Author Appeal / Surname I to Q

I

• Land of the Lustrous creator Haruko Ichikawa really has a thing for bodies breaking apart, whether it's just limbs or entire bodies shattering. It happens to the characters in Land of the Lustrous fairly often due to being humanoid gems, but it also crops up quite a bit in her other one-shot works; these characters are often non-human, likely to justify how their bodies can break apart without it involving a lot of blood.
• Playwright Joe Iconis is a big fan of B Movies, with several of his productions, such as Be More Chill, Broadway Bounty Hunter, and Punk Rock Girl. He also likes to incorporate old-school rock-and-roll into his works.
• Daigo Ikeno, the artist behind the Street Fighter series (specifically Third Strike, EX3, and the IV series), is responsible for Chun-Li's thighs increasing in girth with each game, as he loves him some big ol' thighs. The producer of the series, Yoshinori Ono, prefers thinner women, so Ikeno has admitted that he's often delivered thinner designs at the start of development and slowly made Chun-Li's legs thicker with each new drawing. Then, once he's sent his final design to the 3D model crew, it would be far too late for Ono to do anything about it. (It's all in good fun, though, and the two men have had a good laugh about it.) So prominent is Ikeno's love of thick thighs that Street Fighter X Tekken featured Nina Williams as having some pretty thick thighs herself, even though they are more slender in Tekken.
• Attack on Titan showcases Hajime Isayama's love of people with lean muscular builds. In particular, Mikasa, in art where she wears a tank top, is built like a brick house.
• Daisuke Ishiwatari loves him some rock, especially classic 80s rock like Queen. His magnum opus, Guilty Gear, is testament to this, with an absolutely rocking soundtrack (composed by Ishiwatari), his Author Avatar (whom he voiced) being named after a Queen song, and various other characters named after rock musicians and bands, such as Zappa and Slayer.
  • His character designs are more often than not Improbable Weapon Users, and tend to wear a lot of belts.
• Kunihiko Ikuhara has a very long list of very specific things that tend to pop up in his works: surreal plotlines that get very dark, Design Student's Orgasm imagery, unhealthy relationships, Brother–Sister Incest, Stock Footage, repeated phrases, flowers, princesses, strange dramatic poses, wacky animal hijinx, heavy symbolism and obscure literary references, Forgotten First meetings, Magical Girls, and, above all else, lesbians.

J

• James Jacobs, game designer and the creative head at Paizo, is a huge fan of dinosaurs, so much so that he has made sure that EVERY hardcover monster book published contains at least four of them.
• Brian Jacques, creator of the Redwall series, liked food. Most novels in the series started with a feast and detailed, mouthwatering descriptions of the food being served. Food often became a minor plot point as well (e.g. the "shrewcakes"^note a honey-sweetened pancake with dried fruit, used as a travel ration in Mattimeo). Jacques said that he was a child during World War II when food was being rationed, and his love of delicious food and lots of it stemmed from that.
• Jeph Jacques, creator of Questionable Content, is obsessed with girls with psychological issues, and the entire cast of his webcomic except for a small handful of male characters is filled with just that. He also loves skinny girls, though a lot of focus gets put on a pair of curvier women's busts. His love of short hair was so noted that he admitted it in a post, promising to not cut all of a character's long hair off right away like he usually does.
  • He also likes to draw butts, which was lampooned by his Sitcom Arch-Nemesis David Willis as "butts disease."
• Niklas Jansson has a tendency to draw girls with exposed midriffs, white low-leg panties (it was even in his deviantArt name), and white thigh-highs with knee-high boots. Even when he's doing his game "redesigns", these will pop up, regardless of setting. For example, count the girls dressed such in Kawaiik. He's made a joke or two about it.
  • Also, for some reason Diglet keep popping up, as do Magnemite.
• Shock comedian Anthony Jeselnik has stated that he loves sharks. The cover of his second comedy album Caligula is of a breaching great white shark even though sharks are never mentioned in the album itself. Jeselnik later caused an international backlash over a sketch on The Jeselnick Offensive in which he celebrates the fact that a New Zealand man was eaten by a shark. In his subsequent comedy album Thoughts & Prayers, he discusses his love for sharks and explains that far more sharks are killed by humans, so whenever a human is eaten by a shark, it's a score for "our side."
• It looks like Jim Jinkins was quite a fan of Madonna back in The '90s when he made Doug. For one, she is the only Real Life person ever mentioned In-Universe, but she is mentioned both in the Nickelodeon and the Disney show. Besides, Beebe Bluff's Quailman alter ego is named Material Girl.
• Geoff Johns is known for quite a few:
  • Geoff really like Pre-Crisis DC comics:
    • Johns' personal favourite character is The Flash, specifically Wally West, but he is also very fond of Barry Allen. In Johns' The Flash (1987) run, which featured Wally West as the protagonist, Barry was featured quite a bit, and Wally all of a sudden started storing his costume inside a ring like Barry, when by that point he'd been able to actually just manifest one around himself. Later, Johns would write The Flash: Rebirth which focuses on Allen's return, and is basically one long love letter to Barry.
    • Hal Jordan is Johns' preferred Green Lantern. After he became a villain and was hated by many people in the DCU, Johns' JSA run featured him in a few arcs as the Spectre, and his first arc on The Flash had Wally openly defend Hal in a Mirror Universe where he has his own museum.
    • His "The Lightning Saga" crossover brought back the Pre-Crisis Legion of Super-Heroes. His Legion of 3 Worlds was a last hurrah for the 90s and 00s Legions before restablishing the original Legion as the mainstream one.
    • Johns also re-established Clark Kent's Superboy's career as a hero teenager and a member of the Legion of Super-Heroes.
  • Johns did not make it a secret that he did not like the Rogues having powers in the New 52, and much preferred them using weapons. So, in his Forever Evil (2013) crossover, he has Deathstorm pull Captain Cold's powers right out of him, so Cold falls back on using his Cold Gun.
• Robert Jordan, best known for The Wheel of Time:
  • The Wheel of Time plot continually depends on slavery, servitude, and subordination; the plot winds up depending on a magic leash that allows its owner to inflict pain or pleasure on their slaves at will. Almost all relations between a man and a woman have elements of submission and constraint.
  • He also seems to have a thing for powerful women falling to lowly positions, doing housework and such. Queen Morgase and Siuan Sanche, in particular, spring to mind. And that's not counting the villainous women getting their degrading comeuppance.
  • The secondary female trio often referred to by fans as the "Wonder Girls" are frequently being captured and/or humiliated despite frequently being described as the most powerful channelers in 1,000 years). In book 2, the three are conned by Liandrin, although Nynaeve and Egwene manage to escape. In the next book, all three are ambushed and knocked unconscious by bandits, and then are captured again later in the book by Liandrin and the Black Ajah again. In the fourth book, Nynaeve and Elayne are drugged and captured by an herbalist spy for Elaida. In the 5th book, they take refuge in a menagerie and are humiliated by several other members of the troupe, Nynaeve getting a black eye because one of the other female performers is jealous of the attention, and when they finally reach their destination of the rebel Aes Sedai in Salidar, the two are humiliated yet again by the ever arrogant Aes Sedai who want to put them back into their places as Accepted (basically apprentices) despite all of their many accomplishments. This isn't even going into the dozens of times the three women attempt to dominate or humiliate each other.
  • He also tends to write clothing porn— Just read some of his later books where he goes into pages-long descriptions of clothes that are never mentioned again.
  • There are a lot of revered rites that involve naked women. Point: the breast-baring "I am a woman" scene, which is alluded to have involved "more thorough" proof in backstory.
  • The "humorous" Mat and Tylin subplot, where none of the characters bat an eyelid at Mat falling into a relationship where his consent is questionable at best (and where several characters think it's just what he deserves).
  • Many female characters of the series are punished (or threatened to be) with spankings, whippings, birchings... happens several times to Morgase.
  • Discreet lesbian relationships ("pillow friends") are referred to with increasing frequency among the various all-female organizations, especially among Aes Sedai, due to Situational Sexuality. Most Tower initiates grow out of this once they become full Aes Sedai; some of them don't, and Galina Casban verges on Psycho Lesbian at some points, but most Aes Sedai are simply asexual. The same thing happened in most of Jordan's Conan the Barbarian novels, to the point of being one step away from a Gor pastiche. Most of the heroines wound up naked, mind-controlled, in bondage and/or spanked at some point.
    • In Conan The Invincible, Red Sonja Expy Karela The Red Hawk was forcibly stripped and bound by bandits. She was also mind-controlled into dancing in the nude (and possibly more) by an evil wizard. The same wizard freely admitting to having a boot fetish, and forced Karela to strip down so she was wearing nothing but her leather boots. And she ended the novel nude except for a metal collar, on a slave chain, begging Conan to buy her.
    • Conan The Triumphant centered upon Al'Kiir; the demon-god of female subjugation who required a steady stream of female souls to "play" with. Al'Kiir was said to prefer very strong-willed women as "brides" and his rituals required sacrifices to be stripped, oiled with some kind of aphrodisiac, chained down and whipped. Naturally Karela wound up on the altar by the novel's end...
    • The Conan books at least were considered an Old Shame on Jordan's part, originally published under a different name.

K

• George Kamitani, of Vanillaware fame, likes women that are, to say the least, voluptuous. Nearly every game he helped develop feature women with curvacious figures, often with breasts larger than their heads. Even 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, which has a more grounded and realistic aesthetic, has Hot Nurse Chihiro Morimura. In addition, he likes to incorporate food into games, as seen in Odin Sphere and Muramasa: The Demon Blade's farming/cooking system and hub world restaurants, or Dragon's Crown's use of food to overheal and campfire minigame.
• Hiraku Kaneko loves two things in his anime series: Gigantic breasts and copious amounts of fanservice...usually involving gigantic breasts, so expect a lot boob shots and bouncing breasts. All of the series he's directed (Seikon No Qwaser, Manyu Hikencho, Kagaku na Yatsura, Maken-ki! OVA and season 2) are adaptations of extremely raunchy works with multiple characters sporting breasts at least the size of their heads.
  • His tastes have apparent before he started directing as well. He worked on the animation for Eiken, Godannar, Witchblade, and Dragonaut: The Resonance. All of those series mainly known for their abundance of scantily-clad busty characters.
  • He was one of the many character designers for the Queen's Blade visual combat books. He did the character design of Cattleya, who, in terms of size breast size, dwarfs most of the cast who are also busty.
• Hideki Kamiya loves Shoot 'Em Up games, particularly Space Harrier. As such, almost all of his games have at least one rail-shooter segment.
• Masakazu Katsura is a huge fan of Batman, and anything he works on will inevitably have some sort of nod or reference to the Caped Crusader. The most blatant was in I"s, where one character (an aspiring sculptor) managed to get some of her artwork included in the background of a very thinly-veiled version of one of the Schumacher Batman films.
• Joe Katz, the lead programmer of the Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory pinball machine, adores Mortal Kombat, which is why the former has "Candy Kodes" that are very clearly modeled after Mortal Kombat 3's Kombat Kodes.
• Lloyd Kaufman of Troma (The Toxic Avenger) Entertainment likes his Gorn, girls and especially in combination. He's not alone, as he finds many actresses and models who love appearing blood-splattered and faux-mangled. Promoting this as a defining quality of Troma blurs the line between Author Appeal and Playing To The Fetishes.
• Guy Gavriel Kay has the extremely obvious fetishes of male submission (complete with pillows and silken ropes) and Mardi Gras-type festivals involving anonymous sex.
• NoonboryKedabory's works often include Shout Outs to media that she likes, most commonly The Golden Girls and Barbie movies. In the notes of one Ma Fille chapter, she outright says the chapter was inspired by "my new favourite Pixar movie".
• The frequent references to beauty products and chocolate in Marian Keyes' books is because of her real-life passion for them. The reason Anna takes a public relations job with a cosmetics company in Anybody Out There? is mostly so she can receive free makeup.
• Current WWE President Nick Khan prefers hiring sports people rather than people who have a long a career in wrestling. For example, the WWE NIL program, which focuses on recruiting college athletes as opposed to independent wrestlers, is considered to be his brainchild.
• Smelling women pops up oddly often in Anthony Kiedis' (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers fame) lyrics.
• Stephen King: Among the many common characteristics of his books include things that King simply likes:
  • A classic song of some sort will repeatedly be mentioned or played.
  • He's very prone to inserting an Author Avatar as a main character: famous writer, smoker, had a car accident, alcoholic or drug abuser (sometimes recovering).
  • Creator Provincialism. Most of his stories are set in his home state of Maine.
  • Characters typically discuss baseball, which King is a fan of, at least once every few chapters.
  • A few of King's stories also depict Corgis, in a positive light due to him being the proud owner of a Welsh Corgi of Molly the Thing of Evil. The dog itself actually shows up in The Dark Tower series. More amusingly, a fictional corgi nearly saves the day in Under the Dome, though a human screws up the corgi's gift.
• In Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis has several pairings of adult or even middle-aged male characters with underage female characters.
• Yukito Kishiro of Battle Angel Alita fame just loves to destroy the human brain. Dramatically. He allso likes to tear his hapless main character to pieces over and over again. Kishiro is a self admitted pervert.
• Masashi Kishimoto, the creator of Naruto, has obviously a foot fetish and likes drawing toes. Pretty much every character besides the samurai (who live in a snow region) wear sandals. And he also likes exotic eye designs.
• Mohiro Kitoh, creator of Shadow Star and Bokurano, seems to have a thing for feet with long, almost finger-like, flexible toes. Most of his characters, especially the younger ones, have them and show them off by being bare-footed a lot, even though such feet are relatively rare in reality.
• T.E.D. Klein's work almost always feature an author and/or fan of Cosmic Horror Stories who find themselves in one. Also expect plenty of Shout-Outs to other works of horror literature and a lot of toying with classic tropes of the genre.
• Are you a character in a Kazuo Koike manga? Better start urinating. On yourself, if possible. And hey, would it kill you to drink some urine, too?
• Kōhei Horikoshi has a very obvious fixation on hands - several characters in My Hero Academia have Quirks that are activated via their hands (Bakugou, Uraraka, Shigaraki), Midoriya is always breaking his fingers that require close-ups of his hands, Hagakure's hero outfit is literally just a pair of floating gloves and some boots and Shigaraki Tomura even wears several disembodied hands on his person, including one over his face.
  • He also tends to draw the girls in the series a bit thicker than most anime girls because he finds that body type attractive - Uraraka in particular is somewhat plump for Japanese standards and he notes in Mina's character profile that she has "healthy thighs."
• Hideo Kojima finally admitted in an interview that Metal Gear Solid was a "buttock fixation series". No one was surprised:
  • In Metal Gear Solid, the main character is forced to identify a female soldier by her distinctive hip-shaking walk, which was extremely well hand-animated. There's an extended close-up of her buttocks filling the screen as she runs away in slow motion and motion-blur. She can be seen sans trousers depending on how long it takes you to trigger a certain cutscene, where she pinches her own buttocks after Snake comments on how she has 'a great butt'. She spends the final battle in a coma, lying on her side, tied up, buttocks thrust towards Snake. A certain male soldier is found naked and unconscious with his buttocks in the air. The Twin Snakes ups the ante by having Snake show himself off for the cameras in the Briefing scene, a particularly weird shot being of him with his arms resting on a bed, his legs straight, and his buttocks lifted right up to two of the four cameras, as he calmly discusses the mission.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 2, Solid Snake and Raiden both wear obscenely tight outfits which stretch flatteringly over muscles, but cling very, very tightly to every cleft and dimple of their buttocks. You can even see their underwear lines through their suits (neither of them wear anything particularly substantial). Emma wears skintight cycling shorts which hug her flatteringly, and Fortune wears a tight swimsuit - they bothered to shape the way the cut of the swimsuit changes the shape of her buttocks. Raiden spends a couple of areas completely naked, and, due to the camera angle, his buttocks are very prominent. The climactic scene of the game involves a shot where Snake is attempting to break out of handcuffs, requiring a gratuitous close-up of his hands and buttocks as he shakes them from side to side, in a sequence which lasts a good thirty seconds.
  • The tightness around the buttocks is faithfully reproduced in the action figure.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3, the camera adores EVA's buttocks almost as much as it loves her breasts, to the point where listing individual - or even egregious - examples is impossible. Bringing her up in the Cure viewer can, depending on the time on your PS2 clock, reveal her doing a Stripperiffic posing routine in her underwear.
  • The less said about the Beauty and the Beast unit in Metal Gear Solid 4, the better. And Snake manages to pull off a Thong of Shielding despite being very old. The opening scene to Act 2 involves Snake crawling along the ground in a disarmingly...undulatory way, with the camera focused on his buttocks the whole time. The scene lasts a good two minutes.
  • When asked in an interview if he and Snake had anything in common, Kojima responded that 'we both think we have nice asses for our age'. There's really nothing more to say.
  • The Sneaking Suit in MGS has straps that draw attention to Solid Snake's crotch. The Sneaking Suit in MGS2 has straps that draw attention to Solid Snake's crotch. Raiden's "Skull Suit" has a prominent crotch bulge for no good reason. The Sneaking Suit in MGS3 has straps that draw attention to Naked Snake's crotch. Volgin's "cage match" outfit has bandoleers that cross his hips just above his crotch, and one that hangs down right in front of it. In MGS4, Old Snake has the straps and a bulge. Raiden has a bulge, which is especially odd considering he's a cyborg with no reproductive abilities whatsoever. The art for the Audio Drama? Crotch straps. Big Boss in Peace Walker and the Portable Ops series? Crotch straps. Monster Hunter Portable 3rd? Well, Snake doesn't appear. But you can get the outfit for your cat. And yes, crotch straps. Despite not actually wearing any pants.◊ Raiden in Revengeance? No, of course he doesn't have crotch straps, that'd be silly. He does have a codpiece. With straps leading to it. On his cybernetic body.
  • Kojima really likes David Bowie. One of the first radio lines in MGS3 is Snake asking his handler "Can you hear me, Major Tom?" The original credits song for 3 was going to be "Space Oddity" when the game was more focused on space exploration as a major theme. In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Snake's Private Military Contractor organization is called "Diamond Dogs", and the game opens up to "The Man Who Sold the World". The year the game takes place, in addition to the obvious Orwellian reference, may also be referencing a song of the same name from the "Diamond Dogs" album. There's a popular half-joke theory that much of the characters are based on Bowie looks.
• Konogi Yoshiru's Attack on Eroko manga is about a twenty-seven-year-old woman with a serious fetish for high school boys that culminates in a romantic relationship with one. The second volume's extra material outright says the manga's general concept came out of her and her all-female staff fantasizing about the male characters of another manga they make, which of course means Attack on Eroko is more or less just an entire mangaka's staff's Author Appeal put to pen and paper.
• Heinrich Kramer, the author of the Malleus Maleficarum, was so obsessed with demon rape that he got tossed from every monastery he got sent to after he drove the monks up the wall by talking nonstop about it.
• Tite Kubo, author of Zombie Powder and Bleach, once said that if he wasn't a manga artist, he'd like to be a designer of either fashion or architecture and that he wrote Bleach to be kimono-heavy because he loved the idea of beautifully billowing sleeves during battle. He's also a huge music buff and loves the sound and nuance of languages.
  • The Arrancar are named after models, artists and architects from around the world. Entire manga panels are lovingly devoted to zoom in/out shots of characters standing in dramatic poses with clothing billowing around them. Most characters look like models that have stepped onto a catwalk. Clothing Damage for men and scantily clad women abound. He won't draw backgrounds so that panels can focus exclusively on the drama and emotion of a character without distraction. His volume and chapter cover artwork often depicts characters in artistic poses, dressed in provocative, cutting-edge clothing. One interviewer even said the way the entire manga is structured on a page makes it look like movie stills put together to create a cinematic experience.
  • Volume and chapter titles are usually inspired by music, especially album and song titles, and often include the terms 'mix' or 'reprise' to evoke musicality. He also inserts a lot of gratuitous 'language X' due to his love of languages and word play, and his desire to associate the "feel" of a language with a particular race: He feels German sounds like an organised, intellectual and efficient language, so it's the language of the regimented and militaristic Quincies. He feels Spanish has a sexy flair, so it's the language of the Hollows, especially the fan-service Arrancars. He'll throw in English or slang Japanese for the "cool" characters and uses historical Japanese for traditional and spiritual characters, such as the Shinigamis' Tokugawa-era culture.
  • He also really, really likes the Japanese Spirit trope - characters will take one hell of a beating, only to pull themselves back up again and win multiple times.
  • His women also tend to have huge tits, Rangiku, Orihime, Yoruichi, Cirucci, Neliel, Halibel, Kuukaku, Isane and Unohana being the, ahem, biggest examples.
• Stanley Kubrick's movies frequently have major scenes taking place in a bathroom, someone spitting or salivating, extreme close-ups of intensely emotional faces, and "the glare"—head tilted forward with eyes looking up.
• Koji Kumeta has a couple of appeals that seem to be present in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei. It might be just part of the general weirdness, but there's several scenes that sort of randomly show a dominatrix prostitute "doing her thing" and the character of Ms. Chie was shown to be a sadomasochist. On the non-sexual side, the whole series showcases meticulously selected Awesome Anachronistic Apparel and has a Retro Universe feel. There's a similar Fan of the Past vibe in the characters- Ikkyu "loves everything old", Nozomu is very knowledgeable of both classic literature and older pop culture, Harumi has an encyclopedic knowledge of manga history. Finally, it's quite likely that many of the numerous character filibusters reflect Kumeta's opinions.
• Akira Kurosawa absolutely loves the weather on film. His films would usually depict heavy rain, wind, snow, fog or intense heat. He also likes characters who are rebels, misfits and nonconformists.

L

• The Far Side creator Gary Larson obviously had a thing for obesity and the then-outdated beehive hairstyle. He probably didn't find them sexy so much as funny to draw, though. He was also fond of depicting Westerns, with frequent parodies of their attendant tropes.
• John le Carré:
  • Age Gap Romances feature in 11 of his novels. The trope crops up 6 times in The Secret Pilgrim.
  • A remarkable number of his novels include father-son relationships of some sort. Besides the literal (and most obviously dysfunctional) ones in A Perfect Spy and Single & Single, substitute fathers appear, to one extent or another, in The Looking Glass War, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, The Secret Pilgrim and The Night Manager.
• Laibach seem to like stags.
  • Stags (in various forms) show up in many of their videos.
  • A mounted stag's head was one of the stage props at their show in London 2012.
  • The cover picture◊ of their early LP Nova Akropola is a stag.
• The late horror writer Richard Laymon is a notorious Guilty Pleasure — largely due to the amount of time his characters spend thinking about women's breasts and the many, many instances of sexual violence against women.
• Fritz Leiber's work suggests that he was pretty heavily into BDSM. Especially his final Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, which are stuffed full of graphic sex scenes of that nature.
  • The presence of barely nubile young girls the Twain more often than not lust upon...
• If you're watching a Sergio Leone film and there's a female character in it, you can bet that she'll be raped at some point, or that she's a prostitute. Or both.
  • This is pretty standard for all Spaghetti Westerns. For example, the first Django movie opens with a scene, which goes on for nearly 10 minutes, of a semi-naked woman being tied up and whipped by a group of men. She was being punished for sleeping with a Mexican.
• Paul "Triple H" Levesque:
  • Triple H loves to make penis gags. Specifically, he loves to imply he has a giant one. Also, according to Mick Foley's The Hardcore Diairies, he was the one to note AC/DC's Brian Johnson's significant pants bulge to the other wrestlers during their time on Saturday Night Live.
  • He seems to be a real life Amazon Chaser. He dated Chyna for years, and now he's got Stephanie McMahon (who was never particularly fit before) working out heavily and making workout tapes with him. This also shows up in a lot of the promotional footage for the women of WWE NXT - they're much more likely to show videos of the women doing squats and chin-ups in the gym instead of wandering around the beach in bikinis.
  • His use of Motörhead for his entrance theme counts, though it was incidental. WWE's music director asked if he'd ever heard of Motörhead when it came time to do a new theme; it turns out Trips has been a huge fan of the band since his youth. So far, he got two songs for himself ("The Game" and "King of Kings") and one for his Power Stable Evolution. Hunter is such a big fan that the band itself (or simply their frontman Lemmy) has appeared at WWE events, including playing Trips out to the ring live at two separate WrestleManias.
  • By all accounts, WWE NXT is a running case of Author Appeal. He loves old school southern style wrestling with more of an emphasis on the wrestlers than other people. According to sources, NXT is sufficiently under Vince McMahon's radar, and is Triple H's "baby," and he's pretty much running it himself:
    • Since becoming head of Talent Development, he's signed Sin Cara as well as IWC favorite Awesome Kong, and has focused on the old-school style of using promos to introduce new wrestlers before calling them up. To the IWC's great delight, also, he has also reportedly made some tweaks in developmental, expressing (among other things) a desire to have the talents there learn to cut promos from bullet points rather than the writers writing the promos word-for-word.
    • He has been trying to talk Vince into resurrecting the WarGames match for years - which he finally managed to make happen in 2017 in NXT, booking a War Games match between SanitY (Eric Young, Alexander Wolfe and Killian Dain), The Authors of Pain & Roderick Strong and The Undisputed Era (Adam Cole, Bobby Fish and Kyle O'Reilly) at the eponymous NXT TakeOver: WarGames event.
• C. S. Lewis was apparently fond of characters who prefer going barefoot, due to religious and mystical symbolism behind it, and probably also free-spiritedness and nonconformism (besides, Lewis drew inspiration from his idols George MacDonald and E. Nesbit, whose writings also feature plenty of barefoot characters). The number of barefooters is especially high in The Chronicles of Narnia (the Narnia wiki even has a specific category for them): Lucy Pevensie (her brothers and sister also like to do it sometimes), Coriakin and Ramandu from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Ramandu's daughter and Queen Jadis (at least in the illustrations), Shasta and the Hermit of the Southern March from The Horse and His Boy (though with Shasta, it's just Barefoot Poverty), and Puddleglum from The Silver Chair. Merlin from The Space Trilogy book That Hideous Strength is also barefooted.
  • When Lewis was an adolescent he signed his letters with the nickname Philomastix ('whip-lover')and described girls he would like to spank. This shows up in later works like The Horse and His Boy.
• Rob Liefeld's fixation on certain aspects of the female◊ and male◊ anatomy is one of the many reasons why he has such a large hatedom.
• Jeph Loeb really enjoys employing The Reveal of having his heroes turn out to actually be other heroes in disguise. Examples include
  • Batman and Superman posing as Hawkman and Captain Marvel after stealing their costumes in Public Enemies (2004).
  • Batman and The Spirit switching costumes to fool their enemies during their crossover.
  • Captain America disguising himself as Black Panther for no apparent reason in The Ultimates 3.
  • Hawkeye being revealed to be Wolverine in disguise during Onslaught Reborn.
• Gerard Lough frequently likes to set his films in his home county of Donegal, because it is often ignored in Irish Media. His first film Night People took place entirely in his hometown of Letterkenny, and his second Spears - in addition to having sequences in London, Florence and Berlin - has its last act revolve around Donegal. A fan of David Mamet, he often has Shout Outs dropped in there.
• Christine Love's works all have an LGBT cast (Love herself is a trans woman), elements of Meta Fiction, and the exploration of human/technology relationships.
• H. P. Lovecraft
  • He really liked adjectives in his stories.
  • He also liked cats, and often included benign or even heroic felines in his horror tales.
• George Lucas
  • He wrote Leia as a 14 year-old in a romantic relationship with an older Luke Skywalker in the first draft of Star Wars. He then was very enthusiastic about Indiana Jones having met, romanced and abandoned Marion when she was 14 while brainstorming Raiders of the Lost Ark with Kasdan and Spielberg; this is not stated outright in the final film but it's implied that Marion was very young and Indy took advantage of her when she says "I was a child. I was in love. It was wrong and you knew it!"·(the official Ultimate Guide that she was 16 and Indy 10 years older). Finally, Amidala was 14 years old when she met Anakin in The Phantom Menace, although he was actually younger than her (9) and no romance took place until the next movie, set 10 years after that.
  • Lucas also loves high-speed chase sequences, because of his interest in cars when he was younger. Every Star Wars film has at least one: A New Hope (Death Star trench run), The Empire Strikes Back (asteroid field chase), Return of the Jedi (speeder bikes and Death Star interior), The Phantom Menace (pod racing), Attack of the Clones (Coruscant car chase and Geonosis asteroid belt chase), Revenge of the Sith (General Grievous' pursuit), as well as the Indiana Jones films: Raiders of the Lost Ark (truck chase), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (minecart chase), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (motorcycle and airplane chases), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (jungle chase).
• Baz Luhrmann movies will always feature a wild party. And comparatively modern music if it's a period piece.
  • He also seems fond of having a Love Triangle or tragic romances where the main character Did Not Get the Girl or one of the leading couple dies, most prominently in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby (2013).

M

• British transportation and webcomic artist Ruaridh MacVeigh has a few elements that show up regularly in his webcomics:
  • Making them take place in a certain period. The Maddie series and Outsiders span the mid to late 80s, When Heaven Spits You Out takes place in the early 70s, and For Love Nor Money (a spin-off prequel to WHSYO) is set in the 1930s during the Great Depression.
  • Having TONS of cars either driven by the characters or shown in the background. In fact, this got out of hand when Red 348 was considered by a few to just be "meh" due to focusing more on the titular car than the protagonist of the story.
  • He admitted when making Maddie In America that he always liked girls with their hair combed over the right hand side. Maddie and Rhia (in the previous comic) are examples of this, and Yvonne follows that design too, but a touch more masculine.
  • At least one character in each of his stories is bound to have parental issues of some sort, excluding Red 348. The Maddie series and Outsiders have Siobhan Pattinson, whose father left the family to pursue an affair with a much younger office assistant and Andy Taylor, whose father left him due to being involved in Union strikes. In When Heaven Spits You Out, Simon Hanson constantly abuses his son Ryan, and For Love Nor Money has Eamonn's mother Aoife forced to whore herself out to his uncle John in order to pay for whooping cough medicine for her daughter, which strains her relationship with her son.
• Maffew reeeealy likes CHIKARA, and wants his followers to like it, too. More than one of the Botchamania videos have had allusions to the small, independent wrestling promotion; even their main website links to Chikara's page.
  • Though that's probably because CHIKARA pays him and is the main sponsor of Botchamania videos.
• Matt Maiellaro of [adult swim] fame is a guitarist, and thus electric guitars have played prominently in episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Squidbillies, and 12 oz. Mouse.
• Michael Mann loves seedy underworlds full of Black-and-Gray Morality, where heroes dive so deep into any means necessary to take down villains that it's hard for them to tell which way is "up" (and the true-blue villains are normally horrible, who maintain a degree of Evil Is Cool because they are borderline hyper-competent), lots of Surprisingly Realistic Outcomes (both regular "world is crap" and "guy who isn't a Combat Pragmatist will get his ass kicked by the guy who is" kind of moments) and the Pyrrhic Victory being the best victory a protagonist can get (or even hope for). He also seeks hefty amounts of authenticity on his films, to the point that acts that need to handle firearms are put through tactical boot camps.
• Marilyn Manson likes writing and singing about things such as drugs, the Weimar Republic, and the concept of celebrity (his entire persona was inspired by how two people as different as Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson could be equally famous for such different things).
• A viral Tumblr post once documented that The Fairly OddParents! writer Steve Marmel was obsessed with characters getting giant muscles, noting that a full quarter of all episodes he wrote center around this premise in some way.
• Sondra Marshak's Star Trek novels are all about the importance of physical strength as the ultimate resolving factor. One gets the distinct feeling (particularly after having ploughed laboriously through either The Price of the Phoenix or The Prometheus Design) that she was brutally bullied in school and/or had a tough time in Phys Ed, to the point that she is obsessed with strength.
• Wonder Woman, in its original form, was heavily based on the author William Marston's beliefs and interests:
  • Feminism.
    Marston: Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.
  • Lying. Marston was also the inventor of the first lie detector. Lying was an interest of his, and Wonder Woman's Lasso of Truth is inspired by that. Lie detectors of the scientific type that Marston developed make some appearances in the stories as well. However, the way that the Lasso compels the truth has more to do with submission, which leads us to...
  • Submission. Marston seems to have felt that a little BDSM now and then was a healthy way of sublimating the aggression in a relationship. Oh, and bondage leads to world peace. It was startlingly blatant for the 1940s. Amusingly, attacks by Media Watchdogs cracking down on comics were treated more as a misinterpreted annoyance than any outright denials of its themes. More examples here, courtesy of Superdickery.) Notably, while women are positively depicted when dominating both men and other women, dominant men are always depicted as abusive, and evil in other ways as well.
  • The copious quantities of Les Yay also seem to have been consciously inserted by Marston out of Girl on Girl Is Hot tendencies. In real life, he was definitely known to have been in a triple relationship with his wife Elizabeth and his former research assistant Olive Byrne, and while there is no direct confirmation of a sexual relationship between the two women, they lived together for the rest of their lives after William's death.
• George R. R. Martin:
  • He has some disturbing shit out there, but the only major recurring theme he has is a bunch of stories that have the protagonist losing a woman to his best friend—something that he openly states happened to him and he wrote a lot of depressed stories that featured the idea.
  • He seems to really like writing about incest. A lot. To the point that one of the first questions on one of the "You Know You've Read Too Much ASOIAF When..." lists floating around the Internet is: "You no longer view incest as inherently wrong as long as they love each other." Although it tends to be committed by the bad guys, such as Cersei with her brother Jaime Lannister which leads to Joffrey Baratheon being born.
  • He seems to enjoy unusual sex scenes, in general—be it incest, twincest, Homoerotic Subtext, Foe Romance Subtext, unusual proportions, ugly characters, loveless couples, virgins having awkward first times, borderline Lolicon and Shotacon, or even just normal-ish characters who wouldn't ordinarily get to have sex shown on screen (e.g. somewhat pudgy, bad complexion, shorter than average, etc.) Some readers find this a refreshing change from fiction where every love scene involves perfect people having perfect sex, and others find it gross.
  • Martin clearly loves reading and books... granted, that's not such a surprise considering that he's an author. Every A Song of Ice and Fire character who is depicted as a great reader or lover of literature is sympathetic. At the beginning of the series, we are informed that Winterfell—the ancestral seat of House Stark—is home to one of the greatest libraries in Westeros. Tyrion—by far the most sympathetic Lannister—loves reading. Samwell Tarly loves reading. Rhaegar Targaryen loved reading. Rodrik Harlaw—possibly the only genuinely sympathetic of the Ironborn lords, and the only one who seems to think that there's more to life than raping and pillaging—loves reading. Ser Jorah Mormont gave Daenerys Targaryen books as a wedding gift. In short, not every sympathetic, likeable character is a great reader, but every great reader is a sympathetic, likeable character. On the other hand, the villainous Roose Bolton is seen reading a book... and throwing it to the fire after finishing it. Could it be an Establishing Character Moment?
  • Tyrion says, "I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples and bastards and broken things," and he's clearly not the only one. In A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin really likes to write about characters that don't conform to the ideal of their society, especially the male-warrior dominated societies presented in the series. He likes writing about bookish people, women, cripples, bastards, the deformed and people who are outsiders in one way or another. He also likes writing about difficult family dynamics, especially if they involve someone feeling that they don't meet the standards set by their family.
  • Nipples/breastfeeding. The relationship between young Robert Arryn, and his mother Lysa in the A Song of Ice and Fire series is famous for the fact that she breastfeeds him beyond what many would consider the appropriate age—although it's meant to be weird and creepy. In A Feast for Crows alone, Martin fixates on the blackness of various female character's nipples, describing them as "coal black" and having Cersei fixate with one female's nipples and thinking about how she would like to suckle them. Samwell Tarly drinks his paramour's breastmilk. When a man is torturing somebody he comments on how a man's nipples are as sensitive as a woman's and promptly cuts the boy's off. Cersei has a dream where her nipples are cut off and somebody drinks the blood out of them like one would breastmilk.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire has a copious amounts of Food Porn. There's even a blog about it. Many readers of the series have joked that if Martin didn't go into such loving detail describing every meal the characters eat, the series would be several hundred pages shorter.
• Melanie Martinez likes to include references to cotton candy in a lot of her songs.
• Masamune Shirow appears to have an amputee fetish judging from the number of times his heroines lose an arm. He even makes them cyborgs, so he can dismember them repeatedly!
  • Shirow did it once and then every single adaptation has included it as a reference. Which means that combined, Maj. Motoko Kusanagi has lost three arms, one leg and two heads!
  • It shows up in every Ghost in the Shell book and in Dominion as well.
  • The 1995 film is particularly graphic in this regard as Project 2501's female chassis loses both arms and is destroyed from the waist down. At no point does he wear clothing while in that body.
  • Slim, attractive young women working in some kind of military or police capacity with short hair (NSFW).
  • He also seems to have quite the thing for shiny bodies, to the point that one of his Hentai manga is called Greaseberries.
  • Something that he actually writes about in Appleseed: Hypernotes, which serves as a prototype as to what Volume 5 of his Appleseed could have been, as an end section in which goes on and on about how much he loves bugs and inspects. Something that is seen in very much in his work with Ghost in the Shell's spider-like Fuchikomas and Appleseed's spider-like defense platforms.
• Jason Matthews, author of the Red Sparrow series of spy novels, loves food so much that if a specific item is mentioned in a chapter, there will be a recipe for it at the end of said chapter. And even if it's not the food item that will be getting a recipe for that chapter, most of the food is described in detail anyway. If the events of a chapter don't involve any character interacting with food in anyway, he'll use an analogy instead, then append its recipe.
• Brooke McEldowney has long made clear his love of nubile cartoon women (and has a talent for drawing the legs of women), but a recent Story Arc in his web-comic Pibgorn has also featured a lot of shots of said women in bondage and/or outright torture. 9 Chickweed Lane has bondage in it too, which he plays for laughs.
• Seth MacFarlane loves puke, poop, pee, and blood. Ever since Fox gave him carte blanche to do whatever he wants, he's made sure that every episode of his shows includes at least one scene with plenty of bodily fluid and/or waste.
  • He also has extensive vocal training and loves to sing. Family Guy has lots of musical numbers that are far longer than necessary to make their point. Almost all songs are also sung by his countless characters. He also loves Frank Sinatra's work so much that a world where Sinatra was never born is depicted as hell and Sinatra's son was a recurring guest star.
  • More than either, though, he seems to love 80s POP Culture; in a given episode of Family Guy, American Dad!, or The Cleveland Show you can always count on at least one reference to 80s music, cartoons or movies.
  • He also seems to have a thing for showing or alluding to women on the toilet. This was even lampshaded in the DVD commentary.
  • MacFarlane or somebody else on the Family Guy staff really seems to like chubby girls. MacFarlane (and his writers, when he stopped influencing the scripts and only vetoed bad ones) would like you to know that fat women are sexy...unless the punchline involves the Fat-Admiring community or if it's Meg. Beginning with "Sibling Rivalry" in Season 4, fat women were added to the repertoire of fat jokes.
    • There's also a weird... thing... happening with breast expansion/growing that pops up in both Family Guy and American Dad!.
  • There are a lot of references to Airplane!, with some scenes being exact frame-by-frame remakes. Airplane! is MacFarlane's favorite movie.
• Hiro Mashima, creator of Fairy Tail, likes drawing women with large breasts, muscular men and he draws many chapters full of Fanservice. Also, he seems to have a foot fetish. There is also at least a weird looking or funny guy for each group. Even if it's a woman or a dragon.
• In the same way Greg Rucka and Chris Claremont have a thing for strong women heroes, Dwayne McDuffie loved working with well-developed non-white superheroes. Aside from his work on Static Shock, he helped make the John Stewart Green Lantern into a more prominent character in Justice League, and while running Milestone Comics, he introduced a number diverse characters such as Hardware, Icon and Blitzen (a Japanese lesbian). He was a major proponent of more diversity in superhero comics, as well as film and television, and this is quite evident in his work.
• Surprisingly, Todd McFarlane's run on Spider-Man inverts this: Fans assumed all the webbing he drew was for this trope, when he actually hated drawing webbing, but couldn't bring himself not to include it.
• The initial concept for Minotaur Hotel by Nanoff was a submissive bullman who would bottom for the protagonist. The artist also admits that he's fond of the heavyset characters in the game.
• Seanan McGuire:
  • Virology, infectious diseases, and herpetology all show up in her works (she studied herpetology in college and worked as one before becoming a full-time writer).
  • She also shows her work in Calculated Risks with characters speculating on how the physiology of the Big Creepy-Crawlies works with current biological knowledge.
  • In InCryptid, both of the Price girls' signature athletic activities (Ballroom Dance for Verity and Roller Derby and Acrobatics/Trapeze for Antimony) are described in lavish detail. By contrast, Alex's SCA is left largely in the background.
  • Apparently she has a narrative kink for “character licks blood off their hand for the ability to beat mind control” (it shows up in both October Daye and InCryptid, though there it's someone else's blood).
  • She also seems to have a fondness for old-fashioned carnivals. They show up frequently in InCryptid and several of her songs.
  • She is demisexual and panromantic, adding a number of queer female relationships in her works.
• Vonda N. McIntyre seems to like group marriages, transhumanism, contraception (and other things) via biofeedback, and Unscaled Merfolk.
• Robin McKinley's novels often involve May/September romances. McKinley's husband is 25 years her senior.
• WWE chairman Vince McMahon, having been the final authority on all creative aspects of the WWF/E from the early 80s until 2022, built up several over the years.
  • Vince never had a lot of respect for the "sport" of professional wrestling or the fans of it, and he eventually decided that in order to market WWE to a wider audience, he would pretend it wasn't actually pro wrestling. This led to a lot of wrasslin' terms being banned and replaced with what would come to be called Vinceisms. For example, 'wrestler' was banned and replaced with 'superstar', 'wrestling' was replaced with 'sports entertainment', and 'title shot' was notoriously replaced with the clunky phrase 'championship opportunity.'
  • He spent years pushing for an incest angle and, at one time, even proposed a storyline that would show himself as the on-screen father of his daughter Stephanie's child (thankfully, Stephanie, as head of WWE's creative committee, was able to veto that one). Allegedly he also tried to book an incest angle with Stephanie and her brother Shane (they both refused to do it). He finally did the gimmick with Paul and Katie Lea Burchill, a brother/sister pairing who, when they debuted, had waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much Subtext. Fortunately, the incest portion of the gimmick was eventually dropped, and the Burchills were re-cast as a British Rich Bitch and her overprotective brother. And then became Jobbers, now that they no longer had Vince's interest.
  • He liked big men and extremely muscular men, an obsession that most infamously led to his disastrously short-lived World Bodybuilding Federation. His most favored wrestlers tended to be whoever is biggest and buffest (i.e. Batista), and he pushed them regardless of whether they were talented or not. Curiously, he hated it when big men did agile moves, and forbade Paul Birchill (see above), Mike Awesome and Sean O'Haire from doing the high flying moves they got popular from doing.
  • Conversely, he has a notorious dislike of cruiserweights and smaller wrestlers. The WWF Light Heavyweight division was treated so much as an afterthought that the Light Heavyweight Championship would go without being defended for months - often while the Champion was working unrelated feuds and regularly losing on the main shows. The only cruiserweight he gave a true push was Rey Mysterio, and even in Mysterio's case Vince demanded that Mysterio not be booked too strongly, which lead to Mysterio often losing matches to midcarders cleanly and needing luck to retain his title.
  • Vince also loves Toilet Humor, which is why you see promos and segments that involve pee and poop jokes (Especially during the Attitude Era). On Dark Side of the Ring, Jim Ross even mentions that if you're a writer that comes up with anything that involes puking, peeing, taking a dump, etc... he'll buy into it.
  • Vince also liked having wrestlers with a single name for some reason. See also: (Dave) Batista, (Antonio) Cesaro, (Alexander) Rusev, Sheamus (O'Shaunessy), (Fit) Finlay, Big E (Langston), (Adrian) Neville, Elias (Samson), (Luke) Harper, (Erick) Rowan, Apollo (Crews), (Buddy) Murphy. Wrestlers will often have a full name in developmental and drop it when they get called up, but it isn't rare for wrestlers to simply drop half of their name apropos of nothing.
  • This one's more alleged than confirmed, but Vince supposedly had a soft spot for wrestlers who partake in the older tradition of going out and partying with drugs after the shows rather than hanging out in the locker room or motels and playing videogames like a lot of the newer wrestlers do. It's said to explain his obvious soft spots for locker room troublemakers like Alberto Del Rio and Enzo Amore.
  • Vince is also something of an old school conservative, and rarely passed up the chance to throw rocks at the Democratic party and liberals in general. All American Faces tend to be well received, but other than that his attempts at inserting politics into wrestling usually come out poorly. Examples of this include having stereotypical smug ivory tower liberal and Harvard graduate Christopher Nowinski debate notoriously inarticulate Scott Steiner over the merits of the Second Iraq War^note Vince assumed all it would take for the crowd to back Steiner was that he'd take the conservative position; instead the fans were noticeably more supportive of Nowinski, and a match between a fake Rosie O'Donnel and a fake Donald Trump that was so terrible the fans chanted for TNA.
  • And last but certainly not least, he was a huge fan of swimsuit/fitness models as wrestlers (particularly platinum-blonde women such as Trish Stratus, Kelly Kelly, Maryse and Torrie Wilson, among others.
• Stephanie McMahon (Vince's daughter) is into social progressivism - ironically so, considering Vince's conservative leanings. She's stated her intent to feature LBGT characters in a positive light on WWE programming. Not much has openly come of that yet. Allegedly, the Balor Club started when Stephanie wanted to make Finn Bálor an "empowered gay" and was overruled by the rest of WWE creative (more allegedly, when she couldn't explain what an empowered gay was). Another character that is believed to have come from Stephanie is Nia Jax's brief run as a body-positive face.
• Russ Meyer. Bosomania. Catch it! As the years passed, the boobs in his movies just got bigger and bigger.
• Stephenie Meyer: The driving force behind characters in the Twilight series, but most especially the protagonists Bella and Edward, is that they have a predestined One True Love with whom they are paired, even before conception! Though Meyer gets a lot of accusations of this, Cleolinda Jones had a more humorous hypothesis. In her summary of Breaking Dawn, Cleo suggests that Renesmee being a "perfect baby" (sleeps most of the day, never cries, can communicate psychically) sounds like the fantasy of a woman who's had three kids ("I haven't slept in days, please God send help").
• Ever since he became the head booker of Wrestling/WWENXT back in 2021, Shawn Michaels has been a big fan of its women's roster as not only does he book title feuds for the women but also non-title women's feuds as well as he believes that gender doesn't matter in the NXT as he treats the men and women exactly the same.
• Director Oscar Micheaux pioneered the Race Film in the early 20th century. Almost all of his films focused on racism, "improving" the black race, avoiding Heritage Disconnect, and praising higher education. He was also fond of the protagonists either being half-white or light-skinned.
• Takashi Miike obviously has a fascination with lactation, among other things...
• Mark Millar's first arc on The Authority, his Wanted miniseries, and at least one more of his stories, all work different variations of male-on-male rape onto the last page.
  • Also, both Saviour and Chosen run Evangelical Christian concepts like the End Times, Second Coming, and Antichrist through Comic Book Origin Story tropes.
• Frank Miller's work is notorious for almost always featuring at least one female character who is a prostitute, often of the dominatrix type. This tendency of Miller's reached its apotheosis in Sin City (movie and comic), in which a neighborhood of the titular city is wholly populated and governed by prostitutes (who nevertheless require a man's help when they get into serious trouble). He's managed to avert this so far in All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder, which has proven the least tolerable work of his career. The below-mentioned webcomic Shortpacked! made light of this, when Ethan learned that Frank Miller would be directing the then-upcoming film adaptation of The Spirit:
  Ethan: [But] The Spirit isn't about whores.
  Amber: Correction: it wasn't about whores.
  Ethan: Oh, the karmic backlash.
• Kentaro Miura's Berserk contains...
  • A ridiculously varied palette of battle armor, all drawn in exquisite detail.
  • Disturbing sexuality—rape, violent satanist orgies, rape, incest, more rape, troll rape, demon rape, attempted rape, pedophilia and more rape. It's definitely telling that Guts and Casca's love scene in the manga before the Eclipse is one of the few positive and fully consensual sexual encounters in the series in general.
  • All the Eye Scream. Seriously. Eyeballs popping out all over the place...
  • There's also copious amounts of women's bare feet in his works.
  • Likes to feature loli (or at least adolescent girls) characters in his works as the Morality Chain and will rarely be subjected to the brutal treatments above. In fact, a portion of them in Berserk is what makes the series Lighter and Softer in later arcs, and they especially feature in the more idealistic Gigantomakhia.
• Hayao Miyazaki
  • He has a fascination with flight, hence why practically all of his works involve flying in some form or another, such as Castle in the Sky. Even the adaptation of Sherlock Holmes he worked on had flying machines, when there were none to be had in the original source material. One of his films is about an airplane designer.
  • Pigs. He loves pigs. Many of his movies have scenes with pigs. Most prominently Porco Rosso and Spirited Away come to mind. (Porco Rosso gets double points for being about a pig flying an airplane!)
  • Spirits and spiritual beings. The kodama in Princess Mononoke, three quarters of the cast in Spirited Away, some seriously creepy ones in Howl's Moving Castle and so forth, and so forth.
  • Goo-ey creatures with large eyes, preferably functioning as minions. Both Howl's Moving Castle and Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea are great examples of movies that have them. (Then again, Studio Ghibli also loves goo in general — Studio Ghibli movies will feature viscous and gooey materials quite often. Even the water is sometimes animated to look downright gelatinous, like it was in Ponyo.)
  • Very large animals that turn out to be benevolent. Totoro, the Ohm, the Radish Spirit..
  • And food. His early works often had characters (usually anti-heroes) stuffing their faces, or fighting over food (though it was always Played for Laughs). Downplayed or absent in later works, and Spirited Away plays it for drama.
  • He loves all things Italian. "Ghibli" is an Italian word meaning "hot wind" that was used for a World War II era Italian airplane. Porco Rosso takes place there during the 1920s. The Wind Rises has an Italian "mentor" to protagonist Jiro
  • He also loves strong female characters. Most of his films have girls as protagonists but even his guy protagonists will have some awesome ladies in the lives. His last film and upcoming one have male protagonists but partially this is because he doesn't like the sexualization of the female characters by denizens of the Internet.
  • He also has strong ecological concerns and incorporates them into many of his works.
  • Miyazaki tends to avoid antagonists who are outright evil; his bad guys are often only forced into doing bad things because of outside circumstances such as war.
• Hidetaka Miyazaki, the director of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls is a big fan of Dark Fantasy, Berserk in particular, and difficult games. This definitely shows in his work with the Souls games. He's also stated on record that part of the reason for the punishing nature of the Soulsborne genre he pioneered is that he's, in his own words, "a huge masochist". On top of this, several characters in the games he directs are conspicously barefoot, especially female characters. Regardless if it's a fetish or just an artistic and symbolic design choice, it's been noticed by fans. Exaggerated when he reportedly wanted to make Malenia's 2nd phase design barefoot, but was told by his team members not to, because Western audiences might make fun of him. As such, despite Malenia going Full-Frontal Assault in Phase 2, she still continues to wear her greaves... which merely look like lovingly detailed bare feet.
  • Poison swamps. It's telling that the only Soulslike game FromSoft has made to lack a proper poison swamp is the only one he wasn't in charge of (it still has poison areas, just not in swamp form). In an interview, he has stated that he knows how much everybody hates his poison swamp levels, but he just loves making them so much that he literally can't help himself. Which is why Elden Ring has multiple poison swamps in it.
• Kenji Miyazawa really loved trains and the stars. But he was also obsessed with death. Not unsurprisingly, his most popular work is Night on the Galactic Railroad.
• Maria Momoe from Big Windup! is in some ways an Author Avatar for Asa Higuchi. Higuchi majored in sports psychology and was a softball player in high school. Momoe is very devoted to coaching a high school baseball team, and the series depicts in fine detail how her deep understanding of her players' feelings helps her motivate them towards success.
• Sarah Monette's tetralogy Doctrine of Labyrinths contains at least one pretty boy having gay sex in every book, and three of the books combine this with Questionable Consent or outright rape. Then she and Elizabeth Bear co-wrote A Companion to Wolves, in which men have to have gay sex so wolves will be able to (heterosexually) mate and produce cubs— basically so that pretty young Isolfr can get gang-banged by an anti-troll army's manly men. Each of her major short story collections (The Bone Key and Somewhere Beneath Those Waves) also features one or more stories dealing with dainty-looking young men having gay sex, including one story in which one man actually downs another to get busy next to the second man's dead lover's tombstone.
• Alan Moore:
  • He's certainly is fond of depicting (often non-consensual) sexual relations between young women and older/uglier men or non-human abominations whenever he can. He does it in V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea, From Hell, Watchmen, Providence and Neonomicon, Swamp Thing...
  • He also seems very fond of pornography. Old-time, classic pornography, usually from the Victorian era or the 'Tijuana Bible' style of pornography, granted, but pornography nonetheless. References to and appearances of pornography tend to appear in almost all of his works.
  • He's a practicing ceremonial magician, and will often include instances of real-world magical and occult concepts in his work.
  • His comic books will frequently contain meta-references to the comic book medium, such as Miracleman and his wife reading comics to find ideas for superhuman feats he could try, or a little boy reading a Tom Strong comic about Tom's origin (while completely missing the fact that Tom is fighting some criminals nearby), which is the same comic book the reader is reading.
• Chris Morrison of the webcomic Polymer City Chronicles and his glaringly obvious love of women with huge muscles and huge breasts. Indeed, when he included a female that wasn't of this body type, he rather abruptly ended the storyline involving her, continued the story as if it finished (sort of, he was unclear on the circumstances), and used the unseen events as an excuse to have the character start pumping iron like crazy until she was more buff than your average (male) American Gladiator.
• Grant Morrison:
  • They love taking ideas from the Golden and Silver Ages of comics and reappropriating them for a modern context. Their Batman run is filled with nods to the campier, sillier Batman stories of the '50s, often considered an Audience-Alienating Era by many fans and writers, and their All-Star Superman series had many of these same elements.
  • Despite their regard for comics of the '50s and '60s, they've mentioned that he likes trying to inject more diversity into The DCU. Their Seven Soldiers series introduced the new, black Golden Guardian, while Final Crisis introduced the Super Young Team and Big Science Action, two teams of heroes from Japan. Batman Inc. also introduced Mr. Unknown, the Batman of Japan, and Batwing, the Batman of Congo.
  • They also really, really, REALLY likes using elements created by Jack Kirby, especially his Fourth World opus.
  • And bondage. It's especially prevalent in Morrison's earlier works.
  • Their orks tend to be filled to the brim with Meta Fiction elements and Leaning on the Fourth Wall / Breaking the Fourth Wall moments.
• Toni Morrison has a thing for necrophilia, and adults breastfeeding other adults. She also has an oral fixation... one chapter of Beloved has an unnamed (but possibly the title) character crammed among the dead on a slave ship, and all she focuses on is a dead man's "pretty white points" of teeth and his sweet breath. Several times before, other characters' breath-scents are brought up.
• Let's just say that for Morrissey, "rough trade" is more than just the name of the record label that The Smiths were signed to. There's also his fetish for leather car seats, which he's admitted to in interviews.
• So Randall Munroe's deepest desire is to have a herd of Summer Glau beat the crap out of him. Cunnilingus is a frequently recurring motif.
• Haruki Murakami loves reading and his work often contain a lot of literature references and in general his characters tend to be very well-read.
  • He also really likes cats - Mari and Takashi spend the better part of the night talking to each other outside a café and Mari is cuddling a kitten the entire time in After Dark, in Kafka on the Shore, Nakata can speak to cats and makes a living by reuniting cats with their owners and the bad guy of that book is a cat Serial Killer.
  • Jazz music also pops up in his work a lot.
  • Suicide tends to get brought up a lot and it's an important plot point in Norwegian Wood and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.
  • Dysfunctional family situations as well, most of his protagonists come from broken homes with absent, neglectful or even abusive parents.
  • Astral projection is a plot point quite a few times in his books, especially Kafka on the Shore and After Dark.
  • And of course there's sex. Sex scenes are fairly frequent in Murakami's works, and they're often pretty weird – incest, age gaps – in keeping with his Magic Realism style.
  • LGBT characters, mostly sympathetically portrayed, often crop up in his works from the '90s and beyond.
• Yomu Mishima:
  • Pattern shown in Sevens (unrelated to Yu-Gi-Oh) and Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs: He seems to have a chip on his shoulder about little sisters, as he makes them Cute Bruiser selfish villains. In both cases, he made said antagonists Unintentionally Sympathetic due to just how harshly he punished said characters (Celes and Marie).
  • Between Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs and I'm the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire!, there is a liking for homosexuality, mainly in the form of Gender Bender transformations for characters, but also Yaoi Fangirl women characters fangirling over the male cast getting along so well with other men.

N

• Go Nagai likes to feature a ton of bloody deaths and sexual aggression in his works.
  • He also seems to have some kind of running gag fetish throughout his works of impossibly strong naked women beating the tar out of men.
  • As someone pointed this out:
    ''I see Nagai has a fascination with cute ladies being paraded on large sticks." ^note Make of that what you will...
• Bandai Namco Entertainment and spanking. Actually, butts in general, given characters like Isabella Valentine and Anna Williams from Soulcalibur and Tekken respectively. But spanking seems to be high on the list of things Namco developers would like to do to a butt.
  • Namco's Tales series seems to throw in a reference to spanking somewhere in every game. There's a fairly infamous scene in Tales of Symphonia where Raine catches Lloyd and her little brother Genis skipping school and she spanks Genis and then kicks Lloyd into a wall.
  • The biggest offender is Tekken 4 featuring old Heihachi Mishima in a mawashi; complete with an extreme close-up on his exposed ass during his entrance.
• Tsukiji Nao of Adekan seems to love elabourate costumes, Bishōnen men, Ho Yay, scenery porn, uniforms, men in lingerie and sexy costumes, cute girls, and heaps of rococo-level detail.
• Kinoko Nasu of Type-Moon fame apparently has a thing for eyes, especially the evil ones: at least two of his famous works (Tsukihime, The Garden of Sinners) revolve around a main character with abnormal eyes, and guess how his Canaan's powers manifest themselves. He lovingly describes cooking.
  • Many of his storylines also involve multiple tropes from mystery and detective stories, best illustrated by the constant involvement of both Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty in Fate/Grand Order. A casual look at his page on The Other Wiki shows that two of his biggest artistic influences are both award-winning mystery writers.
  • Nearly all of Nasu's works feature extremely strong, condescending, manipulative, or dominant women.
  • While it's never quite been confirmed, there's an old Running Gag in the fanbase that Nasu has a Giant Woman fetish, as they keep popping up whenever the story can get away with it (usually in more comedic bits, but sometimes in completely serious fashion).
  • Nasu seems to have been a pretty big fan of Kenji when he was younger: as a result, if martial arts get involved in some shape or form, it will always be Bajiquan. Kuzuki of Fate/stay night seems to be the only human martial artist in his entire body of work who isn't a Bajiquan practitioner, and Li Shuwen, the art's most prolific master, is one of the more recurring Servants in the Fate Series despite being a fairly obscure historical figure.
• Agent Aika and Najica Blitz Tactics, both directed by Katsuhiko Nijishima, put the panties into the Panty Fighter genre. The same team also gave us Labyrinth of Flames. Lesser known, yet no less of a Panty Fighter anime.
• Jay Naylor (Of Better Days fame) and the female buttocks. The banner on top of his website consists of nothing but. Mocked with this image.◊ Also casual nudity, as confirmed by Word of God.
• Christopher Nolan is obviously a huge fan of Film Noir. Many of his films feature shadowy urban settings, dark interiors, morally ambiguous men (often with a Dark and Troubled Past) who often dress very sharply, themes of obsession, guilt, and innocence, and a Femme Fatale or two. Several of these are shared with his brother Jonathan Nolan, and both like dressing in suits.
  • He loves throwing crazy Plot Twists into his movies, usually in the form that forces the audience to reexamine what they just watched.
  • Lying, especially in the form of false identities. The Prestige, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, Inception and Dunkirk all have characters who are either 1) not who they say they are, 2) are lying about their true motives, or both.
  • Nolan has some kind of intense hatred for chronological order. Many of his films feature weird timeline shenanigans that disrupt the typical plot progression of events, whether it's a main narrative told back to front alongside a B-plot that progresses normally (Memento), extensive intercutting between flashbacks and the present (Batman Begins), multiple subsequent layers of reality occurring at increasing speed the farther down you go (Inception), time-dilation as a result of Faster-Than-Light Travel (Interstellar), or multiple overlapping time-frames that each cover increasingly short periods of activity (Dunkirk).
  • He likes subdued colors, but that's because he's partially colorblind.
• Ever wonder why the Kingdom Hearts series adores sea-salt ice cream so much? Blame Tetsuya Nomura and the sea-salt ice cream he got from Tokyo DisneySea.
• John Norman's Gor novels began as somewhat mediocre Planetary Romance novels, but rapidly came to revolve entirely around male supremacy and the elaborate system of sexual slavery practiced by the men of Gor. The series has actually spawned a small but vocal BDSM subculture.

O

• Director/animator/mecha designer Masami Obari, notorious for drawing quite a lot of T&A and really cool robot redesigns◊, almost always with his signature badass angular poses.
  Katsuhito Akiyama: So I asked him "Obari, what would you do [to conclude the Knight Sabers' story]?". He said "in the end, giant robots will battle each other." This comment pretty much sums up his personality.
• Frank O'Connor, the director of the Halo series, likes throwing in references to his birth nation of Scotland. In Midnight In the Heart of Midlothian, the protagonist grew up in Edinburgh (Frank's childhood hometown) and the ship in the title is named after his favorite Scottish football club. Then in Halo: Saint's Testimony, the AI Iona explains that her name comes from an island off the coast of Scotland, meaning the Island of Yew.
• Experimental pop artist Frank Ocean, best known for his critically-acclaimed albums channel Orange and Blond(e), has been noted for his obsession with cars. Many of his song lyrics contain references to automobiles (such as "White Ferrari"), and the cover of the mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra is of a sports car. In addition, the magazine Boys Don't Cry, intended to be a companion piece to his albums Endless and Blond(e), is loaded with pictures of sports cars driving around empty fields.
• Eiichiro Oda, the creator of One Piece:
  • He loves women with large breasts in Stripperiffic outfits. They also invariably have Impossible Hourglass Figures comparable to Jessica Rabbit to the point of Only One Female Mold. Many of his characters wear sandals or are barefoot. He also seems to like drawing Gonks, and he puts a lot of details in his panels.
  • Many covers and artwork have animals. Oda likes drawing animals, but he isn't an animal fan.
  • Most of his characters are ridiculously huge, even the women (most notably the women from Amazon Lily). Boa Hancock was the smallest of the Seven Warlords pre-Time Skip, despite being 191 cm (6'3¼") tall.
  • Afros, Crossdressers, and recently sunglasses appear frequently in his character designs as well.
  • Oda is Happily Married to Chiaki Inaba, the actress who played Nami in the Jump Festa stage performances. Now Oda thinks his wife is incredibly sexy (and to be fair, she is very pretty), so he altered Nami's design so when she plays Nami in future performances he could show off her beauty to everybody...and because he really enjoys seeing his wife in the increasingly revealing outfits he comes up with.
• Oh!Great, creator of, among others, Air Gear and Tenjho Tenge. Before he got a series in a major magazine, all of his works were hentai (such as Silky Whip), and Tenjho Tenge has copious amounts of sex. No, really, it must be seen to be believed. The breadth and depth of Fanservice even in Air Gear, his "tamer" series is... incredible.
  • He also seems to have a thing for people losing limbs, primarily arms, and Eye Patches Of Power; in fact the Mother of Tenjho Tenge's main character has both at the start of the series.
• On both game music podcast Nitro Game Injection and its spinoff show GameFuel, the music playlist usually features a disproportionate amount of rock and metal remixes.
  • Most every episode also has at least one song from a Sonic the Hedgehog or Mega Man game. If it doesn't, it's usually an episode with a particular theme, or just a huge oversight. Eventually they just decided to embrace it and do a dedicated "Blue Hero" Mega Man/Sonic episode, which was kind of justified, because their guest that week was Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) and Mega Man (Archie Comics) comic writer Ian Flynn.
  • Machinae Supremacy is played often on NGI and is the artist of the opening song almost every week on GameFuel.
• Shinobu Ohtaka seems to take a kick in making anime characters who are always barefoot, such as Morgiana from her series Magi: Labryinth Of Magic.
• Hiroya Oku, creator of GANTZ (a series that has quite a bit of art involving girls with gigantic breasts wearing skintight suits or skimpy outfits or nothing at all) mentioned in the author's notes of one volume that drawing the series is "like masturbation for [him]." In his older series Hen the main character, Chizuru Yoshida, is a girl with an extremely thin body...and breasts as big as rugby balls.

P

• Chuck Palahniuk always manages to get non-plot-related gay sex, homoerotic imagery, or at least a guy beating off into his novels. Lullaby actually has the female lead die and come back in a male body for this purpose. Apart from his obvious love of genital injury...
• In an interview about Dorian Gray, Ben Barnes said something along the lines of "I asked the director, Oliver Parker, why every sex scene involved a mask, whip, knife, handcuffs, or a feather boa, why there was no non-kinky sex in the world of Dorian Gray. He just looked at his shoes. I assume it was plucked from his own bedroom but you'd have to ask him."
• Dee Parson, creator of Kurami, is a big fan of Garfield. One of the strip's characters, Zane, is essentially Garfield in a hat. He also loves the Rachel Platten song "Fight Song" so much that he gave one character a bruised-looking alter ego with a "Fight Song" headband.
• Charles Pellegrino really loves talking about the RMS Titanic. He's written and contributed extensively to the subject, perhaps most notably in a subplot throughout The Killing Star, where one of the characters continues working on and refining a Titanic VR program even after an attack by aliens has wiped out most of human civilization across the solar system.
• Sr. Pelo includes frequent references to Touhou Project in his Spooky Month videos due to his love for the franchise; in particular, the mall and most of its customers in "Unwanted Guest" were designed after Touhou characters to celebrate the 25th anniversary.
• Fred Perry's Gold Digger is loaded with toned, voluptuous, scantily clad women who kick ass and are usually rather aggressive in their affections. Like the Foglios, Perry also freely plays equal opportunity with his Fanservice. Combined with the above, you are far more likely to see the girls' drooling over a guy in his works than you are guys drooling over a girl. He apparently (perhaps rightfully) expects the readers to do that for him.
• Hollywood producer Jon Peters was obsessed with having a Giant Spider in a film for years. Kevin Smith gleefully recounts in An Evening With Kevin Smith that even the other people at the studio were exasperated with his fixation when he was trying to get it put into a Superman movie Smith was writing. Eventually it found its way into Wild Wild West.
• Tamora Pierce
  • She likes older men. All three of Alanna's paramours are older and Daine falls in love with Numair, who's twice her age. (The fan outcry over the latter instance had her promise not to include that large an age gap again.)
  • She's also a big animal person, and each protagonist usually has at least one animal companion with them in both the Tortall Universe and Circle of Magic books.
  • Characters are also likely to value teaching highly, either finding a Parental Substitute in a teacher or caring for students of their own. Finally, on a less noticeable note, her characters seem to share a dislike of parties and alcohol, with few exceptions.
  • The Circleverse books are Tamora Pierce expressing her fascination with artisinal crafts through the concept of "ambient magic", which can be derived (among other things) from the act of creating and crafting. Of the four protagonists, two are craftswomen—Sandry the seamstress and Daja the smith. The second quartet dives even deeper in when they find ambient mages whose power comes from glassblowing, carpentry, and cooking, with the process of the craft described in great detail. Pierce's notes at the back of some of the books express her opinion that these skills are the closest thing the real world has to magic.
• Christopher Pike, he of the big breast fascination. An interesting point, however, is that the main characters of his novels commonly have small frames and they mock the larger breasted secondary characters.
• ElfQuest didn't start out this way, but gradually introduced Wendy Pini's ideas, which might best be described as a fixation on a Free-Love Future. By the second series, practically Everyone Is Bi including the hero. Although actual scenes never went beyond PG-13 or a mild R, it must have made things interesting for the parents who'd been reading Elfquest to very young children.
• Edgar Allan Poe
  • He had quite the thing for beautiful dead women, as seen in many of his works. Perhaps unsurprising, as his beloved wife died too young.
  • He was also fascinated by the concept of being Buried Alive, although this seems more like a phobia than a fetish for him.
• Roman Polański had the villain of his film masterpiece Chinatown be a pedophile and disgustingly incestuous. Since this detail is not at all relevant to the plot, and taking into account what Polanski would be charged with just a few years later, it's disturbingly likely that the director was secretly indulging a private fetish of his.
• Milton Pool, artist behind AdventureQuest Worlds and the NSFW web series Akumi, definitely has a thing for women who look like young girls with bouncing boobs, in stripperiffic costumes or leotards, thigh-high boots; and hair as straight as that of Lady Gaga. He also depicts all women with crooked teeth.
• Robert Pollard, of Guided by Voices and way more, has a strange obsession with airplanes. It has never been explained why this is. You can add to this his many references to bees, Native Americans, school, and most prominently, alcohol. The school thing at least has an explanation: Pollard was a schoolteacher before achieving success as a musician.
• Pál Pusztai's Jucika, being an adult Slice of Life-Fanservice comic, showcases plenty of kinks, but exposed woman thighs with garter belts or stocking suspenders are particularly prominant. He also had a thing for panties and bare breasts, which lead to certain strips being censored. When Pusztai released a special, censorship-free Jucika woodcut to celebrate the 1965 New Year, guess what the heroine was and wasn't wearing. For that matter, Jucika herself was something of an obsession for the artist, at least according to his jealous widow who threw every Jucika drawing she could find into a fire after Pusztai's death.

Q

• CHIKARA promoter Mike Quackenbush: Jushin Thunder Liger, Manami Toyota, Batman, Mexican wrestling, British wrestling legends Johnny Saint and Johnny Kidd, Tiger Mask, Lost, Comic Books, Anime, Talking Heads, Justice League of America, X-Men...and references to failed early 1990s WWE gimmicks Kwang and Max Moon. He once said in an interview that, with everyone trying to be "xtreme," he wanted CHIKARA to be "wacky."

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