Explain/Pinnipeds
Otherwise known as... Seals. Where do I even begin with seals...?
Toba Aquarium in Toba, Mie, Japan has many pinniped exhibits, including Baikal seals, the only freshwater species in the world. They are notable for their massive eyes and, as a result, their bizarre and often worried facial expressions.
In 2020 a GIF of their youngest Baikal seal, named Niko, went viral due to his oddly human-looking face. Fabric, someone who is friends with many members of the camp (and who helped me factcheck this article! Thank you Fabric!!!) found it to be very amusing and shared it around with everyone, including editing it into a random video. A discordant individual later took the original GIF and captioned it with the relatively bizarre phrase "he was forced to eat cement when he was six". This went even more viral.
Two of their friends, Gopy and Chubs, were among the people to be captivated by this miserable soggy beast. Niko's visage became very popular among Gopy's friend group; when the cement meme showed up, it was incorporated into the mythos as well.
From then onwards things began to spiral into the depths of injoke obscurity. Gopy has a keen ability for making very odd jokes. Many nicknames for seals (especially Baikal seals) were created, such as:
- Nerpa (the Russian word for Baikal seals)
- Nerpy (plural of the above)
- Okin (Niko backwards...)
- Eepa (corruption of nerpa, often associated with buckets or "uckets")
- Pusa (the genus that contains Baikal seals along with ringed seals and Caspian seals)
- Laes (seal backwards)
- Ladoga (another lake in Russia that is home to its own seals; specifically, a subspecies of the ringed seal. The word may be prefixed by additional "la"s. Chubs in particular says this a lot.)
- Any other corruptions of the above, especially nerpa
The fact that Niko in the meme's canon was specifically forced to eat cement implied that someone had a grudge against him or his kind. Indeed, the seal references quickly shifted to being malevolent in nature, such as making more seals eat cement, and eventually subjecting them to other kinds of misfortune. Simply hating seals — even the baby ones, which are pretty much universally beloved — was now the basis of the injoke. People began to ascribe qualities to the seals to explain why they were so repulsive, such as them being liars or smelling like gasoline (this has some truth in reality; seals smell bad while shedding) or just being ugly.
Other seal species and seal-like beings also became subject to the torment. (Did you know that LUNA's favorite Pokemon is Spheal?) Eventually people even started advocating for total seal extinction. Oddly, walruses and sea lions have been kept out of the blast radius of most of the seal jokes. Perhaps because they are too distinct from seals, or because they are genuinely too likeable to be hated.
The opening of The Wiki Camp 2 was when the seal meme reached critical mass. As of writing this (November 6, 2022), more than 100 pages are about seals. These pages include challenge entries; the contestant Paper Niko is obviously inspired by it, but the most infamous seal page is almost certainly Damn seal, which is such a visual-technological nightmare that people have blamed it for causing the wiki servers to crash. Simply strolling through the wiki by hitting Random page, it is hard to go very far without tripping over a seal or two. Many of the seal pages are bizarre in nature, such as Nerpy Scuba (who has his own Explain subpage) and Fruit salad (yummy yummy!) This is not some obscure extension of the joke, it's just the people being involved having a very odd sense of humor, and perhaps a nurpoing.
Shortly before the camp was opened, Ponsuke, a ringed seal from Tokkari Center in Hokkaido, also went viral due to a video of him sticking his tongue out. The seal meme has no mercy, and so Niko was no longer alone in his personal hell. There's also Hiyori the spotted seal from Azarashi Seal Paradise, also in Hokkaido. (She got pretty high in Robot's 'cool things' Twitter tourney... though she was mistaken for her friend Agu, an entirely different seal!)
The seal meme also exists outside of Gopy's friend group; I've seen a lot of Niko fans, along with a couple of Discord servers devoted to seals! Toba Aquarium seems aware that Niko is quite the celebrity, but I don't believe they're aware of the memes that have sprung up at his expense. I sure hope not, anyway...
Oh, and don't worry, marine biology fans: None of the threats directed towards seals are meant genuinely. They are wonderful animals, like the rest of us. :)
Specific seal pages explained
Pinniped
This article is pretty much a summary of pinnipeds, albeit merely wikified. It includes a list of all pinniped species. Despite this, many of their respective articles haven't been made. The image on the right is captioned as "a diverse selection of pinnipeds from each major class," although the seals pictured aren't just one species (that is, the Baikal seal), they are all the same individual—Niko himself.
Damn seal
Damn seal was initially a test by Gopy to see if images could be nested within a caption, as well as a way to show off a picture of Niko from a Sonic Adventure 2 mod.[1] The phrasing of the title was chosen to fill out the alphabet of Category:Seals, similar to the concurrently created quaint seal, while also likely referencing the uncanny "Your chair is: damn chair". The page was then made progressively more hellish, including gifs of fire, looping text saying "THIS SEAL WILL DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!", and the infamous screenshake.
During Challenge 2, it was made into an official team page by Gopy because it would be funny. It ended in third place. Afterwards, the page's destruction became ever more technical and elaborate as the wiki's users became more versed in using CSS and more seal images were uploaded. Throughout its history, user and team member Chubs would be joked about for making several minor edits in a row—due to the page's shake, previewing the page would interfere with the editing interface.
Due to the page's length and density, editing it, or perhaps even simply loading it fresh, can cause the entire wiki to temporarily slow down as it deals with having to reload and update all the data. Infamously, this potentially caused competitor Dodgeball to fail to upload a page for Challenge 3 just before the deadline. Similarly, transcluding the page (a method that inserts an entire page onto another) potentially also causes slowdowns. This was a popular joke before this realization, so the practice has since died down, but its reputation precedes it.
A version of Damn seal that does not include the shake, among other differences, can be read here.
Frederick the Baby Sea Lion
Frederick the Baby Sea Lion is an image of Niko with his eyes replaced by those of the titular alien from the movie CJ7.
List of minor seals
To contain the abundance of funny-looking seal images, List of minor seals was created. The page gives very brief explanations for each seal, written in an analytical though confidently incorrect tone, sometimes accompanied by Olimar and Louie. Several of the seals are named in the format "[x] the Seal", which too is an inside-joke of appending "the seal" to any variety of words, usually as a non sequitur.
Most of the images are taken from @azarasi_bot1 on Twitter, which posts seal photographs hourly.
A follow-up page, List of many seals, was also created.
NerpaPunch
Okinberries
Okinberries are a fictional fruit that resemble blueberries with the faces of seals. Like many seal-related phenomena, this one was likely born out of the funny way it sounds when spoken. Many varieties exist, concentrated on the page Okinberry medley. Okinberries are also the center of the running gag featuring the character "nerpaseymour", who inserts unwanted messages into the wiki's chatlogs.
Several other seal-based fruits followed; most are documented on the page Fruit salad.
The Seals category
Category:Seals is one of the most linked-to categories (it was once the most linked but was eventually dethroned by Category:Dia boxes). This is partly done intentionally, as after a certain point, almost all images about seals that were uploaded were given this category—most images are not categorized at all. Some pages were also made to specifically fill out unused letters, such as Quaint seal.