'It's me, it's Verity': the Minecraft yellow smiley that has kids yelling on TikTok, and its blue, red and pink 'variants', explained

If you've heard someone yell 'It's me, it's Verity' at a smiley-face emoji, it has nothing to do with the thriller in theaters. This Verity was born on YouTube: she's the villain of a Minecraft horror series by YouTuber ThatMob, whose first episode dropped on May 30. She appears as a friendly AI assistant shaped like a floating yellow smiley and slowly turns obsessive and disturbing, eventually becoming a corpse-like figure towering over the player.

The jump to the mainstream came in July, when creator Horror Skunx released the music video 'It's Me, It's Verity', which passed 33 million views, according to Forbes. The hook became a format: on TikTok, kids and teens shout the line whenever a yellow smiley shows up. The magazine ties its success to a generation's anxiety about AI, a cheerful artificial face hiding bad intentions.

Then came the 'variants', catalogued by Know Your Meme. Falsity, the blue version linked to lies, was created by YouTuber xqree on June 17, and his video passed 2.3 million views. Cruelty, red and dark, is hostile to Verity; Lovity, in pink, is the romantic one. Together they form the 'Verity verse', spanning mods, animations, Roblox games and TikToks that reached as many as 23.5 million views and 1.8 million likes.