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The master at work.
"Ergo! While you may not be a murderer... you are guilty of panty-snatching in the first degree!"
Mike: They don't even know what panties are, yet they feel compelled to raid them. Crow: Every male of every species has the biological urge to panty raid.
An individual — almost always a pervert of some kind — who steals and collects women's (or girls') underwear, usually worn/used. Almost always presented as a reprehensible individual and usually an enemy of the hero, and just as frequently played for laughs.
Panty Thieves usually go about their business while wearing Stealth Clothes.
Usually this is an anime trope, but Western culture has independently produced the college prank of panty raiding (which has been out of fashion since the sexual revolution of the sixties). Panty raids are usually perpetrated by groups of perverted young males, rather than just one guy.
Probably an expression of Lolicon; certainly related to whatever cultural elements contribute to the fact that you can buy used girls' underwear in vending machines in Japan. (Or used to be able to, until it was outlawed in around 2004.) This practice was referenced in (of all things) a 1995 Pulp concert video, in which it's suggested that it wasn't quite as widespread as commonly believed.
If you want to really psychoanalyze it, you might venture to suggest that the anime Panty Thief is an embodiment of the suppressed desires many adult Japanese males have about a) young girls and b) bucking social pressure and the forces that make them behave "respectably." Or it could just be another expression of the fact that going against social mores produces good comedy.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Happôsai from Ranma ½ is the patron saint of all panty thieves. This Old Master even developped some martial art techniques around panty-thieving and peeping.
- Mahou Sensei Negima!
- The hamster Echiboo (which reportedly translates as "Perverted Fart") in the manga Aoi House, whenever he got the chance.
- One of the "Orphans" in Mai-HiME is a lingerie thief.
- In the Death Note Spin-Off novel The Los Angeles BB Murder Case, Ryuzaki (BB) raids a little girl's panty drawer. Making the scene even more inappropriate is that he's supposed to be examining her murder scene with Naomi.
- Onsokumaru in Ninin Ga Shinobuden, though he steals panties by proxy (dispatching Shinobu to do it under the premise of ninja training).
- One of Sôsuke's classmates in Full Metal Panic! It's worth noting that he was put up to it by his classmates, who had taken an important item from him.
- Gintama has a whole episode about this. There was much violence.
- In Macross Frontier, the one time Sheryl attends school with Ranka and Alto is memorable not just for her own interstellar celebrity, but because of her unstoppable rampage through the campus while going commando in a skirt. The culprit? A tiny, green, and adorable Ridiculously Cute Critter (a Vajra in larval form) that crawled into her laundry basket while she was showering, then started hopping about the campus with no regard for the pair of panties that had wrapped around it. The Idol Singer was lucky no paparazzi were nearby to capture the moment... Also of note is that the little guy is then pursued by — with three exceptions — the entire male population of the school, whose motivation appears to be acquiring said panties as a trophy rather than giving them back.
- Zatch Bell! has a character named Momon, who looks like a cross between a rabbit and a monkey. When Kiyo meets him, he's holding a bra for some reason. When Momon meets the others, he spends countless attempts to see Tia's panties, and somehow manages to steal another pair from her house. Needless to say, Tia rages.
- The Elder does this at least once in Chrono Crusade, as part of his Dirty Old Man gag.
- The Stalker with a Crush Kuroko from To Aru Majutsu no Index. It's only shown in the anime counterpart of the spin-off To Aru Kagaku no Railgun, though. On one occasion, she somehow stole Misaka's swimsuit from a locked container. While she IS a teleporter, it's not clear how she managed to get past the lock. A few minutes after revealing her theft of the swimsuit, Kuroko took the trope to its logical extreme: using her ability, she teleported Misaka's underwear right off of it's owner.
- In kiss×sis, both sisters partake in a rare Gender Flipped example.
- One You're Under Arrest! story concerns a highly sophisticated Panty Thief — who strangely enough is a parody of Billy The Kid from The Silence of the Lambs: he is sewing a blanket out of the pants he steals, "and then it will be like I am sleeping with all the girls at once!"
- Koragashi of Kamen No Maid Guy can easily steal the panties off the entire female population of a high school without them noticing but doesn't do so for perverted reasons. Instead, he is trying to identify a suspicious person and the only clue he has are her unique panties. His partner, Fubuki, tells him that he didn't have to go to such extremes though and promptly punishes him via remote-controlled explosion.
- In Gargoyle of the Yoshinagas, there's a scene in which Kaitou Hyakushiki literally steals the undies off of two people in front of a crowd.
- Penguin #1 from Mawaru-Penguindrum uses a fish rod to steal panties in episode 10.
- One Running Gag in Daily Lives Of High School Boys is Tadakuni's sister's underwear kept being stolen by her brother and his two friends Hidenori and Yoshitake. Hidenori's older brother had stole it at some point as well.
Comic Books
- Booga in Tank Girl first met the title character when he tried to steal her knickers. They've been together ever since.
Films — Live-Action
Live-Action TV
Music
- "In the Middle of the Night" from the One Step Beyond album by Madness is about a sixty-three year old newsagent who just so happens to be an underwear thief. He sees his own picture in the newspaper and books it.
- The title character from Pink Floyd's "Arnold Layne".
Video Games
- Notably, the thief doesn't steal them because he's a pervert. The panties he's seeking are magic. He stole lots of panties because he didn't know where Trucy lived, to just take her pair. So he went around taking every pair of big panties he saw, hoping each time they'd be the right pair. It was just coincidence that he found the right pair, Trucy's, and another pair that night.
- In Bully, our hero, Jimmy, does this for gym coach Mr. Burton. Slightly squicky, but overall, funny.
- Vico doesn't actually steal any female undergarments in A Dance with Rogues, but he does show an unhealthy obsession with the player character's underwear.
- The image accompanying the Dexterity skill in Avernum shows an Impossible Thief at work, swiping a woman's panties from under her full plate armor.
- In Golden Sun, snooping in Lady McCoy's wardrobe ends in Isaac apparently trying to steal her lingerie. Notably, this example has a teenage boy robbing a middle-aged (but attractive) Rich Bitch.
- During a flashback sequence in Final Fantasy VII, Cloud can sneak into Tifa's room and swipe her "orthopedic underwear" (in the Japanese version, they were "slightly-used" instead). Though it's uncertain if this actually happened or not, since the dialogue options after that are "It's true" and "Just kidding". Later on in the game, we discover that Cloud is an Unreliable Narrator. Assuming it actually happened, it's ambiguous as to whether this specific memory belongs to Cloud or Zack.
- In an early event in Magical Diary, you catch one of your roommates going through the other's stuff, and have the option of suggesting that she's trying to steal her panties.
- Later in the game, your roommate may actually be responsible for the theft of your underwear (a bra this time). Or the other way around. It's accidental... sort of.
Web Comics
- In Something Positive, Davan apparently trained Choo Choo to do this. And then, after the incident with Kestrel, hired him out professionally.
- Blair from Eerie Cuties is a "female" doll possessed by definitely male — and very perverted — spirit. He does this whenever possible, though usually this doesn't end well for him.
Web Original
- There's an entire Whateley Universe story built around this trope, as a panty thief hits every girls' dorm on campus, one night at a time, finally getting spotted (but not caught). That's because it was Sun Wukong the Monkey King, one of the legendary Eight Immortal, the whole she-bang. When he steals yours panties, you just let him.
- One of /tg/ joke characters is Jeanstealer — a genestealer with a jean fetish.
- The Onion describes why panty raids are a poor idea at certain colleges.
Western Animation
- In one episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, Patrick and Mr. Krabs go on a "panty raid". It is near midnight, however, so Mr. Krabs does not realize until it is too late that the person they are stealing panties from is his own mother.
- Inverted in a two-part episode of G.I. Joe called "The Traitor", after a Critical Failure to the armor-treatment chemical, Lady Jaye catches a COBRA infantryman... and obviously, he leaves her with a souvenir!
Real Life
- Some dogs have been known to raid their owners' dirty laundry. Sometimes they don't actually find any socks, and go for the next best thing. (Be on the lookout for 50-lb boxer dogs wearing ladies' underwear as decorative floss.)
- On 8 November 2010, Yukio Kusumoto was convicted for theft of underwear from a woman's home. A police search of Kusumoto's house uncovered 3000 pairs.
- Any contemporary Stage Magic act based around pickpocketing will inevitably culminate with this, a slightly Bowdlerized version using a man's boxers or a Squick version using a man's dirty briefs..
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