"I don't care if he's a billboard. He's still hot, dammit!"
"Actually, you wouldn't believe how many people come up to me and say 'This is my fantasy: to be in bed with
Lisa Simpson and have her say
"Oh more, more!" What is the matter with you people? This is sick!"
— Yeardley Smith
"If the laws of nature would allow it, I would bear that man's children."
—
Ellis on Jimmy Gibbs Jr.
The
technical term for a real person's attraction to a fictional character.
Perverse Sexual Lust originated in a reader poll during the early days of the
webcomic It's Walky!
. The author wished to know the reason behind the slightly loopy church-girl character Joyce Brown's popularity, and saw this option achieve an overwhelming win. The term is now used invariably in
Walkyverse-affiliated forums and is spreading through other ones.
PSL has very specific usage: one never "has" PSL for the object of affection; one "harbors" PSL.
It's somewhat justifiable in live action, especially if the character is played by a hot person, although it does raise the question of what is actually being fancied (Is a viewer fancying
Lindsay Monroe because of Anna Belknap, the character herself, or a combination of the two?). But it gets into the seriously weird when you're dealing with animated characters. (Or not, as realists accept that their chances of being with, say, George Clooney are about the same as being with Kamina above.) Another justification that we give ourselves is that putting purely fictional characters into
ahem situations has less creepy spillover to any real life people. Let's face it, a lot of
Shipping would actually be
wrong if we applied the same standards to
Real Life. And, of course, many animated characters are
intended to be attractive to the viewer (particularly in anime, but to some extent in Western animation as well), in which case it could be argued that PSL is the response the character designers intended in the first place.
Compare
Fetish Fuel.
Got a thing for a fictional character that you really want to let
the world TV Tropes know about? Take it to
Troper Tales! (Be aware, this is
very much Truth In Television. You have been warned.)
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- In Genshiken, the Otaku Madarame referred to this as "2-D Complex" during an epic rant where he defended this to Saki, the Dungeonmasters Girlfriend of the series. Frighteningly, he pointed out occurrences of this trope throughout history.
- The first season of Yu-Gi-Oh GX made a few jokes about "card crushes", unreasonable attraction to Duel Monsters cards. One episode had Daichi snickering over the concept... until realizing he felt that way about White Magician Pikeru (which is technically Lolicon on top of harboring). He then went a little berserk.
- Inverted by Season 3, the entire plot of which involves a Duel Monsters card (Yubel) in love with his/her former owner (Judai).
- And of course there's Yugi's Grandpa in the Abridged series, as mentioned above. It's also implied that Yugi has a thing for the Dark Magician Girl (Like grandfather like grandson?) and that's not even getting into the fact that it's suggested Kaiba likes those Blue Eyes Dragons a little TOO much. If You Know What I Mean.
- In the episode Duel Monsters Spirit Day, all the attendees fall for what they think is a Dark Magician Girl cosplayer, but is in fact the "real" article. In all honesty, given her obvious charms, is Sho/Cyrus' PSL all that unreasonable?
- It gets worse. Way worse. Supposed mathematician/genius dueler Misawa had card crushes on Thunder Nyan Nyan and Dian Keto the Cure Master. Thunder Nyan Nyan is understandable, I guess, being a Catgirl and all but Dian K... OH MY GOD MY EYES
- Those two cards were actually card crushes for Sho/Syrus and Hayato/Chumley, respectively. And the concept of the card crush appeared in the episode where Misawa was
raped forced to duel with Amazoness Taniya...after which, he just started falling in love with any cute lady Duel Monster he saw. In fact, possibly as Lampshade Hanging of this episode, one of his decks in the Tag Force game series is built around Pikeru and its counterpart Ebon Magician Curran.
- To be fair to Dian Keto, the card had its art changed for the English release. Before, she was (to quote this article) 'a green-haired, half-naked, plus-sized woman in a blue dress holding an Ankh', and actually didn't look that bad for her weight. Then they Macekred it into the ambiguous-gender nightmare we now know and swap out for 'Poison of the Old Man'.
- Take it with a grain of salt, but comparing the original to the American version, I'd say it makes more sense, but still rates high up there in Nightmare Fuel.
- And Brain Bleach.
- In Axis Powers Hetalia, Kiku Honda, the personification of Japan, says that he prefers 2D. He says that that your body will be clean, even though your heart will be soiled.
- This is just about the entire point of the Japanese magazine Megami, which features clean (if suggestive) official artwork and posters of the hot anime du jour's female cast. A high percentage of Ship Tease debuts here, especially where same sex couples are implied.
- When Renge first appears in Ouran High School Host Club, it's because she's got a bad case of PSL for a character in her Dating Sim games that looks exactly like Kyouya.
- Fushigi Yuugi's supercouple counts; Miaka is a real person, Tamahome a character in a book.
Film
Live Action TV
- The Red Dwarf discussion between Lister and the Cat on whether Betty Rubble or Wilma Flintstone is more attractive. Even Lister admits it's "an insane conversation".
Lister: Of course... she'll never leave Fred and we know it.
Cat: I'd go with Betty, but I'd be thinking of Wilma.
- Inverted in The Colbert Report, where for a long time there was a Running Gag of (fictional) Stephen Colbert having Perverse Sexual Lust for the very real CNN anchorwoman Soledad O'Brien.
- Completely justified since Soledad is fine.
- Also, this.
- Working Daze actually had Rita - the Pointy Haired Boss of the strip harboring a giant crush on Stephen Colbert's on-screen persona (and had temporarily displaced Bill Gates). A few characters actually lampshaded this.
- Colbert can also be seen to be harbouring Perverse Sexual Lust for Sweetness, his handgun. The mind boggles.
- And Jon Stewart's on-screen persona, which is very close to his real persona, has a thing for Colbert. Judging from his signature lustful-tongue-groping gesture anyways....plus, he acts like Stephen's battered wife whenever they're together.
- Writers on The Shield acknowledged the vocal fandom that sprung up around supporting cast member Detective Ronnie Gardocki, by having one of his fellow detectives (Steve Billings) be obsessed with having a friendship with him, leading to other characters outright claiming that Billings had a "mancrush" on his coworker.
- On one edition of The Weekend Update, a character played by Will Ferrell admitted to having "impure thoughts about that hippie Muppet." *
That would be Janice, from the band Electric Mayhem.
Music
- The song "One Week" from Barenaked Ladies cites Sailor Moon of all things as them harboring PSL for.
Gotta get in tune with
Sailor Moon, 'cause that cartoon has got the boom anime babes, That make me think the wrong thing
NewspaperComics
- Norwegian comic-strip Nemi has the main character harbouring PSL for not only Batman but also the Phantom Blot (yes, the Mickey Mouse antagonist). And Legolas, so very much.
Video Games
Web Original
- The Nostalgia Chick doesn't make it even ten seconds into her Labyrinth review before making it incredibly obvious that she wants Jareth's junk.
- I think it would be more noteworthy to point out girls who don't.
- The Nostalgia Critic made an entire video dedicated to PSL for animated characters. He ends it with "If you were aroused by this, get help! They're not real!"
- Linkara falls into a daydream (complete with "Dream Weaver" by Gary Wright) at the mention of Harley Quinn. To be fair, it was a review of a really horrible comic, but still...
- He also apparently sees her in a Rorschach ink blot test. "Harley Quinn, Harley Quinn, Harley Quinn...Oh look! A bunny rabbit!"
Webcomics
- Shortpacked!, a spinoff of It's Walky! that regularly subverts itself, uses the name and inverts the trope when Robin, a fictional character, starts harboring Perverse Sexual Lust for Greg Killmaster, a real-life special effects technician for Industrial Light & Magic, because of his awesome name.
- A (more) fiction version is harbored by Amber for Donatello.
- Seen and Lampshaded in this strip from "Loserz".
- Fellow Keenspot (at the time) comic College Roomies From Hell referenced the acronym (though not the trope itself, as it's about one fictional character's lust for another) but instead claimed it stood for "Pouring Saliva, Largely".
- Candi REALLY has a thing for anime characters, especially Ranma.
- It is widely felt that Junko's attraction to old man snake in Megatokyo is meant to indicate that she really does prefer older men even when money isn't involved. It still freaks her teacher out.
- Shakespeare in Irregular Webcomic has a bad case of this for Hermione Granger.
