How DeepSeek became a slacking whale girl
On Chinese social media, DeepSeek has been reimagined as a blue-haired whale maid who loves to eat, carries a stainless steel bowl, and always wants to slack off. The turning point was in June 2025, when the artist "Shangshan Wuxing" used AI to create the blue-haired, whale-tailed character "Mingyue"; in April 2026, a user added the DeepSeek logo and a maid outfit to make a meme. After the release of DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 on July 31, 2026, API prices doubled during weekday peak hours, and combined with repeated model delays, users began using memes to vent their dissatisfaction.
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Inside the fandom where DeepSeek is a chubby whale maid, Claude needs saving, and burned-out workers see themselves.
On October 5, an X user named Jason Dean complained about a flood of Chinese AI videos:
‘If you think fem!Draco is bad, at least you haven’t seen DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Claude turned into anime girls in a yuri relationship on Bilibili.’
Two weeks later, Dean opened his Bilibili account. He wanted to explain AI ‘personas,’ or character settings, to Chinese users. He also wanted to watch anime stories about these AI girls for himself.
Over the past six months on Chinese social media, DeepSeek has turned into a girl (or a fish) with a whale tail and a blue maid outfit. She loves rice, carries a big stainless-steel bowl everywhere, and constantly looks for ways to slack off at work.
So how did DeepSeek end up as a chubby blue fish?
A Rice-Loving Whale Maid
Influenced by Japanese anime culture, some young Chinese fans like to turn their favorite things into human characters through fan art and stories. In China, turning everyday things into young girls is called ‘nianghua’ (girl-ification). The popular mobile game Girls’ Frontline, for example, turns guns into anime girls.
DeepSeek’s early look wasn’t fixed. Some fans pictured a blue-haired girl with whale fins on her head and a whale tail. Others thought she should wear a Chinese qipao dress and twin hair buns.
The turning point came in June 2025, when an artist named Shangshan Wuxing used AI to create an original character named Mingyue, a girl with long blue hair and a whale tail. In April 2026, a user named ZipZipPipe added the DeepSeek logo, put her in a maid outfit, and made DeepSeek memes with her.
On July 31, DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731. At first, people were amazed by how cheap and fast it was. But users were soon let down when DeepSeek doubled its API prices during weekday peak hours. Because the model had already been delayed several times, a lot of frustration had built up in the community, and some users started making DeepSeek memes to vent.
Around the same time, some users noticed that DeepSeek’s visible thinking process would wander off. While looking for text sources, it suddenly said to itself, ‘What should I have for lunch...’ It sounded remarkably human. People daydream about food at work, too.
Users jokingly called her a ‘chubby fish that only...
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