sinister grooming plot.” Anything except the impolite possibility. What if three‑year‑olds actually want to watch this creepy nonsense? What if this is what their version of “interesting” looks like when no one is hovering over the shoulder?
For adults, you don’t have to imagine yourself back in a child’s head to see the same instinct at work. Recall why you bought tickets to The Avengers. It wasn’t a phenomenon because of its plot. Superhero plots are Mad Libs. It wasn’t so much the characters. You’d already seen Tony Stark’s wounded quips and Captain America’s earnest scolding in their solo movies. The new draw was forced proximity. People you’d only seen in their own sealed‑off franchises suddenly had to share space and authority. A 1950s paladin gets stuck on a flying aircraft carrier with a Norse god, a green rage monster, and a billionaire futurist. How are they going to get along?
When the movie landed, the clips that went viral weren’t the million‑dollar alien explosions. They were the eye‑rolls, the one‑liners, the little wrestles for control at the seams of those personalities. For months, the front page of Imgur and reddit was wall‑to‑wall GIFs of Thor versus Iron Man, Stark needling Cap, Hulk rag‑dolling Loki. The fight choreography was the trailer. The actual product was chemistry.
Drama works because it sells itself as a seminar in how our culture handles conflict. Harmony doesn’t teach you much. There are no movies where everyone gets along perfectly. Your brain tags that as “no useful information here” and returns boredom. When two people you have robust models of collide for the first time, the interaction is dense with implied lessons. Watching them is like seeing the result of two large matrices multiplied. Of course you press your ear to the door when the neighbors start yelling in the hallway. Conflict‑driven shows exploit the sense that, by watching other people clash and reconcile, we’re learning how to do it ourselves.
Kids run the same algorithm—avoid boring, chase interesting—mapped onto a much smaller world model. Their characters are simpler, but their curiosity about collision is just as sharp. Put two known faces in the same room and see what happens. While you were lining up on opening weekend to watch Stark and Thor snipe at each other, your three‑year‑old was asking for the millionth time to see Elsa and Spider‑Man argue about whether M&Ms belong in the blender. Same instinct, cheaper CGI.
The stakes scale down too. A toddler’s existential threats aren’t aliens invading New York. They’re needles, bathrooms, blood, pregnancy, getting separated from a parent in a store. The dentist is still one of the highest‑stakes days of my year. Imagine how it feels when you’re three feet tall among masked giants. Of course the most magnetic videos put beloved characters in those arenas. Elsa gets a shot and survives. Spider‑Man gets a tooth pulled and doesn’t die. Peppa Pig wets herself and Mum doesn’t throw her away. They’re running simulations of tiny disasters no one will talk about with them directly.
Through their eyes, the Elsagate clips aren’t a mysterious dark psyop. They’re the algorithm delivering a bootleg version of what kids keep clicking on. Crossovers and taboo stakes. No network standards department, no anxious parent hitting stop when things get squicky. A content farm need only notice that popular characters who can never interact outside of Super Smash Bros. yields absurdly high view metrics.
That’s the part adults don’t like to admit. We prefer the story where children are pure and only corrupted from the outside, because it keeps our own early curiosities at a safe distance. It’s more comfortable to frame Elsa going to the OBGYN as something being done to kids than as kids successfully voting, over billions of views, for collisions that match their real fears. Toddlers are already running their own small cultural experiments. We just built them a machine that will conjure whatever experiment they request.
None of this means the supply side is benign or well intentioned. Plenty of kids’ “brainrot” is the same slop we feed adults: lazy repetition tuned for watch‑time. But buried inside the ugliest Elsagate compilations is a recognizable shape. Give a preschooler an infinite jukebox and they will, without knowing the word for it, order stories about their bodies, authority, taboo, and conflict between figures they know best. For them, it’s practice in a smaller world, multiplying the few characters they can model into a whole grid of possible scenes.