Baby Otaku

About

"Baby Otaku" is the name of a song by Chilean singers Polimá Westcoast and Pablito Pesadilla that inspired a series of dance videos on TikTok in September of 2022. Dance videos tend to find the dancer doing movements to represent the song’s lyrics, which describe popular anime and geek culture icons like the Street Fighter character Chun-Li, the game Need For Speed and others. The music has also been used for anime edits of different characters on YouTube.

Origin

On August 18nd, 2022, the song "Baby Otaku"^[1] by Polimá Westcoast^[2] and Pablito Pesadilla was released on streaming platforms. The music video, uploaded on YouTube the same day, gained over 6 million views and 134,000 likes in one month.

The song talks about a man's pursuit to find a girlfriend that wants him like anime characters express their love. Lyrics include "I'm looking for someone who loves me like Pucca loves Garu," and a wish that the future girlfriend is an "otaku" so that they be like "the fused ki' of Vegeta and Goku."

Spread

A snippet of the music has been available on TikTok^[3] since June 2022, but it was not until September 2022 that the song would go viral on the platform. As of September 22nd, 2022, there are more than 500,000 videos using the song on the platform. Most of these videos show people performing easy-to-replicate dance moves. On September 15th, 2022, Mexican influencer Mont Pantoja^[4] posted a video doing the dance trend, receiving 21 million views and 2.8 million likes in one week (shown below).

Anime Edits

The heavy anime references in the music "Baby Otaku" inspired Spanish-speaking anime fans to create AMVs of their favorite characters with the song as the soundtrack. For example, on September 18th, 2022, YouTuber MarinoSaurio posted a lyric video starring several anime characters, gaining over 309,000 views and 7,600 likes in four days (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References