From Toy to Global Sensation: USU Folklore Project Names Labubu the Digital Lore of 2025

LOGAN — In 2025, one of the most intriguing creatures to sweep the internet was a small, sharp-toothed elf called Labubu. Utah State University’s Digital Folklore Project has named this tiny character its 2025 Digital Lore of the Year.

Each year, the project asks folklorists and students to pick the memes and viral moments that shaped everyday culture online, focusing on examples that show dynamic variation, persist over time, emerge from grassroots participation, and carry broader cultural significance. In 2023, Barbie and OceanGate memes shared the title. In 2024, Chicago’s “Rat Hole” sidewalk imprint won for turning a crack in the pavement into a small pilgrimage site.

Just like its predecessors, Labubu is more than a cute (and perhaps slightly creepy) collectible, but an indicator of our collective cultural landscape. It reflects broader patterns in how people make meaning, attach value, tell stories and use humor in digital spaces.

Labubu began as a character in Hong Kong illustrator Kasing Lung’s picture-book world, “The Monsters.” The series draws on Nordic and European folklore. Partnering with Chinese retailer Pop Mart, Lung turned the elf-like creature into blind-box collectibles in 2019. The surprise element, limited runs and “ugly-cute” design helped Labubu explode across Asia and then the world.

By 2024 and 2025, Labubu had become both a status object and a meme. Celebrity fans clipped the dolls to designer handbags and Pop Mart reported huge sales. A human-sized figure sold at auction for more than $150,000. At the same time, counterfeit “Lafufu” knockoffs flooded markets and kept the craze alive for cheaper buyers.

The Digital Folklore team points to not only material culture, but the variety of memes and TikTok videos showing the folkloric variations surrounding the toy (like folk parodies of “I have the one and only 24-karat gold Labubu”) as evidence of the broad spread and cultural impact of the toy.

“One of the clearest patterns we see in 2025 is how little separation there is between folklore online and offline,” said Afsane Rezaei, assistant professor of Folklore Studies at USU. “Even when these trends start or go viral online, they show up in costumes, performances, jokes and shared rituals that people enact everyday life off the screen.”

With the toy’s popularity also came panic and rumor. In 2025, some influencers and exorcists on TikTok and Instagram claimed the dolls were linked to the Mesopotamian demon Pazuzu. Viral videos urged parents to burn or banish Labubu from their homes, and some families posted their own doll-burning “cleanses.”

Institutions followed the trend. Chinese regulators restricted banks from using Labubu dolls as promotional bait. Russian and Iraqi officials proposed or enacted bans, citing the toy’s frightening look and supposed spiritual harm to children. In the UK, trading standards officers warned that many counterfeit dolls are unsafe for kids.

There was also pushback stressing that Labubu comes from fairy-tale art, not demon worship. Online, Gen Z users turned the scare into content, remixing exorcism clips and Pazuzu explainers into mocking reaction memes.

The runner-up for the Digital Lore of the Year was the Coldplay Kiss Cam, a moment whose folkloric significance lies less in the original footage than in the diverse ways people took it up, reenacted it and brought it into life both online and offline.

Beyond circulating as a viral clip, audiences treated the moment as a script to be performed and adapted across public spaces, staging mascot reenactments of the awkward moment on jumbotrons, representing it with skeleton lawn displays embracing each other in the same pose, or couples’ Halloween costumes that referenced the kiss-cam moment without needing explanation.

Other candidates for this year were user-generated content on social media about K-pop Demon Hunters, “performative men,” “Nothing Beats a Jet2 Holiday,” RaptureTok, and variations of “do you have any kids” viral sound on TikTok.“This year’s list makes it clear how folklore, popular culture and commercial products can be closely connected,” Rezaei said. “Something that starts as a commercial product, a viral trend or a piece of popular media can become part of folk culture when people take it up in everyday life — by repeating and circulating it, joking about it and putting their own creative spin on it. That creativity can also feed back into non-folk spaces, shaping marketing, media and design, creating a cycle where folk culture and popular culture continually influence each other.”