Character from South Park by Trey Parker & Matt Stone
Half man, half bear, half pig — Al Gore's obsession that everyone dismissed as crazy until it turned out to be terrifyingly real. The show's climate change allegory, delivered with maximum self-awareness.
ManBearPig started as a joke about Al Gore — the show mocked his environmental crusade as delusional, presenting ManBearPig as a creature only Gore believed in while everyone else rolled their eyes. Then, in later seasons, the show brought ManBearPig back as genuinely real and genuinely deadly, essentially admitting that Gore was right and everyone who ignored him (including the show itself) was wrong. This self-correction is one of the most remarkable things South Park has done. ManBearPig became a climate change allegory where the town knows it's real, knows it's dangerous, and still can't agree to make the sacrifices needed to stop it. The show used its own earlier dismissal as part of the satire — even the people telling you about the threat can be annoying enough to ignore. ManBearPig is now canon as a demon that the town made a deal with decades ago and has been pretending doesn't exist.
A grotesque hybrid creature — part human, part bear, part pig, exactly as horrible as that sounds. Massive, dangerous, and impossible to ignore once you actually see it. The design is deliberately absurd because the point is that the threat was always real regardless of how ridiculous the messenger sounded.
Also known as: MBP