Why a giant fictional penguin could be the cure for millennial burnout

Pengsoo was created for children's television, yet it became such a sensation with adults that it was named South Korea's person of the year. Now it's ready to take over the globe

Growing up in the South Pole, Pengsoo was to his penguin peers what Rudolph was to Santa's reindeers: an outcast shunned for being different. Bullies latched on to Pengsoo's towering frame - at nearly 7ft, Pengsoo is almost twice the height of the average emperor penguin - and its large, unblinking eyes.

The other penguins didn't play with me because I was too big," 10-year-old Pengsoo told producers at a studio in the Korea Educational Broadcasting System (EBS) headquarters in Seoul in April 2019. Sitting in a gray room, empty save a too-small chair positioned beside a childish self-portrait, Pengsoo stared at the producers as it spoke. Pengsoo had swum to South Korea from the Antarctic not too long ago", it said, in the hopes of becoming the next big sensation on YouTube, which was getting very popular" in its homeland. But the bullying there had been too much.