Amabie

In 2020, Amabie started to trend on Japanese Twitter. Amabie is a Japanese yokai that was fairly obscure until last year. There are variations to the story, but essentially a mermaid-like creature with long hair, a beak, scales, and three legs or fins emerged from the sea in the late 1800s to give a warning and advice. It predicted six years of good harvest and then a pandemic, but to stave off the disease, Amabie said to draw its picture and show that picture to as many people as possible.

So artists took to the interwebs with #AmabieChallenge and there are tons of interesting drawings, sculptures, and whimsical lunches in the shape of Amabie. 

This is my version:

And here's the design process video:

If you want to learn more, there are a number of articles from the Asahi Shimbun, NHK, the Japan Times, and Western networks like the Guardian, BBC, and NPR.

To see other artist interpretations, check out Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or any other image search.*

*depending on the search platform, you might want to specify "Amabie yokai" instead of just "Amabie" so it doesn't think you mean the Spanish word "amable," which gives results of mostly inspirational quotes