Author Appeal - Television Tropes & Idioms

Nadere: You must enter the sister ceremony by getting fully naked. That is the Aiel way. It is a sacred, ancient tradition.
Elayne: The Aiel way seems a lot like the Aes Sedai way, and the Ebou Dar way, and the Sea Folk way.
Nadere: Naked women are powerful.
Taim: Yes, they are. Now show your power.
— The Wheel Of Time mock summary

by ISAMJ

"Nurse Mahiro and Shishio Tokiko... I'm sorry. It's not my characters that are out of control. It's me."
— Nobuhiro Watsuki displays refreshing honesty, Busou Renkin chapter notes

A kind of Fan Service where the presence of a particular gimmick or kink is so widespread and prominent that it is interpreted as a specific reason the creator actually produced the work. Often, this can overlap with a certain philosophy the author espouses; for instance, an "enlightened culture" in The Future may have no nudity taboo, or may have everyone bisexual, remove all body hair at birth, et cetera. Deliberately satirical or political stories often invoke associated Take That moments.

Author Appeal is perhaps the single leading cause of Mary Sue characters. Beyond just being written from the ground up to appeal to the author's baser interests, most writers can't help but to then derail the storyline and other characters to facilitate the character; that's the line where Author Appeal gets out of hand. In most other cases Fanfic Chop Suey occurs and simply becomes a more generalized version of the Male Gaze.

Interestingly, with careful handling Author Appeal can still remain subtext which may not be detected until much later. On the flipside, an audience who enjoys a work specifically because of Author Appeal can be easy to produce work for, if the rarity of such works sufficiently balances out any faults with the work itself.

Compare Fetish Fuel, Fanservice, Author Tract, Writer On Board, Mary Suetopia.

If a writer's early work contains obvious Author Appeal, and their later work doesn't, this may overlap with Old Shame.

Author Appeal is among the Tropes Of Legend.

Examples

open/close all folders

Age Fixation

Anime and Manga

Gunsmith Cats would seem to be born in large part out of creator Kenichi Sonoda's preoccupation with barely legal girls and highly detailed firearms and automotives; he actually admitted in one interview that every female character in the manga traces back to one or another of his private obsessions (short girls, dark-skinned girls, girls with glasses, etc. etc. etc.).
- Lampshaded by the characters themselves - In one of the early stories, Rally sighs in satisfaction after a session on the target range, and Minnie May *ahem* observes how shooting stimulates her. Later, Minnie May indulges in her fetish for explosives and lets out a similar sigh of satisfaction. Rally takes this opportunity to give her a taste of her own medicine and comments, "ooh, they're like little rocks!"
A lot of people thought Gunslinger Girls was a deconstruction of lolicon. Turns out...not so much.
Pretty much any clone from the Moe Seinen genre.

Comic Books

Jack Chick's Author Tracts seem to feature women in different lights depending on their age: Old women are wise warriors of the Lord, Middle-aged/adult women are greedy, sinful bitches, teenage girls are stupid, easily impressionable airheads, and little girls are sweet and adorable, unable to do any wrong. In fact, he seems to feature children, especially little girls, as his protagonists often, and they almost NEVER go to Hell like most other characters do. Dunno if that... SUGGESTS anything...
- That, like most Christians and NON-Christians as well, he believes children are innocent and that older people are cynical and sinful?
- Wait, wouldn't the Wise Warriors Of The Lord first have had to go through many decades of being Greedy Sinful Bitches after growing up from Stupid Airheads?
Frederic Boilet depicts pretty Asian girls who enjoy casual sex, especially with Western men, in nearly all of his stories.

Film

One doesn't want to think about it, but Kevin Smith seems to have a thing for Catholic school girls. First was Trish "The Dish" in Mallrats, then the fact that Chasing Amy was originally penned to be set in high school, then his sorta-Gary-Stu mouthpiece Randal espousing the advantages of having sex with "barely legal pussy" (They even like it when you go ass to mouth!) and flirting with a pair of schoolgirls in Clerks 2

Literature

Many of Piers Anthony's books include teenage girls who are involved in nudity and sexual situations, often with adult men; for example, Firefly, and the Mode series.
- It should be emphasised that in Firefly, it's a five-year-old girl demanding sex from an adult male. (Her family was, shall we say, screwed up.)
- In addition, just about every Piers Anthony story has to have a woman facing being raped. Often rape is excused as something "normal" or otherwise permitted in society under "special" circumstances.
- He puts a bit (rather a lot, actually) of a lampshade on people complaining about sexuality in his books in Xanth's "Adult Conspiracy" — the great act of self-censorship that adults participate in to keep kids from finding out about sex — magically enforced in Xanth, to boot. And, of course going back to "nudity and sexual situations", the most cited example of this is tragically — but appropriately — named "The Color of Her Panties" — wherein a mermaid turns herself into a human for a while, but doesn't realize she should be putting on clothing, and no one really cares too much — until she's given a free pair of panties (magic panties, we should point out, which were designed to knock out would-be assailants), which causes every male in view to pass out from over-stimulation. The Aesop? It's not the nudity that's inherently sexual, but rather the intent or the covering up that adds appeal. Or something.
  - His Adept series explicitly has the main character be born on Proton, a planet populated by naked Serfs "owned" (read: employed for semi-long term contracts worth enough at the end to live in wealth for the rest of their lives) by clothed Citizens. When the main character, Stile, has sex behind closed doors he dresses his partner to increase her allure, knowing there would be an extreme scandal if they were seen in public with the sheer nightgown, possibly to the point of being thrown off-planet. When he discovers the portal to the magic realm of Phaze, complete with functional clothing and a nudity taboo, Stile is understandably weirded out. Even in Phaze, there's a scene where his third major love interest, Lady Blue, rides a unicorn naked. (The unicorn, who can shapeshift to human, is his second major love interest.)
- The fact Anthony unapologetically calls himself a 'dirty old man' shows he is fully aware of this trope, and that anyone who reads his works are full-warned ahead of time what they will encounter therein.
Leo Frankowski and the Conrad Stargard series. Frankly, the series has enough appeals to fit into every single category on this page.
- It was bad enough the final books of the Conrad Stargard series are self published. The books didn't sell and the publisher got sick of his Self Insert Author Avatar.
Robin McKinley's novels often involve May/September romances. McKinley's husband is 25 years her senior.

Multi Media

Joss Whedon seems (virtually by his own admission) to be incapable of writing anything that doesn't feature at least one short-statured, petitely-built, very young woman/teenage girl with some angsty emotional issues or even sanity problems who can kick the living crap out of people three times her size for one reason or another. If they're not the main character, they'll at least be a prominent supporting role. He takes this to the extent of even manipulating the ages of pre-existing characters, such as portraying the notionally long-since adult Kitty Pryde of X-Men as a Buffy-esque young student teacher, or saying in interviews about his (later abandoned) WonderWoman film project that the title character would "obviously have to be quite young", in bizarre dissonance with just about every depiction of the famous Wonder WOMAN character ever seen.
- Kitty's age does change as the plot demands. Has for a looong time.
- Joss Whedon sometimes also gets criticized for his portrayal of lesbians and bisexual women being an author fantasy. He always sticks to the straight male fantasy of the Lipstick Lesbian. Of course this could be more about everyone on his shows usually being abnormally attractive anyway.
  - Which is problematic in of itself. Surely there are abnormally attractive butch lesbians out there. He always stops just short of it... Faith, for example, has a lot of butch qualities but is always long-haired and coiffed like a lipstick lesbian even during the height of her subtexty relationship with Buffy. Willow, who assumes a sort of male gender pose in season six (with respect to traditional lesbian gender roles in fiction, especially if you count Tara as a Woman in the Refrigerator), still has an essentially feminine presentation. She even lampshades this in "Once More, With Feeling".

Video Games

Show of hands, guys: who here doesn't think that Disgaea's main character designer is a huge lolicon?
- The artist of the previous series, who did the design for Prier, the Succubus, and the Nekomata, had a thing about really curvy women (and thighs).
  - And he was hired back solely for the Succubus and Nekomata designs because of this, no less!
- Nippon Ichi sells mostly on this, but it's hard to say who the author is. The Disgaea designer was never very explicit but the games themselves love to crank up the innuendo. It doesn't help that Etna turned out so marketable...

Close Age Fixation

Anatomy Fixation

Anime and Manga

Eiken is a parody (it must be, despite it playing everything 100% straight) of the standard Elaborate University High and Harem Anime. It's fairly normal ecchi anime except the girls are extremely large busted. The Token Loli has a G cup, for example — her bust is the size of her entire upper torso. I am NOT◊ making that up. The other girls are even larger. Gag Boobs does not even begin to cover it. So, why is this Author Appeal? Seiji Matsuyama does this in all of his works — Eiken is just the most well known in the west. And Eiken is his most tame series yet. This◊ is him acting restrained. This was in the manga as well, but they decided "what the hell" and just ran with it in the OVA.
Let us not get started on the foot love in Aeon Flux.
In Fullmetal Alchemist creator Hiromu Arakawa's own words: "Men should be buff! Women should be vavoom!" This is most obvious with Hohenheim and Scar who are much more muscular than their anime character designs.
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. I hope he has improved with proportions since then.
Hideaki Anno. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Hands. Enough said.
- This might extend to the rest of the good people of Gainax. Episodes 1, 5, and 6 of FLCL are proof-positive as is Gurren Lagann where the enemies in the last few episodes are giant Hand and Foot spaceships.
Mohiro Kitoh, creator of Narutaru and Bokurano, seems to have a thing for feet with long, almost finger-like, flexible toes. Most of his characters have them and show them off by being bare-footed a lot of times, especially the younger ones, even though such feet are relatively rare in reality.
Ditto Hiroaki Samura
While this troper isn't 100% certain, there was just something strange going on with Lily Borjarno's hot cocoa-drinking scene late in Turn A Gundam, specifically how one of the militia soldiers reacts to her "cute pink tongue"
- Speaking of Gundam, when reading Yoshiyuki Tomino's Mobile Suit Gundam novels, you get the feeling he has a thing for chubby girls. It's very restrained, but there are a few telltale signs. The first time we see Mirai Yashima in the second book it's pointed out she gained some weight since her last appearance. Then there's the novel exclusive character Margaret Blair, who's lovingly described as being very cute & plump. She even become's Char's girlfriend & he absolutely adores her & decides he wants to start a family with her after the war. This seems somewhat out of character for Char, as every other woman he's been involved with was rather petite.
  - This can also be seen in reverse with Lady Of War Kycillia Zabi. She is meant to be somewhat unattractive, which is accomplished by emphasizing how unnaturally thin she is, with a sharp, angular face, prominent cheekbones & relatively flat chest (in an era where the typical Japanese standard of beauty favoured busty, caucasian-looking women rather than the current Moe Moe craze).
Kozue Amano seems to have a thing for cute girl butts; the angle at which she depicts bent-over and crouching girls makes one wonder at times. This was relatively subtle in works such as ARIA , but becomes quite a bit more blatant in her latest work, Amanchu!, where she loves to hoist her female main characters into tight diving suits.
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.
It is said that there is only one true king of Author Appeal. And his name is Oh! Great. Creator of, among others, Air Gear and Tenjho Tenge, he's also well known for his hentai work (such as Silky Whip). It must be seen to be believed. The Fan Service even in his "tamer" series is...incredible.
Real Drive, a Slice Of Life style Sci Fi anime that is most famous among fans for its plump lead characters. The rather refreshing Word Of God states it's just an attempt to depict how Japanese people actually look. Fans don't see this as dodging around the fact every woman and only women look this way; the most popular character is actually the chubbiest.
- Only the central characters are curvy/chubby. Several background characters have slimmer proportions.
Makoto Shinkai seems to love the sight of young women without shoes on. (Then again, a couple times it's used constructively to implicitly convey two characters being emotionally and physically comfortable with one another.)
Tite Kubo, author of Zombie Powder and Bleach, seems to have rather a lot of characters getting an arm lopped off, often temporarily. Oh, and he appreciates a certain degree of bustiness in his ladies.

Comic Books

Robert Crumb and buttocks. Anyone who's read his comments knows what I mean, at least he's refreshingly honest about it.
Fred Perry's Gold Digger is loaded with toned, voluptuous, scantily clad women who kick ass and are usually rather aggressive in their affections.
- This troper, who is not bisexual, has also noted that 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.
Is it humanly possible to name any work by comics artist Frank Cho that doesn't include jungles, dinosaurs, extraordinarily well-endowed women, or some combination of the above?
- No. And you forgot the apes and the monkeys.
- See also Frank Frazetta. Although he was more equal gender opportunity about it, particularly with the muscular bums.
Ross Campbell of Wet Moon demifame. He loves BBW, and very full lips. Even the lead of Water Baby, who is thin, has the "bee-stung" look about her.
Rob Liefeld's fixation on certian aspects of the female◊ and male◊ anatomy is one of the many reasons why he has such a large Hatedom.

Film

Quentin Tarantino really likes feet.
Director Tom Tykwer of Run Lola Run fame has an admitted Charlie Brown-esque preference for redheads, as demonstrated by the titular Lola and the characters of The Plum Girl and Laura in his film adaptation of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, though the latter two were mentioned to have red hair in the novel as well.
Many of Tim Burton's characters, in both animation and live action, are extremely tall, thin and lanky. Though it could just be because his character sketches are more or less really scribbly stick figures.
- It's also due to his main film influence, German expressionism, which deals a lot with tall, long and misangled set pieces and characters.
Russ Meyer. ''Bosomania'. Catch it.
- Russ Meyer anything. As the years passed, the boobs in his movies just got bigger and bigger.

Literature

Several of Philip K Dick's novels set in the future have a bare breasted woman in them, often an important character. Nobody comments on it, so I assume it's normal in those societies. There's no compelling plot reason for it, but to his credit he avoids it in societies where it would be inappropriate (e.g., the present day, the alternate world where the Axis won, or controlling and repressive societies).
- And of course, the female, dark-haired, small, neurotic, violent alter ego of the author. He has been recorded as suggesting that this represents some dreams he had of his twin sister who died at 5 weeks old.

Live Action TV

Joss Whedon, who in his Serenity commentary called "River's Feet" the eleventh character of the show (the ship herself being the tenth). This may be justified as Summer Glau used to be a professional ballerina and her feet are quite mesmerizing.
- It didn't turn up much on Buffy, but just look at Angel once Fred joins the cast. She always seems to be wearing thong sandals that leave practically her whole foot exposed, even when you'd think it would be a bad idea. And in "Conviction", the first episode of Season Five, which Whedon himself directed, there's a scene in which the opening group shot is blatantly centered on and composed around Fred's bare feet put up on a stool or table.
  - See also in "Shiny Happy People" when the newly-born (but adult) Jasmine walks around in the nude, with the shot lingering quite a while on Gina Torres's admittedly well-formed feet.
- And then there's the Firefly episode where a barefoot Kaylee even playfully pushes one against Simon's cheek. Nothing to see here, folks, move along...
- Dollhouse. Just... Dollhouse.
This trope was hilariously parodied in an episode of Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia, when a character takes it upon himself to design women's clothing. His design sketches? Nothing but gigantic boobs on stick figures. The trope shows up again in a later episode when the same character writes an entire novel about his fictional "erotic life."
The Sarah Connor Chronicles has more than one long, drawn-out tracking shot focused firmly on Summer Glau's well-rounded posterior as she slowly walks along. Not that we're complaining.
- Plus, every female character wear boots almost all the time. It might just be product placement or something though.

Video Games

Team Ninja and the physics behind a lady's upper half (almost always DD). Case in point: DOA Extreme Beach Volleyball.
Falcoon, producer of King Of Fighters: Maximum Impact, has admitted that he likes designing female characters with large chests, so it's small wonder that the Maximum Impact games feature a lot of Gainaxing and Jiggle Physics. This is especially noticeable with the characters Falcoon designed himself, like Lien Neville (whose chest receives a lot of the focus in cutscenes).
- But it becomes a larger wonder if you know that Falcoon is gay...
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.
  - To be fair, it is quite an ass.
  - The tightness around the buttocks is faithfully reproduced in the action figure, much to one Latin teacher's amusement.
- 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 PS 2 clock, reveal her doing a Stripperific 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, Hideo Kojima responded that 'we both think we have nice asses for our age'. There's really nothing more to say.
Daigo Ikeno, the artist behind the Street Fighter series, is responsible for Chun-Li's thighs increasing in girth with each game, as he loves him some big ol' thighs.
Kinoko Nasu of Type Moon fame apparently has a thing for eyes, especially the evil ones: at least two of his famous works (Tsukihime, Kara No Kyoukai) revolve around a main character with abnormal eyes, and guess how his Canaan's powers manifest themselves?

Web Original

Averted in the online blog novel Fartago. Author Tony Caroselli has said he chose the main characters' sexual fetish, as expressed in their "porn" (hairy hindquarters) specifically to emphasize the pre-Homo sapiens Hominid characters' "monkey-ness" by using a fetish only non-humans would have to prevent readers from thinking of the female characters as attractive, even if the readers were Furries. He therefore chose a sexual fetish he had never heard of from a human standpoint and which would emphasize the opposite of anthropomorphic characteristics in a female. Nonetheless, after inventing the characters' fetish, he found Websites devoted to depictions of women whose unshaven pubic hair reached their taint and even to their anuses, (he has never said whether he found this Website by coincidence or in looking for it to research the novel) and discovered it is, in his words, "impossible to make up a fetish." The workings of this are similarly codified as Skif's Internet Theorem.

Webcomics

One has to wonder about Phil Foglio. As well-done as Girl Genius is, Agatha does spend a lot of time in nothing but lacy bra and bloomers... which, of course, is outright tame compared to the pornography he supplied for the comic ''XXXenophile'' and its spin-off Collectible Card Game. And all the female characters in Girl Genius have big chests and big hips.
- Remember that Girl Genius is a collaboration between him and his wife. A recent filler sequence took several pages to present a fashion show of several characters in the form of paper dolls, and in the commentary, Kaja expressed delight at having an excuse to show the characters in the sort of corsetry she only occasionally works into the main story. So it's not just Phil.
  - This Troper has noticed, as a bisexual individual, that Girl Genius is one of the world's few truly equal-opportunity fanservice providers. The princes end up (deliciously) naked about as often as Agatha winds up in corsets and teddies.
  - You don't have to wonder about Phil; he and his wife are pretty openly active in kink lifestyles. The two times this troper has met them were at Fantasm, an erotic fantasy/art/kink relaxacon.
- Don't forget the trapeze from "What's New?".
Then there's Chris Morrison (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.
Gorgeous Princess Creamy Beamy combines the author's love of BBWs (Big Beautiful Women), usually eating until they're sick, combined with parody of Magical Girls.
- Author S. Sakurai's other webcomic, the Dead To Begin With dark comedy Muertitos, also features more than its fair share of fan service involving fat chicks or women stuffing themselves.
- This is at least an open and deliberate part of the series, frequently lampshaded and foregrounded.
Property Of Gwen and Lowroad 75 both fit in, as series where the main premise is the size of the main characters' breasts. Lowroad 75 is fanservice to the extreme.
- In fact, the Lowroad artist has admitted, on his Deviantart account, that Lowroad was basically just an excuse to pander to his fans and/or himself. He's now working on a new comic, which isn't much different, but the main character is at least more realistically proportioned...
Both The Magnificent Milkmaid and The Chocolate Milkmaid are built on this. Suffice it to say that the maids get their powers from milk... and they're not anthropomorphic cows.

Close Anatomy Fixation

BDSM and Status

Anime and Manga

Right from the get go Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro had some BDSM undertones, but being a shounen manga it never really got overtly sexual and there was enough ambiguity to make it questionable whether it was actually meant that way or not. Then along came the villainous New Bloodline, and with it...Mistress Genuine.
Ken Akamatsu's deepest desire is to have a herd of nubile teenage girls beat the crap out of him.
- So is Randall Munroe's, except in his case it's a herd of Summer Glau. (Boy, she shows up on this page a lot.)

Comic Books

Chris Claremont's run on X-Men repeatedly showed strong women beating up men, with female characters who were more timid being reworked into dominant bruisers. Psylocke was the prime example of this. Mind control plots are also common in his work, seemingly for the same reason.
- When a pornstar revealed that Claremont had allegedly hired one of his colleagues to dress up as Storm (a strong female character he wrote) and do things to him involving copious amount of lubricant, many people were grossed out, but only a few were surprised.
  - I'm afraid to ask, but... "weather goddess" Storm or "punk rocker" Storm?
- In addition to strong women beating up men, he also introduced the Hellfire Club. The leader of the group, Sebastian Shaw, has the power to get stronger the more you hit him. The two lead women, Selene and Emma Frost, both wear dominatrix outfits and have hypnotic powers.
  - The oufits in question (and the portrayal of the Hellfire Club (and 'Emma' as a name for the HC's queen)) are derived from The Avengers episode "A Touch of Brimstone", earlier shown in he U.S.
Works by the late Mark Gruenwald, particularly his Captain America run, also often featured subtle to not-so-subtle instances on a frequent basis. This could range from standard rope/chain/mechanical devices bondage scenes to a scene where a semi-nude Red Skull had the villainess Viper strap him to a "torture wheel" that would inflict pain on him, which the Viper had full control over. He even pointed out that he was interested in seeing how far the Viper would actually go!
- Speaking of Gruenwald, he was also one of many writers responsible for numerous bondage scenes in the original Spider-Woman's (Jessica Drew) title. The most glaring example (written by Marv Wolfman) is her capture by a vigilante named The Hangman, who ties and gags her and leaves her in his dungeon because he believes that "all women are frail", and he must therefore protect her from the evil world. This is particularly bizarre considering her capture was a cliffhanger ending for the Hangman's first appearance, but following her escape from his dungeon at the beginning of the next issue, he's not heard from again for several years, thus making the entire sequence utterly pointless in terms of relevance for the plot other than self-serving purposes.
  - Um... how is a Marv Wolfman story an example of Mark Gruenwald's Author Appeal?
Wonder Woman, in its original form, was heavily based on the author's belief 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 than you can shake a vibrator-shaped bomb at here, courtesy of Superdickery.com
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 an entire 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 and Robin, which has proven the least tolerable work of his career.
- The below-mentioned Web Comic Shortpacked made light of this, when Ethan learned that Frank Miller will be directing the upcoming film adaptation of The Spirit: [1]
  Ethan: [But] The Spirit isn't about whores.
  Amber: Correction: it wasn't about whores.
  Ethan: Oh, the karmic backlash.
  - This troper laughed when everyone wasted their "whores" jokes on the teaser trailer, which did not, in fact, have whores. He laughed because that meant they wouldn't have any jokes left for an actual "whores" trailer. And they didn't.
- In All Star Batman and Robin, Black Canary might not have technically been a whore, but she acted exactly the way all whores in Frank Miller's writing tend to act.
- Not to mention what Frank Miller did to Catwoman. Classy Cat Burglar? Certainly not classy anymore. Poor Selina...
- And who can forget the aforementioned webcomic's classic "WHORESWHORESWHORESWHORESWHORESWHORESWHORESWHORES..." strip before that?
John Byrne, too, loves having a big, busty, musclebabe teamed up with a average, somewhat shortish male secretary. He even did it to Wonder Woman!

Film

Larry Wachowski has a good reason why every good character in The Matrix films loves to wear leather.
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. IIRC she was being punished for sleeping with a Mexican.

Literature

John Norman's Gor novels began as somewhat mediocre Planetary Romance novels, but rapidly came to revolve entirely around the elaborate system of sex slavery practiced by the men of Gor. The series has actually spawned a small but vocal BDSM subculture — see also Rule Thirty Four.
- Leading understandably to fanfic backlash.
- This troper opines that the Gor novels wouldn't be as bad if the author didn't portray bondage and slavery as the natural relationship of females to males, which is not only morally repugnant but scientifically inaccurate. Lampshading the Fetish Fuel might help, too.
Terry Goodkind's Sword Of Truth series has a disturbing focus on rape, with it almost happening (or actually happening to someone less important) at least once a book. This editor is trying to think of a single female character within the series of several 500+ page books who has not been raped, nearly raped, threatened with rape, or revealed to have been raped in the past, and is drawing a blank. In a scene in the sixth book, the protagonist's wife, linked to a female antagonist to feel what she feels, experiences very rough sex that the other is going through. She reflects that there was always an undercurrent of such things in her sex life with her husband, but nothing like this...
- It's not only Goodkind's women who get this treatment. Richard, the Marty Stu protagonist of the series, spends a large chunk of time in the first book being horrifically raped by...
- The brigade of women who do nothing but wear leather fetish gear and torture men is also a big chunk of Author Appeal here.
The Wheel Of Time, Robert Jordan's sprawling epic fantasy series. The 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.
- 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.
- As the pagequote shows, 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.
- And who can forget 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 its just what he deserves).
- The same thing happened in most of Jordan's Conan 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.
Robert A Heinlein often had women being spanked (or threatened with a spanking) by men, including Beyond This Horizon, I Will Fear No Evil, Glory Road, The Puppet Masters, For Us, The Living and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. There were references to all sorts of spanking in many more of his works, especially The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.
The ideal of heroic man-worship for women runs through many of Ayn Rand's writings, reaching its creepy apotheosis in an actual rape scene ("rape by engraved invitation" or not) in The Fountainhead. Atlas Shrugged, however, tunes the heroic dominance down a bit in favor of letting the heroine trade her boyfriends up at the drop of a hat. Suspiciously, the latter work was written around the time one Nathaniel Branden caught the married author's eye...
Aside from Sally Kimball in the Encyclopedia Brown series, Donald J. Sobol seems fascinated by women who can beat up men in some of his other works (e.g. Angie's First Case).
William Hope Hodgson had definite opinions on bodybuilding, gender roles, and the domination and disciplining of beautiful women by strong men, and in The Night Land he indulges fully in them.
Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy novels, in addition to being about a society where Everyone Is Bi and prostitution is seen as a sacred calling, feature a lot of BDSM. Oddly, this seems to be the only real fetish as such that anyone practises - there's vanilla sex and bondage, but no foot fetishism or cross-dressing.
- But to be fair, Phedre specializes in BDSM, which might be why she doesn't encounter a lot of other fetishes.
- You aren't escaping bisexuality, though. Of the nine novels Jacqueline Carey's written, seven of them have a bisexual protagonist. Thank you, ma'am.
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.

Live Action TV

Scrubs has a lot of spanking going on. JD spanking Turk. Turk spanking JD. Turk spanking Elliot. Elliot spanking JD. Neena spanking JD so hard, and for so long, that he can't sit down. Various characters spanking themselves. You name it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y03uAu8uww
- Sexual strangling is mentioned several times throughout the series.
Supernatural seems to have a thing for equal-opportunity submission. Almost half of the Season Two promos had the pretty-boy leads in hooker poses, at least three quarters of episodes (so far) have had bondage or wall-pinnage of some description and you also have Dean's relationship to John (which is D/S in a nutshell), Sam and Dean's powerplay in Hunted, anything involving mind control (whether it was making the girl undress in Simon Said or forcing Ellen to put the gun to her head in All Hell Breaks Loose), Gordon going after Dean in Fresh Blood, Meg-In-Sam's near-rape of Jo in Born Under A Bad Sign and the monsters' treatment of the female victims in both Skin and No Exit.
- The fact that one of the writers, now producers, Sera Gamble was known for her erotic short stories before the show might have an influence. At least, this would explain the episode "Heart" she penned in which some very animalistic sex takes place.
If Farscape's writers don't have a penchant for BDSM, this troper will eat his handcuffs.
Doctor Who: This troper has noticed that in the first season of the new series, Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor seemed to get cornered by enemies more often than the other Doctors before (and after) him. And then there was THAT scene in "Dalek."
- You forgot the Fifth Doctor. And the Third (the big bondage queen).
  - And let's not even get started on The Master...

Music

Let's just say that for Morrissey, "rough trade" is more than just the name 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.

Newspaper Comics

Brooke McEldowney has long made clear his love of nubile cartoon women (the only thing he can draw correctly are long feminine legs), but a recent plot-arc in his web-comic Pibgorn has also featured a lot of shots of said women in bondage and/or outright torture. Add this to the constant references to sex in 9 Chickweed Lane and you get the feeling that Brooke is one sick cookie. Oh yeah, and occasional bondage in 9 Chickweed Lane too, played for laughs.

Video Games

Namco and spanking. Actually, butts in general, given characters like Isabella Valentine and Anna Williams from Soul Calibur and Tekken respectively. But spanking seems to be high on the list of things Namco developers would like to do to a butt.

Close BDSM and Status

Gender Fixation and LGBTQ

Anime and Manga

It would seem that Everyone Is Bi in the CLAMP universe. It's especially noticeable in Cardcaptor Sakura, in which everyone seems to have at least one crush of each sex (except for Tomoyo, who only has eyes for her Sakura-chan.)
- And then there's Miyuki-Chan... Chobits is probably one of their more atypical works, but it's a little weird for its own reasons.
Yoshihiro Togashi, author of Yu Yu Hakusho and Hunter X Hunter, has stated in the first volume of the YYH manga that he has an interest in gay and bisexual men and male-to-female Transvestites and Transsexuals. He even has an unpublished series, Trouble Quartet, about a team of crossdressing homosexual soccer players. Of course, Shueisha refused to publish it.
Kunihiko Ikuhara really likes Schoolgirl Lesbians.
Shoji Gatoh (creator of Full Metal Panic) seems to have a... thing for overt homoerotic overtones. Arguably moreso than lesbian overtones. He even made one novel sidestory dedicated to getting Tsubaki to confess (albeit accidentally) to Souske, in what appears to be an effort to clarify to the readers that Sousuke (along with Tsubaki) would be the submissive one in a gay relationship. And then there's his fascination and love for the villain Gauron, whom he kept bringing back to life (while many, many fans were screaming why he liked Gauron so much to bring him back). And every time Gauron makes an appearance, Gatoh makes it more and more obvious that the idea of Gauron with Sousuke appeals to him. Including a gratuitous part in the novels where Gauron graphically describes how he fantasized killing and raping Sousuke. And then there's that episode in Lucky Star that Gatoh had a hand in, where Kagami picks up a graphic Yaoi doujinshi of Gauron and a Bound And Gagged Sousuke. It's safe to say that countless viewers cried for Brain Bleach, and the only possible reason why Gatoh even thought of it was because he... liked it.

Comic Books

The comics of Melinda Gebbie (longtime girlfriend, now wife of Alan Moore) usually have some sort of girl-on-girl action. An interesting example would be an issue of Supreme wherein two versions of the same story were shown. Chris Sprouse drew a traditional superhero fight, her version looked more like a catfight.
- Not to mention all her work on AARGH!, an LGBTQ benefit oneshot comics anthology published by Alan Moore.
Greg Rucka loves lesbian strong girls. Most of his works have a lesbian as the main character. The ones that don't, have a strong fighting women. Dammit, when he wrote Batman, Sasha Bordeaux, Bruce Wayne's tough bodyguard girl, became the main character of the book!
- Most of his works? Apart from a few minor supporting characters, he has only written two lesbian characters in his career. He (along with Ed Brubaker) turned Renee Montoya into a lesbian character (or were the first to reveal that she was a lesbian all along, depending onj how you look at it), and he later reated the new Batwoman who is also a lesbian (since she was introduced as Renee's ex-girlfreind, its kinda inevitable). All of his creator owned works (Queen and Country, Whiteout, and Stumptown) feature hetrosexual women. None of the Checkmate characters are lesbians as far as I can remember. In his Action Comics run, the female lead is the girlfreind of the male lead. Not counting all the comics hes written featuring characters (including male characters) other people have created.

Film

Ed Wood, people! While there's a blatant example of deliberate polemic in Glen Or Glenda (whose cross-dressing main character he played under a pseudonym), the authur's personal love of transvestitism pops its head up in virtually every single movie. (Nice example: Tor Johnson fondling an angora sweater in Bride Of The Monster.)
Gay horror film director David DeCoteau was originally notorious for the amount of gratuitous female nudity in his works, but has become well-known in recent years for including equally gratuitous male homoerotica in almost all of his films. And by that, we mean male models in their underwear getting frisky no matter what the film is actually about.

Literature

If Robert Jordan's above noted fetishes weren't enough, discreet lesbian relationships ("pillow friends") are referred to with increasing frequency among the various all-female organizations, especially among Aes Sedai, due to Sitch 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.
There's a reason why Everyone Is Bi in Anne Rice's books.
Alternate history and science fiction writer S.M. Stirling seems to a liking towards blonde lesbian or bisexual female characters - see Swindapa from his Nantucket series and pretty much everyone in the Domination of Draka. There's a reason his fanbase calls him S&M Stirling.
Gregory Benford has a thing for M/F/F threesomes and Japanese women.
Stephen Fry's novels usually include and address male homosexuality to at least some extent.

Video Games

Touhou, a game featuring Loads And Loads Of Characters, has an almost entirely female cast. Word Of God says there are just as many men as women in Gensokyo, it's just that apparently, no man ever feels like doing anything in a game where girls fight for no reason besides boredom, or has no superpowers to compete with the girl's Superpower Lottery superpowers, or is a turtle or cloud. Since all romance must, by default, be lesbian (with the rare exception of Rinnosuke, who almost always is paired with, (who else?) Marisa), naturally, the fan catchphrase is "Everyone is gay in Gensokyo".
- Mind you, the series creator, ZUN, isn't a very good artist, and his male characters are all either non-humanoid or don't appear in the games themselves; on his part, Gensokyo's unbalanced population might be less rooted in Author Appeal than the limits of his abilities. More directly, though, he's notorious to the point of Memetic Mutation for his love of alcohol, which might explain why just about every Touhou character seems willing to drink at the drop of a hat, even though the human ones sure don't look of age. There's even one who has literally never been seen sober.

Web Original

The Whateley Universe, non-stop. Every member of Team Kimba is GenderBendered in varying ways. Everyone living in Poe Cottage (the secretly LGBTQ-exclusive dorm) have admitted on their Whateley Academy entrance forms that they're LGBTQ, which is why they are assigned there. Even a lot of the non-Poe Cottage major characters are LGBTQ.
- And most of the other fetishes mentioned on this page show up there too.
There are always Yaoi Guys in Zee Rose's works or every guy is bi. They're either married, dating, or even just teasing each other - but expect them to get a lot of scenes. Don't believe me? Observe The Princess 99 and then look at her other online published works, especially Gaeadians. Though this might be justifiable since she started out drawing yaoi-oriented doujin.

Webcomics

Lean On Me creator Jade Gordon admits to having a thing for male-to-female transsexuals and crossdressers, and her comic centers around a romance between her Author Avatar and a beautiful transgirl.
Unicorn Jelly and its spinoffs. The writer/artist is a transfemale, and every series is almost entirely populated with LBGTXYZPDQBLTIOUETC.

Close Gender Fixation and LGBTQ

Transformation

Miscellaneous Paraphilia

Anime and Manga

It is claimed that Hellsing mangaka Kouta Hirano based the design of Rip van Winkle (no, not that one) on a mix of his fetishes. This editor cannot recall the source and would appreciate someone conclusively confirming or denying it.
- Don't know the source, but if you cross-reference with the other female characters then you can definitely see a pattern emerging: Glasses or sunglasses (Rip, Yumiko, Integra, Heinkel), gloves (almost EVERY character, male and female), androgyny (Rip, Integra, Heinkel and Zorin all wear mens clothes; Seras would look like a boy if not for her exceptionally large breasts) stupidly large weapon (Rips musket, Seras' "Harkonnen," Zorin's Scythe...). Hmn...
- Considering that Kouta has made no secret of adapting characters from previous hentai work there's no good reason to be surprised when characters are so heavily sexualized.
Ken Akamatsu and cosplay. Just check out Love Hina or Mahou Sensei Negima. In fact one of the more important students in Negima, Chisame, is a Cosplay Otaku Girl. The whole thing hits its peak during the school festival arc in which everyone is wearing cosplay, and there is a cosplay contest. His wife is also a famous cosplayer.
- So that's why Elegant Gothic Lolita Evangeline dressed up all the characters left behind in school for summer.
- You forgot Negima's Clothing Damage and Panty Shots.
  - Don't forget his inclusion of barely pubescent girls as a large source of Fan Service in his mangas.
  - He uses just about everyone as a large source of Fanservice in Negima.
  - Plus, he has gone on record as saying that he prefers more mature, curvier women... Then you notice that Love Hina and Negima both have women just like that acting as enablers and/or helpers for others' relationships. Hmmm...
Mine Yoshizaki, creator of Keroro Gunsou is a macrophile, somebody attracted to giants. The main evidence for this is that he actually did write/draw an adult work about a giant naked woman, and in the anime, the presence of the size-changing "Flash Spoon" in later episodes, not to mention the general size-related issues with the series.
Whoever wrote the Filler episodes of Naruto obviously has some sort of sick, twisted fetish for showing Naruto pantless, peeing, or worse: both...
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!
- This troper is pretty sure that's because Shirow did it once and then every single adaption 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.
Hidekazu Himaruya loves his military uniforms (though You Should Know This Already). And (generally busty) girls with hair decorations. And boys in dresses (not only Poland and the younger Italies, but also Noto from the Noto-sama mini-games).
- Considering Hetalia has it's own Fetish Fuel page? He's not alone.

Comic Books

Garth Ennis loves to include two things in his comic books: anal sex, and grievous head wounds. It is a rare issue of Preacher that did not include anal sex or someone being shot in the head, or both.
- Also, a fetish for having Straw Man versions of characters he doesn't like get beaten up, such as he did to Daredevil, Spider-Man, God, and others. Preacher and Punisher are most guilty.
- And castration. Lots of castration.
Paul Dini, a writer of The DCAU, has a penchant for using the Zatanna character. He's married to a magician, so...
- A magician who looks like this◊. The man is married to the real life version of Zatanna, I think he can be forgiven a fondness for the character. He first hooked up with his (heretofore non-comics fan) wife because she was given a copy of a Zatanna comic he'd written and she contacted him about her resemblance to the character.
Legendary comic book artist George Perez has the non-sexual Author Appeal of redesigning characters' costumes to be much more detailed than the average artist is willing to draw. It gets sexual because whenever he draws Wanda Maximoff, AKA theScarlet Witch (whom he has singled out as his favorite character to draw), he draws her in this costume◊, which references her Roma heritage. Furthermore, this outfit is designed to indicate that Wanda does not wear panties (note that the two sections of fabric over her hips are connected by gold loops that rest over bare skin). When asked to provide Word Of God information that nobody else could give, Perez stated that Wanda prefers to go commando and dared readers to find an instance in which she is proven to be wearing underwear. He even found other ways to subtly convey this sexual trivia - such as showing her wearing a very long t-shirt to bed. It is worth noting that no other artist draws this costume if they can avoid it, although that is likely because of the prohibitive level of detail rather than the designer's fetish appeal.
Every one of Craig Thompson's major works so far has featured a main couple snuggling in bed frequently. Sound innocuous? It's not. You can tell from the presentation that the guy is obsessed with this. Goodbye Chunky Rice features a turtle and a rat sharing a bed more than once, Blankets was inspired by the feeling of sharing a bed with someone for the first time and follows through, and the unreleased Haibibi is apparently going to show a lot of this as well.
- Also, a subversion of this occurs with traumatizing childhood sexual experiences being featured or mentioned often. (Which apparently stems from the artist and his little brother being raped by a baby sitter.)
Hoo-boy, those guys who wrote the comics at Heroic Publishing sure love incest! Flare, Eternity Smith, Icicle, Champions...

Film

In the first Transformers movie, a woman eats a Ho Ho that was dropped on the floor. When you see it, you probably just think it is a weird scene and then instantly forget about it because of how many plots are going on in the movie. However, when a similar scene happens in Revenge of the Fallen (with a female college student and an apple), you can't help but wonder if Michael Bay has a thing for women eating food off the floor.
Many of Stanley Kubrick's movies had someone spitting or salivating.

Literature

Salman Rushdie appears to have a thing for girls with scars.
- Considering he was married to Padma Lakshmi (who has a noticeable scar from a childhood auto accident) of Top Chef fame, that's unsurprising.
Clive Barker is really into people getting eaten (aka vore). He also seems to assume the reader's into it too.
Karen Traviss and Mandalorians. ...what? You know it's true!
- And the rest of the EU burns while the Queen Fandalorian fiddles...
Robert A Heinlein married a redhead. Guess the standard hair color of any love interest in his novels. Go on, guess.
- Better yet, count the redheaded twins.
  - Castor and Pollux in "The Rolling Stones", a rare male example.
  - The maletwins from "Time for the Stars", a second less-rare male example.
  - The twins in Project Nightmare (1953 short story)
  - Laz and Lor in the Lazarus Long stories (actually clones)
  - Libby and Deety in "Number Of The Beast" (actually parallel universe counterparts, one of them transgendered)
  - The twin redheaded sisters at the start of Time For The Stars ("cute as Persian kittens")
Heinlein again: From Stranger in a Strange Land and on, expect any book to feature its protagonists in a polyamorous group marriage. And as you get later and later in his career, especially after Lazarus Long starts showing up and refusing to go away, expect incest. Lots and lots of incest. Mother/son, father/daughter, brother/sister, whatever. Heinlein was a known polygamist in real life — one can only hope he kept the incest stuff to his fantasies.
- Speaking of polygamy, have you noticed how many of his characters (the Author Avatar ones at least) have harems? Jubal Harshaw has his three employees, Lazarus has half a dozen women throwing themselves at his feet ...
- How about Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice. A religious fundamentalist campaigner is introduced to free love, polyamory, and a sexy demoness. Incest is discussed, approvingly.
- And public nudity— it eventually becomes mainstream in every Heinlein-imagined future. And surprise surprise, he was also a practicing nudist.
English Western author J.T. Edson seemed to have a fetish for Cat Fights judging from how often he managed to shoehorn them into his novels. The most egregious example involved a character who had a collection of paintings of catfights that had taken place in the author's previous novels, incuding ones that no one but the participants had been there to witness.
The Culture from Iain M Banks is a space faring, almost nomadic civilisation that have no sexual taboos. Ho, and their "national anthem" is called "suck me hard".
- Let's not forget all their genetic modifications, the fashion for changing gender at a whim, etc. It's not just the Culture either. The psychopathic sadistic villain from The Algebraist, who has had his genitals genetically altered so he can ejaculate poison or truth serum, immediately springs to mind. Oh, and cannibalism pops up quite a bit in several novels too. (Yes, that IS a fetish. No, I would not suggest searching for it).
Nathaniel Hawthorne liked writing about orphans, distant parents, and the plight of women. Also, his works have a lot of incest. A lot of incest.
Justina Robson's books Mappa Mundi and Living Next Door to the God of Love both have tall, dark male romantic interests who are or appear to be mixed-race and have beautiful long-ish hair. And when the second one crossdresses/tranforms into a woman, it's very lovingly described indeed.
VC Andrews. This troper is unfamiliar with a single series published under that name which doesn't include at least one incestuous relationship.
- V .C. Andrews, the real life person, wrote only a few books before dying and having her work continued by other writers in a fairly literal case of ghost writing.
Call me crazy if you like, but I think Michael Crichton has a... fixation with people using the bathroom, especially women. It generally doesn't derail the plot or get heavily detailed, and often it comes up to add verisimilitude to crazy situations, but I swear it comes up at least once a book... often two or three.
- This may simply be a Lampshade Hanging on the rarity of bathroom visits in most fiction, compared to reality, and an attempt to redress the balance. Or maybe he is a kinky bastard. Or both!
- Ironically, the most famous example of someone in a Crichton work using the bathroom—Gennaro's ill-fated toliet trip in Jurassic Park-isn't even in the Crichton novel on which it's based.
- This is also common in Piers Anthony novels. Some have more than ten separate references to "bathroom activities."
  - PA also likes partly-clothed women as opposed to nudity, he elevates the Theiss Tittilation Theory to an absolute fetish.
Harry Turtledove's Darkness series features the country of Zuwayza, whose inhabitants are all black nudists. He also points out quite a few times how in Algarve circumcision is mandatory.
- I think the latter part was just supposed to be an inversion based on the fact that the Algarvians play the role of Nazis.
- Also, nudism does not normally appear in Harry Turtledove novels; the Zuwayzi are more or less the only example. Now, there are other things, like groin attacks, that he features far more often...
- Turtledove also has a tendency to describe his sex scenes in loving, lavish, lurid detail. Sometimes. Sometimes not. Also, Every Inch A King? The main character and his buddy, Max (currently going under the name "Captain Yildrim=Captain Thunderbolt") share a harem. The sex isn't too lurid (as I remember), but the harem is described as ridiculously happy with the situation.
- His Fox series has Gerin and Van sharing a woman (not at the same time, they roll dice for the privelege). Eventually the wanton wishbone becomes exclusive to Van (not faithfully, she just doesn't sleep with the Fox anymore) and Gerin the Fox gets a more conventionally exclusive love interest.
  - said 'wishbone'? She could easily kick Van's ass, and half the time they fuck each other after arguing. Some likes grudgesex.
Stephen King nearly always has a reference to a character farting in his books, God knows why.
- Don't forget characters peeing in their pants.
- His greatest fetish is Stephen King. Seriously, take a look at his stories' main characters and check the following list: writer, famous writer, smoker, had a car accident, alcoholic or drug abuser (sometimes recovering).
  - And if that wasn't enough to convince you...well, can we just say 'Dark Tower'?
John Ringo. Particularly, his self-admitted 'wanker piece' series. It's long, but you don't have to read very far to get the picture. OH JOHN RINGO NO.
- His Council Wars series plays it more realistically with its very-similar Mary Sue protagonist, Herzer, but the appeal is still there.
- He does admit everything the reviewer says about the Paladin of Shadows is right, but then makes the... creepy claim like "women tend to love [guys like the alpha rapists] and men to follow them."
  - Take a look around. Is he wrong? (His next line after that: "We're a really ***ed up species.")
If Naked Lunch is any indication, William S. Burroughs was really fond of autoerotic asphyxiation.
- It's not just Naked Lunch, Burroughs's fondness for asphyxiation, can be seen over his entire body of work. The 'orgasm death gimmick' as it became known, was greatly expanded upon in The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express, was strangely absent in The Wild Boys, but reuturned with a vengence in Cities of The Red Night, where it was a major plot point.
  - The above books also bring to light, Burrough's fondness for teenage boys, particualrly blondes and redheads.
Philip José Farmer was the original Fanfic writer. The dude loves writing about sex with historical figures.
Toni Morrison has a thing for necrophilia, and adults breastfeeding other adults.
- It seems to this troper that 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.
- This troper is suddenly reminded of the last page of Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath.
  - That some Moral Guardians actually tried to get The Grapes of Wrath banned for sexually-explicit content on the basis of that scene probably tells us more about their personal fetishes than anyone ever wished to know.
  - It gets better. Steinbeck stated that he only put that scene in to complete one of the extended metaphors he was setting up.
I'm not sure if this is sexual or not, but the heroines in Wilbur Smith novels never shave their armpits and the text is always at pains to draw attention to their underarm hair.
- Hairy armpits are historically correct for his Courtenay and Ballantyne series. Western women didn't shave until the early 20th century, and not just because short razors that could safely shave the hollow of the armpit hadn't been invented yet: missing body hair was a sign that the woman had recently been treated with mercury for a venereal disease. His Egyptian series is more complicated, given that some women, mainly great ladies and members of the Pharaoh's harem, always had their body hair removed by tweezing, while poorer women never removed body hair, both because it never occurred to them to do so and because even if it had, they didn't have the time to remove hair or the money for a pair of tweezers. Whether the attention paid to the hair is sexual in nature is another question entirely, and I'm not sure if anyone but Wilbur can answer it.
Dan Simmons invariably has his characters some of his character end up having sex in extremely strange places.
- And then, there is the relationship between Fedmahn Kassad and Moneta/Rachel: you would think that a love story between a Palestinian and a jewish girl would be cute, but Simon managed to turn this into a Nightmare Fuel: they are both turned on by bloodshed, only have sex during violent battles (sometimes but rarely just before a battle starts), and a lengthy scene describes them losing it to their lust just after a slaughter they caused when you see the girl transforming into a Shrike: a monstruous bio weapon... The author might have been trying to make a point with this one, but this troper read the Cantos when he was in middle school and I surely had nightmares after this one.
It it just me, or does George R. R. Martin seem 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 To Much ASOIAF When..." lists floating around the internet is: "You no longer view incest as inherently wrong as long as they love each other."
- 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.
John Barnes does his absolute best to avert this, repeatedly describing the love interests in his stories as being fat, bucktoothed, or otherwise unattractive. Consideringly how lovingly he describes their negative physical qualities, though, one wonders if he just has a different concept of beauty.
It's quite a bit more subtle than the polygamy thing or the eternal youth thing in his books (not to mention the giant penis-shaped starships), but David Weber's thing for tiny frequently-pregnant dwarf women is worthy of comment. While most of the pregnancies occur offscreen, Katherine Mayhew and Allison Harrington in the Honorverse have eight to eleven pregnancies and eight live births between the two of them. There's never any discussion of the difficulties they have as little people, just comments on how beautiful/elegant they are and how impressive it is that they're into natural pregnancy...

Live Action TV

Russell T Davies' fondness for nontraditional romantic relationships has bled into Doctor Who, most noticeably in the in-your-face pansexuality of Captain Jack. And that's not even counting all the stuff that goes on in Whoniverse series Torchwood.
- The Doctor Who episode "Gridlock" included a marriage between a woman and an anthropomorphic cat. They even had kittens. The same episode also featured two old ladies who were married.
- In the Doctor Who Expanded Universe, veteran Doctor Who writer Terrance Dicks' contributions began to display a rather alarming tendency to have the Doctor's female companions threatened with being raped upon being captured by the villains. Nothing ever happened, of course, but it's frequent presence in his works began to get more than a bit unsettling. The Doctor even makes a rape joke in the theatrical play Doctor Who - The Ultimate Adventure.

Multi-Media

Joss Whedon seems to have a thing about incredibly skinny young women who've been driven mad by horrible suffering but are still kind-of hot. See Drusilla, Fred/Illyria, and River. He even singled-out a dead X-Men character who fit the pattern to reappear in a hallucination, even though she'd appeared on about one page in a previous writer's comic and been immediately killed. (Negasonic Teenage Warhead)

Music

Smelling women pops up oddly often in Anthony Kiedis' (of the Red Hot Chili Peppers fame) lyrics.

Professional Wrestling

WWE chairman Vince McMahon has apparently been pushing for an incest angle for years now, 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). He appears to have finally gotten his wish 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.
- While we're on the topic on Vince McMahon, he likes big, muscular men (i.e., bodybuilders). And he will push them, regardless whether they're talented or not.

Tabletop Games

FATAL, a Tabletop RPG, tries to justify this by claiming historical accuracy and realism... badly. Even ignoring it's a game with magic and orcs in a bastardized version of medieval Europe, it's possible to cut a man's uterus in this game, and while we're busy with the impossible you can do it without harming any intervening skin, muscle, or other organs that might be in the way. The misogynistic approach to (gratuitously detailed) sexuality pushes it past offensively stupid into stupidly offensive. Here's a more complete assessment (NSFW for language).
- All you need to know about FATAL can be summed up in author Byron Hall's response to the charge that he had created a "date rape RPG," which was the succinct and revealing "where is dating included?" The same attempted rebuttal had him continuing to claim historical accuracy even whilst all but admitting that he was doing it for the lulz.

Video Games

Demonophobia is filled with the main character dying incredibly explicit deaths that don't shy away from intense gore beyond all but the most over-the-top horror films and even the occasional instances of her losing control of her bladder. And, just to further suggest that it's author appeal, there's a sequel in the works with similar content.

Webcomics

Sabrina Online illustrates the difference between "Funny Animal comic" and "Furry Comic".
- Not to mention the authour's desire to have his graphic designer lead use an Amiga computer, just like him. To put this in perspective, Linux would be more appropriate.
Mega Tokyo and the author's obsession with emtionally fragile young women, which happen to make up half of the cast. The author himself has all but admitted this, making joking comments that it's practically the contents of his soul detailed on paper. The series also shows his Kanon-influenced obsession with Snow Means Love, despite being set during fall; it appears that his next work, however, is going to completely focus on it.
- While on the subject, one should also note that almost every female character just happens to wear a choker at some point. Also, the character Piro has a female online avatar.

Western Animation

Totally Spies is infamous for putting its heroines in situations that appeal to one or more of a variety of sexual fetishes (e.g. bondage, Attack Of The 50 Foot Whatever, Incredible Shrinking Man, Animorphism, and many more) in virtually every episode, despite being aimed at a primary audience of teenage girls.
- Admittedly, these are usually just more fantastic versions of James Bondage. They are spies, after all.
- Good luck finding a fictional situation that doesn't have a corresponding fetish.

Close Miscellaneous Paraphilia

Likely Non-Sexual

Anime and Manga

This is part of the reason why Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha fans love the series. The person in charge of it is a self-admitted fan of Super Robot Wars, so he inserted a lot of Humongous Mecha tropes and references into the anime. The resulting fusion of Magical Girls and Humongous Mecha is very cool indeed.
- Of course, the series has taken a considerable amount of flak from critics recently for, you know, not actually being a magical girl show anymore.
Between both his principal works' tendency to contain a cast of kids exposed to uncomfortable amounts of rape, teenage pregnancy, mental illnesses, parental child abuse and eventually a gruesome and pointless death, and just generally possessing a Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism you could use as a trebuchet, it would seem Mohiro Kitoh (Narutaru, Bokurano) is not a 'people' person. Especially where children are concerned.
- Finally, he's also fond of mountain bikes.
Keiichi Sigsawa, author of Kinos Journey and Allison And Lillia, goes out of his way to profile in entirely unnecessary detail every weapon and vehicle that comes up, regardless of whether it is important to the plot. And as if that weren't enough, even his pen name is based on a gun brand.
Masamune Shirow loves drawing sexy, scantily clad women, but that hardly sets him apart; what does is his obsessive attention to detail regarding near-future/sci-fi weaponry and machines. The Other Wiki even has a page about Seburo, which is Shirow's recurring futuristic small arms manufacturer.
If you couldn't tell from the series itself, Hiroyuki Imaishi, the director of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann said in an interview that he liked drills and wanted a show where they were the main character's weapon. This becomes either hilarious or creepy when you see his previous work, Dead Leaves, where one guy has a giant drill (that's drawn just like the ones in TTGL because he's also the character designer for both) for a penis.
Most of the ridiculously hard to understand math and physics found around Suzumiya Haruhi (including an important in one of the later novels that is even illustrated) stem from Nagaru Tanigawa (the author of the novels) being a math/physics buff.
Wataru Yoshizumi, the mangaka behind Marmalade Boy, Ultra Maniac, Mint na Bokura and many others likes her tennis. She tends to have at least one of her characters in each of her series be a member of their school tennis club.
Aside of uniforms and girls with hair decs, Hidekazu Himaruya loves bunnies.
Shamelessly lampshaded by Ai Yazawa in her manga Gokinjo Monogatari, about an arts high school populated by eccentric teens. "In the Yazawa High School students have an unspoken agreement to dress in the most outrageous way possible. Why? Principal Ai Yazawa just loves outlandish clothes!". Before becoming a mangaka, she wanted to be a fashion designer, and she's a hardcore fan of Vivienne Westwood. She also loves rock and punk music. It becomes glaringly obvious since all of her mangas feature fashion designers, massive amounts of different outfits, designs lifted from Westwood, aspiring musicians and punk rockers.
Tite Kubo loves to take the chance to dress up his Bleach characters in many different fashion styles. They go from Japanese garbs to punk outfits to suits to boxing gear.
The Wallflower author Tomoko Hayakawa practically admits in her author notes that she simply made a series full of stuff she likes: Bishonen, J-rock performers, horror and gothic pop culture, and the Elegant Gothic Lolita style.
Kouichi Mashimo went to a Jesuit university, knows a lot about the Catholic Church, and likes to feature some of Aquinas's and Augustine's ideas in his shows. He also has a non-sexual love for any Action Girl (especially with a gun), being a fairly well-known feminist in Japan.
Tsutomu Nihei, author of Blame!, has an obvious obsession with architecture, post-humanism and cyborgs. The latter occasionally verges on fetish territory, and the former is something of a running joke amongst his fans.

Art

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, as can be seen at the Other Wiki here, made a career out of painting innocent, pale young girls looking sad and adorable. Almost surely non-sexual.

Comic Books

Alan Moore 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.
- Speaking of Alan Moore, he certainly is fond of depicting sexual relations between young women and older/uglier men whenever he can. He does in V for Vendetta, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vol II, Promethea, From Hell, that I have read of.
  - Silk Spectre II dating a much older (though technically timeless) Dr. Manhattan, beginning when she was 16.
- Lost Girls is the inevitable, er, climax of the above two points; one gigantic blown load of Author Appeal.
  - ...So how does any of that belong under the "Likely Non-Sexual" section????
The late comicbook writer Mark Gruenwald apparently loved his home state Wisconsin. In Captain America, he made the villain Sidewinder a Wisconsite. His love for Wisconsin really showed in D.P.7., as most of the early issues were set there, and many of the characters were from Wisconsin.
The Flash's John Broome seemed to have sort of fixation with second floor burglaries. It has been suggested that maybe he was burgled while living on the second floor and developed it because of that.
John Callahan has at least two cartoons with quadriplegic protagonists. It's likely because the man himself is also quadriplegic.
Anything Geoff Johns writes frequently involves a character receiving an injury to their hand or arm.
Bill Amend of Fox Trot really loves his math/computer/geek humor.

Fan Fiction

Dahne, the author of Stray, loaded the story with Shout Outs, and seems to have a particular interest in Neon Genesis Evangelion (justifiable in-story, as one of the protagonists is a mecha anime Otaku), Planescape Torment (which provides the Arc Words), and Norse Mythology.

Film

Film producer Jon Peters appears to really like Giant Spiders, as noted in our article on Executive Meddling.
Tim Burton has a thing about hands. His films contain strange hands — severed hands, mutilated hands, prosthetic hands, gloved hands, and artistic representations of hands — in far greater proportion than is common. The only remotely sexual connotation attaches to the leather-glove fetishism in Batman. (Or maybe that's just me.)
- Of particular note is The Nightmare Before Christmas, which uses the lyric "bony fingers" three times.
  - That could be more due to Danny Elfman being not a great lyricist.
- Burton also likes German Expressionist cinema (please note the fact that Johnny Depp Looks Like Cesare in over half of Burton's films), which is a visible influence of his work. Sometimes he admits this, like how Christopher Walken's character in Batman Returns is named "Max Schreck". This also feeds into his lower-level fixation with spirals. Spiral hair, spiral feathers, spiral coattails, spiral plants, spiral embroidery... maybe he eats a lot of curly fries or something. And stripes. Especially on snakes.
- And Burton seems to have a thing for dogs, as there're some dropped into every one of his movies at some point.
  - And that's the subtle stuff, we'll not even get into his main character is nearly always a sensitive outsider shunned by the masses. That speaks to his target audience— which makes it Market Driven, not a fetish.
Kevin Smith always stuffs his films with his favorite things: Star Wars, Jaws, hockey and comic book references, and talks about "unnatural" sex acts. He also seems to have a thing for girls with glasses.
- Don't forget Degrassi references. In fact, when he appeared on Degrassi The Next Generation, this troper half-expected him to have Caitlin chained to him wearing the gold bikini while a carbonited Joey looked on.
- His diary contains a moment where he realizes his fetish for thin girls in glasses, brought on by his wife getting glasses.
As a boy, Wes Craven was bullied by a kid named Fred Krueger. Before this name became attached to Craven's most iconic baddie, his earlier film The Last House On The Left contains a villainous rapist named Krug.
Screenwriter/director Richard Curtis seems to have a thing for Americans. Aside from the Bridget Jones films, which were adapted from another medium and was a collaboration with several other writers, every theatrically released film he's ever written has been a British comedy featuring at least one American character.
- I suspect it's more that he has a thing for money. Including an inexplicable American to coax the US market has been a standby in UK cinema since the thirties.
The films of Guillermo del Toro always include slime, aspects of clock punk (or at least, clocks), things in jars (often People Jars), and references to Roman Catholicism. The supernatural is extremely common, and he's also greatly interested in the Spanish Civil War.
George Lucas seems to like Ridiculously Cute Critters a lot, to many people's displeasure.
- And CG, lots of CG. And tweaking/totally remaking scenes in his already-established films that don't need the help, just to meet his "original vision"— really, Lucas is just a bettter filmmaker when he's broke.
Robert Zemeckis likes Historical In Jokes as well as putting real people in his films, either by getting the real person or by combining editing tricks with Stock Footage.
- In a documentary made for the 2002 Back To The Future DVD, Zemeckis said he always felt the best Time Travel stories were The Time Machine and A Christmas Carol. Seven years later, he came out with his own version of the latter.
- Which brings us to Motion Capture.
- Casting actors, often the lead, in multiple parts (Michael J. Fox in Back To The Future Part II, Tom Hanks in The Polar Express, Jim Carrey and Gary Oldman in A Christmas Carol) and having them interact with each other.
Dario Argento's films usually have protagonists who are involved in the arts or some creative profession, and are foreigners.
- Jessica Harper in Suspiria and Jennifer Connelly in Phenomena are based on Disney's Snow White.
Robert Rodriguez sure loves Mexico and Texas...

Literature

Robert Heinlein, again (the man had trouble keeping himself out of his books, clearly) — Starship Troopers is one of the oft-most cited literary examples, with almost all of the authority figures in the main character's life having page long monologues that consist of Heinlein's own philosophies, such as his views on nuclear weapons, the military, and matters of national defense— at least, at that time (his political views changed drastically over the years)
- The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and even Stranger In A Strange Land also feature such monologues.
Virtually everything written by Kevin J. Anderson will have an eye-clenchingly horrible cancer metaphor in it somewhere. In fact this troper once cottoned on that a book written under a nom de plume was actually his just from encountering one such metaphor in it, before reaching the index which revealed his identity.
Even HP Lovecraft, in his own way: He had no strong female characters, and sexuality is always horrifying in his work, but he could describe a building more lovingly than Shakespeare describing his Fair Lord. There are theories that Lovecraft may have been asexual. But he loved his architecture.
- The "Lovecraft as asexual weirdo" idea is so ingrained, it may be surprising to learn that he was married for a time, and while it didn't last, his wife was explicitly quoted saying yes, they had sex, and yes, he was "adequately excellent" at it.
  - Some asexuals have sex. On the other hand Lovecraft, old stickler that he was, may have just seen it as an inappropriate subject matter. It's not even portrayed as bad, it's just not there.
  - Given the subject matter and the sheer amount of High Octane Nightmare Fuel found in Lovecraft's work, This Troper is A-OK with sex being left out.
- Of course, whether Lovecraft was asexual or not, he was definitely a weirdo. He also had a list of phobias as long as your arm. It would probably be easier to list the set of all things in the world he didn't have a phobia of.
- Lovecraft was also reportedly allergic to fish, which has been held to contribute to the marine qualities of many of his monstrous creations.
  - Most especially he seems to have a thing about tentacles, finding them more or less the embodiment of all that is disgusting.
  - Pretty much everything horrifying and disgusting in Lovecraft's work is alien and/or aquatic.
- Don't forget his xenophobia and apparent racism against not only blacks, but many Europeans.
- He would also faint if the temperature would drop too much (cf. Cool Air) and was a deeply racist person (although he softened up a bit in his later years).
- Made even more obvious in his works is Lovecraft's love of cats.
- Also, most of his protagonists are solitary men who have little or no obvious employment, yet never lack money; Lovecraft came from an upper-class family that fell into poverty while he was a child. As a result he spent his whole life in chronic lack of money, but unable to get work that would match his social status. There's clearly some wish-fulfillment going on.
JRR Tolkien liked trees a lot.
- Not so much "trees" specifically, as more "nature in general", which came with a direct correlation to his dislike of the encroachment of the ever expanding industrial England into the English countryside. Trees just put up a better fight than flowers.
Ayn Rand admits that the men in her novels are intended to be the ideal man, an important aspect of her writing.
L. Frank Baum wrote The Marvelous Land of Oz with two armies of young women in that book. An early critic at the time said that Baum may have had a play with women in leotards dancing around.
Robert Anton Wilson's novels are pretty much an excuse go write extensive analyses about his personal philosophies, and explore various schools of mysticism he's been involved with - however, he manages to do it in entertaining and amusing manner. He also occasionally lampshades his tendencies to this with characters commenting about books that start telling a story, and end with an essay of philosophy.
- He also loved James Joyce's books, and several times included them, or the man himself into the plots of his various books. In Schroedinger's Cat-trilogy he even features a utopean alternate universe where Joyce became the Pope, changed the entire nature of the Catholic Church to a more modern value-system, and prevented the World War II!
The authors of the Left Behind series really, really like their telephone conversations. In fact there's probably as much talking on the phone as there is talking face-to-face in the earlier books.
- Don't forget their love of explaining the difficulties of getting from Point A to Point B. Over a billion people have just disappeared, but I'm going to worry about how hard it is to get to New York.
S. M. Stirling's many books consistently feature detailed description of subjuguation and slavery; ridiculous amounts of detail and wanking on about weaponry (guns or bows and arrows depending on the setting) and, of all things, cannibalism.
- Much of Stirling's work is a homage to the "heroic Mighty Whitey explorer" genre of pulp fiction, so this is a cross between Author Appeal and Shout Out.
- Another common vein in Stirling's works is the prevalence of "survivalists." In the Terminator novels, they were the few survivors of Skynet's attack on humanity, and in the Emberverse most survivors were people who lived off the grid.
Speaking of Piers Anthony... Sure, the Xanth books are filled with puns, but they lurk in other books too, not to mention the Meaningful Names. And he loves logic puzzles; more than once has the climax of a book hinged on the protagonist figuring out a logic puzzle. (Off the top of my head: Golem in the Gears, the Prisoners' Dilemma; With a Tangled Skein, the Twelve Coins Puzzle.)
- Macroscope involved the game sprouts.
Many of Neil Gaiman's stories involve talking cats, imposter mothers, and, of course, eye trauma.
Frank Herbert's consistent themes: hallucinatory experiences as a spiritual journey of discovery (usually by means of some substance,) and resentment toward/competition with a father figure.
Cordwainer Smith loved to include cats (including an early, Western example of the Cat Girl trope) and references to Chinese culture in his science fiction stories.
Mercedes Lackey loves to include birds and intelligent avian creatures in her fantasy novels. Valdemar has gryphons, tervardi, and the Tayledras ("Hawkbrothers") and their semi-intelligent bond birds; the Free Bards books all have bird-themed titles; and one of her fairy tale adaptations has a minor character who's interested in falconry.
In all the Harry Potter books, spiders and socks are mentioned in passing several times, and both becoming huge plot points in the second book. There's even a giant talking spider character named Aragog.
- The spider thing probably has more to do with the fact that Ron is arachnophobic than any direct author appeal. Though this raises the question of why JK Rowling likes screwing with Ron so much as to make it a plot point...
- She also made a whole family of red headed heroes to counter the negative stereotypes of 'gingers' in the UK.
- By her own admission, Rowling likes odd and/or interesting names and words. She says that she "collects" them. Almost every character in the series has either a Meaningful Name or just an odd, medieval-style one, the titular character being one of the only exceptions.
Brian Jacques fills his Redwall novels with pages upon pages of descriptions of the food the characters eat. So many different kinds of scones!
If McCoy appears in a Diane Duane novel, you can reasonably expect him to be awesome. This may or may not be related to the fact that the good doctor is smokin'.
The elves of The Inheritance Trilogy are atheist, nudist, vegetarian tree-worshippers who impart their "wisdom" repeatedly to the main character and the reader.
Lois Mc Master Bujold loves riverboating on the Ohio, and more than half of The Sharing Knife: Passage focuses on this pastime.
- Also horses and gardening.
The Hyperion Cantos contain almost obscene numbers of references to John Keats.
- Which This Troper might argue isn't that much Author Appeal given that John Keats is a character in the series. However, if you look at Hyperion, Endymion, and the Ilium/Olympus books, obscure literary references definitely count.
Every single book in James Ellroy's L.A Quartet has a different serial killer and a different non-traditional incestous relationship. Ellroy is pretty upfront about his mental baggage: his beautiful mother, to whom he was sexually attracted, was brutally murdered when he was a child. They never found the killer. He has a memoir about this.
- There's such a thing as a traditional incestous relationship?
Everything by Leo Frankowski has both sexual and non-sexual Author Appeal. Especially Conrad's Time Machine, a book whose plot is as follows: Two Author Avatar s hang out together inventing a time machine, and spend the majority of the book whisked away to an tropical island where they become fabulously wealthy, enjoy the services of an Unwanted Harem, and finish inventing their time machine. It's also filled with quotes from Frankowski's own favorite authors, especially Heinlein.
Andre Norton and cats, AKA the "Brothers in Fur".
Diana Wynne Jones and Wales/the Welsh language.
Robert Forward's Camelot 30K is a hard science fiction novel that exists merely to showcase his elements-pooping one-eyed shrimp aliens and their Expy King Arthur society. Characterization, writing, pacing, dialog, and plausibility are all sacrificed just so Forward can play with his Starfish Aliens.
David Weber seems to have a thing for baseball. It's one thing when it shows up on Grayson, but it is also the favored sport on Safehold. The latter is especially bizarre, given that Safehold is at a Rennaisance tech level.

Live Action TV

Jerry Seinfeld likes Superman. It shows.
Tina Fey and the other writers of 30 Rock like to make Star Wars references. In the second season, they managed to get Carrie Fisher to guest star and say "Help me, Liz Lemon... you're my only hope!"

Multi-Media

Jhonen Vasquez (Invader Zim and Johnny The Homicidal Maniac) gives frequent homages to Alien, The Fly (both the original and Dave Cronenberg's version), Scanners, and video games in his comics/ TV show. He's also a fan of giant robots, space in general, spooky stuff, and certain words, most notably: Doom, Cheese, Piggies, Tacos, Monkeys, Moose, Noodles, Dooky, Nachos, and Bunnies. He even stated at Comic Con '07 that he's fascinated with plotlines of people who are "controlled and used" by others (Johnny and the Doughboys, Devi and Sickness), and that he also hates dogs and little kids (sans Squee).
Costume Porn in many stories.
Anytime where the background has more detail than the characters.

Music

John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants appears to enjoy writing about cranial trauma.
- So does David Lynch.
Rapper DMX is known for his love for dogs, which makes its way into many of his songs. His fifth album, Grand Champ, took it a bit further and stated that they can't just be any dogs, but pitbulls.

Professional Wrestling

Vince Russo loves pole matches. If you see a pole match in a WWE, WCW, or TNA show, Russo's booking this match.

Tabletop Games

Gary Gygax regularly included mushrooms and various hues of the color purple in his early Dungeons And Dragons works.
- Gygax also made a number of Lovecraftian references in those same works, as evidenced by such creatures as the Kuo-Toa (inspired by Lovecraft's Deep Ones), the Aboleth (inspired by some sort of Great Old One; this troper isn't a Lovecraft expert), the Illithids (which are basically a race of Cthulhus without the bat wings) and certain elements of Nightmare Fuel in the temple of the Eldritch Abomination gods. He outright acknowledged Lovecraft as an important influence on D.
  - Gygax needed a lot of content to make the game work, so he drew from a very large number of sources. He didn't quite make D&D into an All Myths Are True setting, but he came pretty close.
- Also his fantastically large and baroque vocabulary, which might have had an element of showing off.
- And polearms... Ever want to know why the glaive-guisarme seems to crop up in D&D so much?

Theater

Shakespeare loves comparing things to gardening, falconry, and hunting with dogs. He also loves crossdressing characters, but that was a fairly common schtick at the time. When he was writing, women were not permitted to be actors, and as such all of the female characters were men, and he thought it would be funny to make jokes based on that.
- Not to mention his continual description of rebellion and social breakdown in terms of cannibalism/self-consumption. Although perhaps this belongs in the 'Miscellaneous Paraphilia' section.
Tom Stoppard frequently references Shakespeare.

Video Games

This editor believes that Shinji Mikami from Resident Evil fame has a thing for masked wrestlers and Sentai as demonstrated in games where he can actually get away with it (Killer7 had Mask de Smith and the Punishing Rangers AKA The Handsome Men, God Hand had Mr. Gorilla Mask and the Mad Midget Five and two words: Viewtiful Joe)
- And then there's No More Heroes, where the player character collects luchadore masks (who all have names like "La Guerra, Jr.") and learns new wrestling moves from finding masks with notes in them.
- The luchadors more the preference of Suda Goichi, aka Suda51, who even wears a luchador outfit in some press releases.
By this time, it's became quite obvious that Square-Enix designer Tetsuya Nomura is obsessed with zippers and belts.
- And as of Dissidia: Final Fantasy, he has added earrings to his obsession, as only four characters out of twenty lack them, and only because two of those are covered head to toe in ludicrously huge armor. But even that is dubious defense, as even Garland, whose helmet covers his entire head, wears earrings on the helmet where the ears would be.
  - Those designs, and the bead fixation that relates to them, were created by Yoshitaka Amano, who was the art designer for the series prior to the seventh game. Nomura's redesigns actually somewhat simplify the characters' outfits.
  - Speaking of Amano, he seems to have a thing for blondes.
  - And men wearing dark lipstick...
Castlevania Czar Koji "IGA" Igarashi seems to have a weird fixation with furniture, namely chairs. Dracula always waits for the Belmont sitting in his throne before the final fight. His son Alucard and Soma who's his reincarnation can also catch some rest sitting down in the many chairs they encounter. The best example is in Curse of Darkness where former henchman Hector can collect more than 10 different types of chairs scattered all around the stages and store them in the aptly named "Weary Chair Room" .
- Second best example: Harmony of Dissonance. Most Castlevania heroes can collect weapons, magical items, and such. Juste Belmont collects random items of furniture and decorates an empty room of the castle with them. You know, the castle he intends to destroy.
Shigeru Miyamoto has implemented personal interests into many of his games, including Pikmin (gardening), Nintendogs, Wii Fit, and most recently, Wii Music. Nintendo recently banned him from talking about his current hobbies.
- His earlier works were rather definitely based on his childhood experiences, too.
Yuji Horii of Dragon Quest fame is a compulsive gambler which is why many of the games in the series have some sort of gambling mini-game in it. (Though its been said that the fact that you can only save in the town's churches is a way to try to make going out in the field/dungeons feel a bit more of a gamble as well.)
Speaking of belts, Guilty Gear character designer Daisuke Ishiwatari seems to use belts as a unifying motif minus a few rare cases (Anji Mito has only a sash). Sol Badguy tops the list with 24 belts in his costume design. Funnily enough, the costumes still manage to look pretty cool.
There are so many Flash games about escaping from a locked room remarkably like, say, a programmer's bedroom (usually complete with bed, closet and computer) that it has become its own genre.

Web Original

There's an unclickable "Joy of Painting" toon on Homestar Runner that shows Marzipan dressed as Bob Ross painting a picture of a mountain landscape. Matt and Mike Chapman, creators of Homestar Runner, admitted that they only did this because they thought showing Granola Girl Marzipan with a beard would be funny.
- A lot of the stuff at Homestar Runner is based on the creators' childhood. Note the frequent appearance of breakfast cereals and Merchandise Driven Saturday morning cartoons, the sibling rivalry between Strong Bad and his brother Strong Sad, the characters' Vague Age, and in-universe Nightmare Fuel.
How else do you explain the contortion scenes in Sapphire Episode III?
SD40ka (NSFW porn-hosting site): His stories (and it's definitely a "he") often enough star a male computer programmer, who marries/is married to a genius woman, and either or both of them recently served America proudly in Iraq thank-you-very-much. The characters are always staunch political conservatives, often actively reshaping the fictional universe into a Republican Paradise. He plugs that his (genius!) characters love the Cato Institute and Townhall.com, just in passing. There's even the occasional Easy Evangelism of a merely misguided (rather than Evil) liberal. And everyone accepts Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, without whom there was a great big hole in their hearts. In fact, it's a lot like Jack Chick, only with lots of monogamous sex with big penises.

Webcomics

Shortpacked!, a rare hobby-based and clean-subtexted example, takes this trope to a really fun extreme. Toys, especially Transformers, had managed to sneak into the earlier webcomics of David Willis, and this is a Webcomic set in a toy store, written by a toy collector. Do the math.
Fans! is a little too vehement in its defense of fanboys. Claim that they're valuable, intelligent and worthwhile human beings, fine. Claim that fanboys have the specific combination of strengths that makes them the only ones capable of defending Earth, and that the biggest, geekiest fanboys alive will be revered by future generations as heroes who made all of society possible... that's taking things a bit too far.
- Likewise for Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn's Fallen Angels, word for word with a side order of anti-environmentalist screed.
  - That takes on Self Insertion overtones when you learn that Niven, Pournelle, and Flynn are members of a group called Sigma, a think tank made up of science fiction writers and enthusiasts.
Misfile. Not here because of its transgender content; here because it goes on and on and on about amateur street racing.
- It is interesting to note that the author's other comics all feature transgender content.
Jay Naylor's Better Days frequently works in lovingly detailed drawings and descriptions of firearms and the handling of them and undertones (and in an earlier arc, outright depiction) of incest between the twin protagonists Fizk and Lucy. Despite the repeated appearance of said themes (and the fact that Fisk and Lucy were created in a series of x-rated commissioned works), Naylor denies that the comic is explicitly about them.
- One could give him the benefit of doubt on this one: His best-known adult books don't seem to contain anything incest-related whatsoever. It's even possible that the entire arc was a subtle Take That at how incest was pictured in Badly Drawn Kitties...
  - One of his early sketchbooks was entirely centered around incest, he just doesn't sell it anymore, myth busted.
- Naylor's political leanings (Right Wing, Objectivist) also pop up regularly, via Character Filibuster.
Sabrina Online started out as a comic for fans of the Amiga computer platform before gradually expanding into more of a slice-of-life comic, so its occasional Amiga humor can be dismissed as a non-example of this trope. The increasingly-frequent Transformers strips, however, are another matter.
Tom Siddell has worked many of his own interests into Gunnerkrigg Court. First, Kat's interests in videogames, TV, and dance music usually mirror his own. Second, his interest in folklore and mythology is the reason for the comic's Crossover Cosmology. Third, Tom's a big fan of English folk music, with its effect on the story varying between Shout Out and "character inspired by a folk song". He's also stated that Antimony — the main character — has the same regional accent as Kate Rusby, one of his favorite folk singers.
xkcd in its entirety (See Randall Munroe above).
Erika's New Perfume contains certain things that pop up in most of the author's other works, such as Fountain Of Youth.
Last Resort has its protagonist, Jigsaw (along with the rest of the Talmi species), heavily implied to be Jewish. The author is also Jewish. Hey, it could be worse.
Mookie will be the first to tell you that a) he was a nerd, b) he loves heavy metal and Comic Books, and c) "Lots of things I love are green!".
- Apparently among those green things are She Hulk and women built like her.
The author of Among The Chosen may have a fixation with boobage and pregnancy.

Western Animation

Butch Hartman's love of Star Wars and Comic Books, as well as his hatred of jocks, cheerleaders, popular kids, rich kids and basically anyone else who picked on him in high school shines throughout his work. This includes The Fairly Oddparents, Danny Phantom, and even the never-picked-up Crash Nebula. He also has a habit of making his protagonists Book Dumb losers who are also crazy about space and comic books.
Watch a few episodes of Codename Kids Next Door and it becomes pretty obvious that show creator Tom Warburton has a love affair with Humongous Mecha, whether they're made of houses, amusement park rides, giant rotting sandwiches, or baby chickens. Not that anyone minds.
Greg Weisman is a self-described "Shakespeare nut, probably with the emphasis on 'nut'." Gargoyles had Puck, the Weird Sisters and MacBeth as recurring characters, and another trio known in the script as Othello, Iago, and Desdemona. Meanwhile, The Spectacular Spider Man has a running subplot about a School Play of A Midsummer Nights Dream - in particular, "Growing Pains" takes advantage of the auditions to have Shakespeare quotes punctuate the story.
- Better A Midsummer Night's Dream than another high school play with Romeo And Juliet that centers around the "kissing scene".
The Venture Brothers creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, on the DVD commentary for the series, talk about their "addiction" to using Star Wars references, and vainly trying to give up the habit.
One writer on The Simpsons is a big Preston Sturgis fan and has an accompanying interest in hobos, leading to a number of hobo-jokes throughout the series.