Prince Herbert: But I don't like her. King of Swamp Castle: Don't like her? What's wrong with her? She's beautiful! She's rich! She's got huge... tracts of land!
Within various forms of media there is a prevalent assumption among creators that large breasts automatically make a woman more attractive. This often leads to significant focus on said breasts, or in-universe social norms (or specific Cast Herds) treating larger breasts as absolutely more attractive than smaller ones, sometimes going as far as making it the most important or even sole standard of female beauty — regardless of who the fans think is really the most attractive, or whether there is an in-universe distinction between sexual attractiveness and non-sexual beauty.
This trope is not simply "Big Breasts = Hot Girl," the female character needs to be seen as more attractive in-universe because of her larger breasts. Her breasts should at least be referenced in dialogue if not an integral part of the character. Male characters often gawk at her breasts and may be easily influenced if said female character flaunts her breasts, leading to I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!. Female characters, especially flat chested ones are often prone to jealousy and yearning for larger breasts.
The logical opposite to A-Cup Angst and Petite Pride (though in different ways), and the Distaff Counterpart to Bigger Is Better In Bed, which applies Bigger Is Better to penis size and quality of sex.
Emma Watson was also on the receiving end of some Photoshop enhancement on certain Harry Potter posters.
Anime & Manga
In Devil Hunter Yohko, Yohko ManoLampshades the fact that, despite being the most buxom character in the show, every romance she has ends in disaster. In fact it is her lack of romantic success that ensures her role as The Hero, since the initial activation of being a devil hunter is a Virgin Power. Afterwards a hunter can have all the sex they want, as demonstrated by Yohko's grandmother.
Iketeru FutariHuge Schoolgirl Yuki subverts this. She actually doesn't like her big breasts due to the the physical discomfort and all the unwanted attention she gets, but she's willing to use them to seduce her childhood friend Saji. Unfortunately for her, Saji only has eyes for the more petite Koizumi. She eventually gives up on Saji, becomes a model and finds a new love interest in Kaede, only to find out that Kaede has a phobia of breasts, due to a Marshmallow Hell incident with his mother when he was a baby. Fortunately, Kaede gets over it and becomes a couple with Yuki.
In Onegai My Melody, schoolgirl Iijima has very large breasts indeed and lusted after by the boys in class for having such "bodacious boobs."
Chapter three of the manga series Asklepios, has the protagonists trying to convince a village girl to let them do operate on her to remove a tumor on her ovaries that resulted in an huge increase of her bust size, but at the same time is killing her. She initially refused because she thought love interest liked big breasts but eventually takes the surgery when said love interest say he cares about her and not her bust. After the surgery over he even says she looks better flat chested.
Bleach: Although there are a lot of buxom babes in this manga, only one fits this trope: Rangiku Matsumoto. She's not above using her appeal to help her get what she wants, such as the time she tried to convince Ichigo to let her sleep at his house by unbuttoning her blouse. Aside from the occasional reference (usually comedic, but sometimes insulting) in the manga and its related omakes, the anime takes this much further and has a field day using Matsumoto's chest as actual weapons to help her manipulate men (usually Hisagi). There's even one omake (turned into an episode) where the shinigami are at the beach and she begins training Orihime (who's not far behind Rangiku in breast size, despite being only 15 years old) in the art of carrying water with breasts instead of buckets - much to Ichigo's horror (Nanao in the episode).
Jungle De Ikou Mii has extremely huge breasts, the explanation being that since she's the spirit of fertility and reproduction her huge breasts represent Earth's life-giving energy.
Kurumu Kurono (pictured) repeatedly invokes this trope as her major selling point in her quest for coming up on top of Tsukune's Unwanted Harem.
Ukraine from Axis Powers Hetalia has huge breasts, representing the country's large and fertile farmlands, or in other words, "huge tracts of land."
AirmasterNakanotani Mina. Unfortunately it's much to her dismay as it's the main reason why she get hit on so much. Ironically despite being the most attractive female in the series Mina and her breasts are mainly played for satire and the source of many awkward situations .
Haruka Gracia in Basquash!. She's from the moon, where it's fabled that due to the low gravity women all have gargantuan, perfectly spherical breasts, so here her "lunar bust" became the focal point of attraction from most men and jealousy from most women.
The premise of Manyu Hikencho takes this trope Up to Eleven. The size of a woman's chest not only determines a woman's attractiveness but her wealth and worth in society as well. Small breasted women are outcasts and well endowed women are showered with wealth and power.
In Centaur no Nayami, Hime's breast gets lots of comments. In the very first chapter, a boy praised them, and only them, in a love letter, showing they were the only reason he was interested on her.
Kyon: So, you brought this girl, Ms. Asahina, up here just because she happens to be cute, tiny and extremely well endowed?
Haruhi: That's right.
Comic Books
Love and Rockets has quite a bit of this. Luba's breasts are enormous. So are most of her female relatives, especially her mother Maria and half-sisters Fritzi and Petra. Their huge busts are constantly commented on by others and are a very integral part of the characters of Luba, Maria, and the rest of the girls in the family. The attention they receive runs the realistic gamut from fascinated and aroused men, disgusted men with a preference for thinner women, and jealous women who call them names like blimp-chest. Luba in particular has complained that her build makes people automatically assume that she is a slut. Petra actually had the largest breasts out of all the women in the family until she had a breast reduction, going down to simply "regular busty." Luba's daughter Doralis has a delightful combination of huge rack and voluptuous hips and ass. Her other daughter Guadalupe looked like she was going to escape the "family curse"... until she got pregnant.
Adamâ, one of the book's protagonists. She has large breasts and wears a very revealing set of overalls. Fellow hero Ram obviously is fond of them and gropes her when she tells him to "grab my waist" to hold on during a hippodrile ride. She is not amused by Ram's mistake.
Shalise, the holographic projection of the police clone training ship. She tells the clones that she's been "endowed with a feminine personality" while she caresses her considerable bust.
Buxom Is Better is an actual plot point in W.I.T.C.H., and it is generally accepted that larger breasts are a sign of greater beauty: three of the five girls all try or actually do use magic to enhance their breast size, leader Will angsts about her small bust, and Irma tries no less than twice to artificially enlarge her already sizable breasts using magic. Lets not even get started on the near-constant Breast Expansion fetishism that is seen throughout the series, but needless to say it's omnipresent. The TV show seems to go even further. Even the transformation sequences feature visible, onscreenBreast Expansion every episode, the characters talk about it directly the very first episode, it's referenced or directly addressed several times, and the show actually made headlines in the UK for being so outright blatant about it. Basically, in W.I.T.C.H., if you're flat-chested you're flat out of luck.
Actually it could count as a a subversion, since Irma's attempts to use her Sexier Alter Ego end up causing trouble and nearly exposing the Guardians when they back fire. When Irma did get the guy she was trying to tempt, he went to fast and far in what is implied to have been an attempted case of Auto Erotica; she panicked and turned him into a frog. Will herself has the longest relationship of any of the girls with her boyfriend Matt, they're practically the Official Couple. Considering the comics try to present the main characters as role models for readers, they may be trying to say that any guy that is only interested in a girl for her appearance isn't the best choice for a boyfriend.
Jamie Schaffer, the muscle of the Chaos Campus cast, has enormous breasts... however, they're not natural. She puts on a facade of being deep and "real", compared to her sorority girl comrades, but she's actually more shallow and vain than them and got, quote, "larger and larger breast implants" over the years to compensate for her small height. She's actually described in her bio as "Ripley with silicone implants".
Gold Digger features this conversation between the busty Cat Girl Brittany and her also-busty sister Gina:
Brittany:You've gotta be joking!!! You're gorgeous! Look at you! Look at these! <hoist>
Gina: Eek! (Narrating): "I remember thinking: 'Jinkies! where did those come from'?"
Brittany: Do you know how many gals would kill for a nice, firm set like yours??? What man wouldn't fall all over himself just to get to talk to you?''
Fanfic
In Fan Work, almost every canonHello, Nurse! or Ms. Fanservice is often flanderized into this mold, usually with a healthy dose of pride in her "assets", even when (or perhaps because) there is little to no canonical evidence for or against it.
Film
Superbad has an (unseen) girl who apparently had huge breasts, but she got breast reduction surgery. Seth claims that this is "slapping God in the face," but Evan counters that "she had back problems," and "now that she can exercise comfortably, she's in the best shape of her life."
The eponymous character from Kick-Ass is obsessed with large breasts, going so far as to watch photos of female african tribals.
It's telling that, when a girl asks him to spend the night, the first thing he does (before even kissing her) is grab her boobs. She doesn't mind.
The male lead in Friends With Kids sincerely believes this, leading to A-Cup Angst from his would-be girlfriend.
Literature
In one of the Gossip Girl novels, one girl uses artificial means to try and increase her breast size, but it backfires because she becomes too big. Jenny Humphries, on the other hand, has naturally huge breasts that garner her plenty of attention from male characters.
Alicia, one of a series of Alpha Bitches in the Clique series. She has huge breasts for her age, sufficiently large that it's a plot point. The boys at her school love her and shower her with affection. The other girls, including her Girl Posse, make fun of how absurd she looks at thirteen with such big breasts.
Kylie in Duumvirate was buxom before she could genetically alter herself. After, she jumped chest-first into this trope.
In Warbreaker gods are mortals who have died and come Back from the Dead. One of the perks of this resurrection is that each of them looks the way they always wished they could look. For goddesses, this almost always means having a huge rack.
The trope is given a bit of a disturbing cast in The Hunger Games: a near-throwaway line from Cinna near the end of the first book mentions that the Games officials almost had Katniss's breasts surgically enhanced without her knowledge or consent while she was tranquilized and recovering from the Games, to make up for the weight she lost during the whole experience. Fortunately, Haymitch threw enough of a fit that they backed off and agreed to let Cinna simply pad her clothes instead.
What really makes it disturbing is in the third book of the series when you realize that the breast enhancement was probably meant to attract/please customers. The most attractive winners ended up prostituted by President Snow.
Nip/Tuck has a double subversion in the episode Jenny Juggs, where Nip Tuck has incredibly huge breasts that she can even use as weapons, knocking out the protagonist and breaking a pumpkin with them. Her breasts have caused her a lot of self-esteem issues, not helped by the fact that she's a stripper. She is finally convinced by the protagonist to get a breast reduction bringing her to a C-cup but ends up getting upset anyway because she thinks her breasts are too small.
When Kevin from the American Office tries to figure out who is hotter, Karen or Pam, he specifically notes that Pam has bigger breasts.
Yoon-sung: (denying interest in a girl) And more importantly, you’re a B-cup, aren’t you? I don’t ever see anyone under a C-cup as a woman.
One arc on 30 Rock featured Jack Donaghy's romance with nurse Elisa, played by the patron saint of Buxom Is Better, Salma Hayek. Liz's take?
Liz: If I had knockers like that, I'd be thanking God too.
In the first season of Eastbound And Down, Jerkass protagonist Kenny Powers is obsessed with the ample breasts of ex-girlfriend April; in her first scene the camera zooms in on her cleavage as Kenny stares. In Season 2 he dates the gorgeous but less bosomy Vida, only to decide that he's "a breast man" and go back to April.
In one episode of Two and a Half Men, the current girlfriend of Charlie wants to get her sizeable breasts reduced due to back pain, to the horror of Charlie; the crisis (from his POV) is avoided when he tells her that once they're done people will notice her ass more - whereupon she decides to cancel the operation and keep her chest (and live with the backache).
Penny on Happy Endings says that she used to draw attention to her cleavage to get bigger tips during her waitressing days. It's still one of the first things that people notice about her.
In Monty Python's Flying Circus "All England Summarizing Proust Competition", the announcer basically says that all contestants sucked, and he therefore awards the first prize to somebody who deserves it: The girl with the biggest tits. Those are really his words.
The Big Bang Theory: Bernadette is considered cute and attractive, and she's fairly well-endowed. Acknowledged in the show.
Howard's Mom:(regarding a custom made vest) She has a tricky figure, she's short and stacked like me!
Ali G from Da Ali G Show says to a group of doctors and experts on medical ethics that he heard that some women got their breasts reduced. He thinks it's selfish as it's just one woman getting rid of backache, but pleasure is taken away from numerous men. One really cool doctor (who might have figured out that they were being trolled) politely explains to him that those breasts are grossly enlarged and not attractive. Ali D assures him he was talking about nice ones, and the doctor suggests that it's a matter of taste. Ali is impressed and wants to chat about that after.
Ali G: I heard about this thing and it's probably rubbish, that some girls h'actually gets their babbylongs reduced. Is that true? Ain't that selfish, though? Cause like, is one woman getting back ache but you is taking away thousands of men getting pleasure, innit?
Music
The entire point of the song Tig Ol' Bitties. The song is about the singer seeing an attractive new girl in class, who has a large pair, and asks her to the prom with "I like your boobs. Go to prom with me?" She says yes, and at the end it turns out she stuffed her bra. "Those aren't boobs! They're lies!" He then dumps her.
It's like two beach ball in shirt disguise
Or Earth and Mars havin some fun
Wait, I take that back - it's like two of the suns.
Tabletop RPG
People with the Eros genemod in GURPS: Bio-Tech have "exaggerated sexual characteristics" as part of the modifications for making them attractive. Sarcastically from the vignette: "Yes, you too can be stacked like a pleasurebioroid."
In Shadowrun, the player can get breast implants of varying sizes. Gamemasters are encouraged to use discretion in determining actual in-game effects.
Theater
One character in A Chorus Line sings a song about how her breast implants have helped her career as a dancer.
Video Games
Miranda from Mass Effect 2. As the engineers put it...
Daniels: I've got green across the board. The forward tanks are buoyant and elevated. Donnelly: Are ya talking about the Normandy or Miranda? Daniels: I'm talking about the one covered and protected, not bouncing in the breeze.
And in the third game, Liara's father, Matriarch Aethyta practically goes starry eyed remembering her mother "Nezzy"'s magnificent rack, with predictable results as far as Liara's reaction is concerned.
This appears in Tales Of Vesperia with Judith, who is regarded as the sexiest party member because of her large breasts.
In a meta example, the developers of League of Legendshave explained that so many of their female characters have enormous busts because subtlety is hard to do with the graphics engine.
The governors' daughters in the 2004 iteration of Sid Meier's Pirates! were ranked plain, attractive and beautiful. The major difference between each level of attractiveness is an increase in breast size.
In BlazBlue, the source of many A-Cup Angst was due to big breasts, Kokonoe threw a tantrum over Makoto's bigger breasts, mentioning her small breasts makes Noel really mad, and she wished to get a bigger breasts like Litchi's. And when Tsubaki was groped by Taokaka and called "Average" despite having decent-sized breasts, she's pissed. And big breasts was one of the reasons Litchi was such a Hello, Nurse!.
When Yellow Heart shows up in Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, the player party instantly agree to take her out so Vert can have the biggest bust of the cast again. The CPU's breat sizes are actually one big Visiual Pun, being directly related to the size of the console they represent, so while [[Xbox360 Vert]] is XBOX HUEG, Uni is rather small and actually flattens some in HDD form.
Visual Novels
Mia Fey from Ace Attorney was once able use her large breasts to get information out of a Dirty Old Man witness. Also, in the first game she gets a small boy to start talking with a Cheshire Grin smile when Phoenix had a hard time getting him to cooperate at all.
Dr. Edward Bunnigus of Schlock Mercenary is a gene-tweaked test-tube baby, as her parents were mentally stunted and therefore not permitted to produce naturally. The "model" of her gene-tweaking was the "Exotic Dancer" package, hence her massive mammaries and her name ("ED"ward). She's used her considerable assets as a stripper and pole dancer to pay her way through medical school, and in one case "weaponized" her body during a strip search.
Didi of Ménage à 3 is this trope in perfection. Her chest inspires lust in everyone she meets.
However, this also slips into Blessed with Suck territory, as she's never had a partner last more than 2 minutes at sex as a result - with one poor guy lasting -39 Seconds.
In Girls With Slingshots, Jamie is extremely well-endowed, and quite proud of the attention this brings her. Though she is still surprised when she has to bundle up for the winter, and suddenly everything at her favorite bar is twice as expensive as she's used to.
Jamie: You've been giving me boob discounts?!
Web Original
In Chakona Space, Chakats all have positively huge breasts (with in-story justification that they're actually made from a spongy tissue that stores a sort of natural sports drink they secrete when they're not in full pregnant lactation mode). Of course, there's no shortage of endowments among non-chakat races, either.
SynthOrange's Let's Play of Princess Maker 2, casts Gendo Ikari as the father of the main character. Upon getting a visit from a travelling salesman, who, amongst other things, sells "Buxom Pills", a drug that increases bust size, Gendo first does a Flat "What.", before angrily chasing the salesman away for being a creepy weirdo. In a later chapter, Gendo eventually buys a Buxom Pill... to use on himself.
Western Animation
In one episode of Squidbillies, a doctor says Granny's fifth-degree burns can be masked with "enormous fake breasts." Granny keeps demanding that they be bigger on a computer simulation until it warns that they threaten the orbit of the planet, at which point she says to stop because she wants them to "look natural."
Real Life
Breast enlargening surgery is called breasts enhancement or augment surgery because of this trope. They are a major business.
While women with large breasts generally do attract attention and admiration, there is also a good number of reasons why buxom is not always better in real life.
Clothing is produced for the average/slim body, so in order to get clothes that flatter a buxom body, one needs to either have clothes tailor-made, spend time and/or money to fix ready-made clothes, or to limit oneself to certain textiles and patterns.
Carrying sizable funbags can get really hard on the neck and back. Properly fitting, adequately supporting bras can help this of course, but when you are truly big, those are neither pretty nor very affordable. Serious cases have sometimes had breast reduction surgery covered by insurance as medically necessary.
If your body type doesn't match your bust size, it can look awkward.
Which is why Big Bra to Fill exists. Hollywood is fixated on abnormally slender women, and a poorly executed version of this trope can very quickly turn into Gag Boobs.
"The Buxom Bandit" a woman who held up a gas station in Australia getting a lot of attention for her being "ample" and wearing a low-cut top. Even though she physically attacked the cashier and threatened him with a knife, the story mostly elicits jokes and suggestive comments about her big breasts.
Sex workers (escorts, strippers, and porn stars) often get breast augmentation because it's been proven that large-breasted women make more money in that line of work.
There has been at least one published research paper showing that female lawyers with small breasts are less likely to win cases than their larger breasted counterparts,
