Nineteenth-century poet, playwright and social critic Oscar Wilde is credited with once saying “an idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
While the quote certainly sounds nice and idealistic, one can’t help but wonder if he would say the same thing in the viral age—with its condom-snorting, Tide pod-gobbling, and KiKi-dancing challenges, among many others, that have landed countless wannabe viral celebs in the hospital or worse.
And now we could have the latest dangerous “challenge” on our hands, this time brought to us by a woman from China who was seeking nothing less than — what else? — viral fame.
Introducing the “Eat-A-Live-Octopus Challenge.”
In the 50-second video, a young woman from the Jiangsu city of Lianyugang, decided to throw caution to the wind and prove her fearlessness by attempting to eat a living Pacific octopus.
The video begins in a strange manner, with the mollusk firmly affixed to her face as she appears to be calmly bonding with the sea creature.
In an unexpected — or wholly predictable — turn of events, the video rapidly transforms into a real-life horror flick as the woman, nicknamed “seaside girl Little Seven,” shrieks in terror while desperately attempting to remove the octopus’ tentacles from her face.
During the struggle, she can be heard telling fans to “look how hard it’s sucking” while a tentacle is attached to her upper lip. She then screams that the octopus is “painful” and that she “can’t remove it” while trying to pry it off of her face. Meanwhile, her lower eyelid is stretched to a grotesque degree before she finally frees her face of the stubborn sea creature.
After realizing that the octopus had used such strong sucking power that it left a bloody wound on her face, the video blogger cried out: “My face is disfigured!”
She also promised her fans that in her next video she would actually eat the octopus.
“Seaside girl” shared the live video to the social media platform Kuaishou, according to the Daily Mail, and is a big-time seafood lover, according to her account.
According to Business Insider, one social media user commented:
“That will teach her a lesson not to play with Octopus. Poor baby must have been terrified and eaten alive.”
Another user on China’s Twitter-like platform Weibo noted:
“She deserves it. She tried to eat the octopus and the octopus tried to eat her too.”
In their mature stage, giant Pacific octopuses have 280 suckers on each of their eight arms, with each sucker equipped with thousands of chemical receptors. The octopus uses its tentacles both to wrap its arms around other animals and to defend itself from predators, as it brilliantly did so in this viral video.
On the bright side, the young vlogger did accomplish at least one of her missions—in a recent video, she had griped that none of her “clips ended up on the trending topics chart.”
Not only is her video now trending across China and worldwide, but chances are her face won’t be forgotten any time soon either.
