海王

What does 海王 mean?

海王 started as the Chinese title of the superhero film Aquaman and then acquired a dating meaning: a man who runs romances with several partners in parallel and commits to none. The metaphor comes with a whole aquarium. Everyone he strings along is a fish, his collection is a 鱼塘, a fish pond, and settling for one person is 上岸, coming ashore. Most of the time it is a warning, as in 他是个海王，你别当真 (he is a sea king, don't take him seriously), though it can also carry grudging admiration for the sheer logistics.

Where does 海王 come from?

After 海王, the Aquaman movie, took about two billion yuan at the Chinese box office following its December 2018 release, the word was on everyone's lips. Through 2019, confession posts and romance-show clips on Weibo fixed the flirting-with-everyone sense, and the line 你以为你游进了哥哥的心房，结果发现那只是他的鱼塘 (you thought you had swum into his heart, only to find it was just his fish pond) became a fixture of breakup threads.

How to use 海王

• 朋友劝她别再等了：快跑，这人是海王，你只是他鱼塘里的一条鱼。
  Péngyou quàn tā bié zài děng le: kuài pǎo, zhè rén shì hǎi wáng, nǐ zhǐ shì tā yútáng lǐ de yī tiáo yú.
  Her friend told her to stop waiting: run, this one is a sea king, and you are just one fish in his pond.
• 他同时跟五个人聊天被扒出来，评论区齐刷刷：海王本王。
  Tā tóngshí gēn wǔ gè rén liáotiān bèi bā chūlái, pínglùn qū qí shuāshuā: hǎi wáng běn wáng.
  When it came out that he was chatting with five people at once, the comments filled up with one line: the sea king himself.