“You’re pregnant and you’re proud!” screamed Robopup, a v-tubing puppygirl dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants. “W for pregnancy!”
This was the first thing I heard when I arrived at the “SpongeBob AND ALSO Final Fantasy & Kingdom Hearts MPreg Rave,” hosted at the Brooklyn bar/indie arcade Wonderville in early September. Yes, that was the event’s real title. It was produced by Weeb Adjacent, a “rave series and countercultural collective” that aims to inject some internet brainrot into NYC’s nightlife scene.
I’m not a raver — I’m not even a dancer. But I am a terminally online weirdo. So when the event’s poster, which features Cloud Strife lovingly cradling a visibly pregnant SpongeBob, appeared on my timeline, I was fascinated. Within a few minutes, I’d bought my ticket.
Multiple people I spoke to at the sold-out rave also cited the bizarre mashup of themes as the central reason they’d attended. “The idea seemed so crazy,” said one attendee, drenched in sweat, who’d just spent the last two hours dancing his heart out. “I had to see what it was about.”
For Joe Panuncialman, these raves might be crazy, but they’re also a reflection of the internet culture that raised him. Joe is the co-founder and head of Weeb Adjacent, as well as a DJ under the name BUBUCORE69. He grew up frequenting anime and gaming fansites, including 4Chan’s /a/, which gave him a deep appreciation for memes, shitposting, and the niche subcultures that create both. And when his love for J-core, J-pop, and video game OSTs brought him into the world of DJing, he was demotivated by how “mainstream” most rave music was.
But in 2023, when he and some friends took a chance on producing a rave with their own favorite tunes — in his words, “a mix of hyperpop, anime remixes, and some real shitpost-y stuff” — the audience resonated. Thus, Weeb Adjacent was born. “This is the kind of stuff that I think we, when we were younger, were looking for,” he told me.
Since then, the group has hosted multiple raves, most featuring some wild mashup of pop culture themes. Last December, for instance, dozens of ravers attended a Sonic the Hedgehog x Saya no Uta rave. The group’s Hatsune Miku x Family Guy and Madoka Magica x Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater raves in March went semi-viral on social media. The choices might seem random, but Joe refers to each individual theme as a “constant,” or a cultural touchstone for his generation.
“Shitposting is catharsis, right? Shitposting is a trauma response,” he said. “The job market's really bad, nothing is stable. And so the only constant that we have are these communities, and the sort of absurdity that defines them.”
Most people would definitely describe the SpongeBob x Final Fantasy x Kingdom Hearts x MPreg (SBFFKHMPreg for short) rave as absurd. Around the bar sat a host of colorful characters, including a pregnant Cid Highwind, two Squidwards, and a sexy Patrick Star with nipple pasties and a Miku plush slung over her shoulder. The screens above them played The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water on mute with Arabic subtitles, next to a longplay of Final Fantasy 7. Outside, furries passed around a joint and laughed.
“That’s a whole lot of random shit,” Wonderville’s bouncer said to me, moments after yelling at a cosplayer to stop planking on the club’s property. He rubbed his face wearily. “I don’t see how SpongeBob is related to any of this.”
I arrived in the middle of Robopup’s set, which blended dark thumping synthpop with classic SpongeBob songs. She danced in front of a screen that cycled between screencaps from the cartoon, memes, and a loop of her v-tuber model dancing. At one point, she transitioned into a song using SpongeBob screaming “I NEED IT!” as a dubstep-style drop. Between tracks, she asked the audience to bark for her, which they did with glee.
But nothing could compare to the unhinged energy of Pinkii, the rave’s headliner. Pinkii — a “simp-funded” pop star with a womb tattoo who came across as a mix of Hololive’s Mori Calliope and Belle Delphine — spent her set jumping between J-pop bangers, speedily rapped verses, and call-and-response anthems.
All the while, she berated the crowd, telling them to beg at her feet and pay their “simp tax,” which some did by throwing crumpled cash her way. On the background screen, four versions of her danced in an endless loop, while the words “WORSHIP HARDER SIMP” and “PINKII OWNS YOUR HEART” scrolled by.
Joe himself DJed Pinkii’s set, and followed her act with a solo performance. He’s seriously skilled on the console, mixing Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts OSTs with techno dance music in a way that got even my lead feet dancing. Other solo DJs went hard too, including Weeb Adjacent mainstay Rabbit Crime, who complained to me that they “couldn’t find any MPreg songs” to weave into their setlist.
“Yeah, we’re shitposting and being a little evil,” Joe said when describing Weeb Adjacent’s vibes. “But I like to think we have really good hearts and really good music on top of that.”
The music isn’t the only difference between Weeb Adjacent’s raves and your typical concerts. For instance: About halfway through her set, Pinkii asked the winner of an Instagram raffle to step forward. His prize: Pinkii chaining him up with a dog leash and making him crawl around the stage. The crowd — and the winner — seemed to love it, cheering and laughing.
“I just thought it would be fun,” the winner told me after the show. He’d come dressed as SpongeBob, holding a spatula with “yaoi” and “yuri” written on either side.
The event might have felt silly, but there was also genuine passion fueling it. I’m tempted to say, “It’s funny, but not a joke,” but that’s not quite right. SBFFKHMPreg does have the tone of a joke, just one that everyone is laughing along with and adding to, not at or deriding. It’s sorta like longform improv, with each attendee “yes, and”-ing an increasingly complicated scenario.
“The way I see it is that this isn't a business venture built on exploitation, right? It's one built on celebration,” Joe said. He recounted a conversation he had with a member of the MPreg kink community who had attended the rave because they felt represented by the theme. “We're just trying to prove that no matter what sort of niche you're into … that there is a place where you can thrive, where you can find people, where you can enjoy good music.”
Multiple attendees praised Weeb Adjacent’s raves for introducing them to new friends with similarly unique interests and senses of humor. In a city of millions, these raves helped them find the handful of nerds they clicked with. And in that crowd, moving together on the cramped dancefloor, those friendships crossed the lines of race, gender, and kink.
As I watched the cosplayers, dancers, and other guests laugh with their friends, I couldn’t help but long for that sort of connection. I had invited friends to come with me, but come showtime, I arrived at Wonderville alone. None of the NYC-based pals I talked to took the idea seriously enough to actually invest the time.
But plenty of people do: Joe said that the raves make enough profit to pay the performers, and then some. And Weeb Adjacent isn’t the only purveyor of weird pop culture mashups — in California, for example, the group Stay Ugly just ran a “Cartoon Network vs. My Little Pony” rave, complete with MordeTwi (Regular Show’s Mordecai shipped with MLP’s Twilight Sparkle) MPreg art. And Internet Kids has been running anime-themed “hyperpop dance parties” in Minneapolis for years now. The SBFFKHMPreg raffle winner already owned a SpongeBob outfit because he’d held his own SpongeBob rave a few years earlier.
All this is to say that there is an audience for this. It’s a sizable one, whose members can appreciate a living shitpost. Weeb Adjacent might just be the group that’s willing to risk getting called cringe for long enough to bring that audience together. I just hope I can be part of that audience again.
