Carp With a Human Face

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.

This carp has a human face 😳 pic.twitter.com/okT67Zyo4v

— The Unexplained (@Unexplained) November 8, 2019

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.

Search Interest

External References