Tung Tung Tung Sahur

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2025 · TikTok (Indonesia), as part of the Anomali AI character trend · Also known as Tung Tung Sahur; Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Sahur; Tung Tung

What it is

A picture of a wooden drum with a face, arms and legs, holding a stick or a baseball bat, made by an image-generating computer program in 2025. The drum is a kentongan, the kind Indonesians bang before dawn in Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month, to wake people for sahur, the meal eaten before the day's fast. The name copies the drum's sound. It was one of the best-known characters in brainrot, the name for deliberately nonsensical online videos loved by children.

Where it came from

On 28 February 2025, the day before Ramadan began in Indonesia, the TikTok user Noxa (Fernanda Bagas Indrastata) asked DALL-E, a program that makes pictures from typed requests, to draw a sahur drum with a face and legs. He posted the best result on TikTok, an app for short videos, as part of the Indonesian Anomali trend of AI-made creatures with silly names. That trend copied Italian brainrot, which did the same with fake Italian names and robotic voiceovers. The drum spread well beyond Indonesia, mostly among children, and was later put into Roblox games and, reportedly, Fortnite.

Why it mattered

For children it was a shared joke that adults couldn't follow, and the point was that it meant nothing. It also caused a real argument. Noxa's licensing agency, Mementum Lab, reportedly claimed rights to the character and tried to license it, and he was pulled from Steal a Brainrot for a while. Pictures made by AI programs generally can't be copyrighted in places like the United States, so the claim was shaky, and people argued about whether anyone should own a character a program drew. His reported arrival in Fortnite was unpopular with players who didn't want AI characters in the game.

What noah thinks it shows about us

A character typed into existence in one afternoon, with no studio or writer behind it, became something primary school children recognised on sight. Once money got involved, it turned out no one clearly owned him, and people argued about whether anyone should.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.