Carp With a Human Face

Submission 5,585

About

Carp With a Human Face refers to a viral video of a carp with a face that resembles a human's. The fish's appearance has been compared to various other cultural figures.

Origin

On November 7th, 2019, Douyin ^[8] user @༺瑾萱🍀 posted the video. The video received more than 168,000 reactions and 6,800 comments in less than one week (screenshot below).

Spread

On November 8th, 2019, KK脑王, a user on the Chinese social media site Weibo,^[1] posted the video, which was taken from Douyin (screenshot below, left).

That day, the video was published to the Facebook ^[2] account Newsflare, where it received more than 6.7 million views, 164,000 shares, 28,000 reactions and 7,900 comments (shown below, right).

That day, Twitter user @Unexplained shared the video. They wrote, "This carp has a human face." The post received more than 600,000 views, 18,000 likes and 5,200 retweets in four days (shown below).

Additionally, Redditor ^[3] paolols shared the video on the /r/WTF subreddit, where it received more tahn 55,000 points (93% upvoted) and 2,000 comments in four days.

Following the post, people on Twitter began comparing the appearance of the fish to other cultural figures, such as the alien in the film Alien: Ressurrection and the video game Seaman (shown below, left and right, respectively).

According to Snopes,^[4] this is not the first fish with a human face thhat circulated online. They wrote, "Ifeng News reported in April 2019 that a fish with a human face (possibly the same fish) was spotted in a pond outside of a local temple in Tsuruoka City, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan. Ifeng News captured some close-up photographs of that fish. While the “human face” is still visible, these pictures make it apparent that this creature really has a fish-shaped head that only resembles a “human face” due to its unusual markings.

Several media outlets covered the video, including AV Club,^[5] Metro,^[6] BGR^[7] and more.