im not talking like "oooooh the authors poorly disguised fetish." only like, kinda? i think its actually perfectly fine to notice and comment on "huh this show has a lot of x, it could be that one or more of the creator(s) have a fetish for x" but i don't think it should end there. "how does this work intend to play with the sexuality of it's target audience and how does it do so in execution." is a much more interesting question imo and it's one that people even do engage with sometimes! when a shonen manga has a conventionally attractive female character most people would agree that it's to attract teenage boys with their raging hormones to keep reading. i think discussion ends there usually, not necessarily at manga but with "sexuality in media is a bad thing because blah blah blah male gaze." and i don't want to defend male gazey stuff i really don't cause i don't like it either when the female characters wear fuck all and have zero body mass to appeal to the ever narrowing thing that is men's sexuality and the male characters are fully clothed and portrayed as physically powerful. but like, choices in sexuality don't start and stop there.
i wish i could find it but like, 5 or so years ago i was reading this deviantart fetish comic about a girls ever expanding breasts that started out fun and horny, that slowly began to press on the horror that would come about from this. the pain. the objectification. the inability to fit in with wider society as a whole. you begin the story probably by looking for some material you can goon to or whatever, and as it goes on, as your sexuality gets more and more excited seeing the fetish play out as the character gets more and more depressed. by the end, she kills herself. by the end, you were jerking off to a girl who killed herself.
like, this is probably made with primarily men in mind. but that doesn't detract from what starts out as just another story where the girls boobs get fat, ends with a complete backstab that leaves you, in your likely post nut depression (assuming you are of the target audience) in complete shock. from what i remember it wasn't even that good as either a fetish work or horror (two pages before she writes her suicide note she goes to a cosplay convention as tifa lockheart and it used those weird uncanny realistic 3d models that a lot of fetish work likes to use for some reason. is that an intentional decision to help evoke the emotions finalized in the end? uhhhh maybe?) but it stuck with me and i had and still have never seen anything like that.
okay okay. that's not non sexual media. but you see it right? there's ways to acknowledge the sexuality of a work besides saying "it shouldn't be there." that's what i was trying to get at ultimately so i can actually give another example. surprise! this was a winxpost in disguise. there is NO way i could post this to my winx account without getting fucking killed on the spot for it.
in this case the sexuality here is a little simpler - being a kids show means it can't be too sexual. but it also means the target audience is about 8-14 year old likely heterosexual girls who are very much sexual contrary to what weird internet puritans say! and this isn't me trying to say "well this means whoever worked on winx club was a child molester" because. lmao. it's not like anyone working on it was doing dan schneider shit and it ultimately didn't hurt anyone.
he's the main villain of the third season of winx club. i'm probably the 7th or 8th biggest lesbian you'll ever meet and even i can see the appeal in this guy even if i'd never actually want him. thats why im the 7th or 8th biggest one and not the first. but like, he's meant to be hot. his classy, gentlemanly, miles edgeworth looking outfit. his defined jawline. his long flowing hair. his tall stature. and within the story, he's pumped up to be all that. there's three girls fighting over him for almost the entire show. he's so charismatic to make people who are otherwise simply jealous of others obtain his mark and be under his control. and look at the third image i posted. there's clearly some tension between him and the main character, bloom, as she's forced into not hurting him due to him having vital information about her birth parents. none of that tension is said outright, and one could even say its unintended, but it is there. there is a reason that, among the relatively puritan fandom that is the winx fandom, valtor x bloom STILL stands as one of the most popular ships in the series despite having a pretty visible age gap and, if we assume the school year in alfea begins in august, has a chunk of its material starting when she was 17? anyways. my point is - this guy is hot and the creators know this. or, he was hot. near the end of the series, as his frustrations grow and his power becomes challenged more and more, he transforms into this weird demon form. and uh.
WOW. there's normally a running joke among fantasy that if a character has a non human form and a human form the non human form will be treated as less sexy when it really is way hotter, but that does NOT apply here. his face is realllllly ugly and his eyebrows are huge and grotesque and his body is too absurdly proportioned for really most people who are generally into men to be into this guy. most winx fans hate this and im pretty sure its mostly because they think the original valtor is hot. which, no hate, but i LOVE this. without words, this betrayal of his sexual allure communicates so much about his character, his cunningness, his charm that he once had, all being a facade, all existing as a means to an end. he never once cared about any of the people he claimed to want to help. not diasporo, not the trix, not cassandra, not chimera, those were all pawns he used to conquer and hurt more planets. he's in the endgame, where his charisma no longer matters, all that does is his power. and then the viewers, the 10 year old girls for who this character was genetically engineered in a lab to irreversiably alter the course of their sexual life 10 years later for, suddenly are realizing that this guy was never being honest about anything. something they intellectually knew prior to this, but through this they're able to EXPERIENCE it, through a very real feeling that the show intentionally conveys and then stops conveying.
anyways. in conclusion sexuality is a very real thing that can be and has been used in art to inspire emotion in whoever is experiencing it that goes beyond "horny." a lot of people on the internet do not seem to like this and tend to write off sexuality as something that cannot exist as a part of a works ideas and themes and can just be axed from something without changing it or making it worse unless its literally porn. it quite frequently can't, sexuality plays a massive role in society, like it or not, and society influences art. art will continue to be sexual, even unintentionally! and that's okay and a good thing. it does somewhat limit who's able to truly feel the the fullest extent of a work, but that's sort of just part of art as a whole, idk what to tell you.
p.s. i recognize i assume that the one experiencing either work i talked about here is a cisgender heterosexual man/woman. because of how gender and sexuality work there's obviously a lot of other ways this could play out. however, in both of these cases those were definitely the primary intended audience and i feel like the way gender and sexuality varience can interact with sexual work (random examples, itd be much harder for a gay boy to self insert onto bloom in her scenes w valtor, meanwhile a heterosexual trans girl may find extra comfort in doing so, and perhaps greater betrayal, an asexual person may miss out on all this entirely) are for another conversation entirely.
