Shotacon - Television Tropes & Idioms

Fetish regarding young boys. Originally popularized in BL fandom as the bishonen aesthetic taken to its natural extreme, but more generally refers to an attraction to a male character around 13 years old or less.

Shotacon tends to be less controversial than Lolicon because it's typically played for humor (and because boys are more obsessed with sex, generally speaking). Also, some boys find the idea of physical encounters with older women enticing while others like the aggressive female characters usually involved. So, ironically, it pops up in shonen a lot, even if those boys are on the technical borderline.

If a show has a aggressive, sex-hungry Ojou with an annoying laugh, she's the most likely candidate, although that usually happens if the only potential male targets are very limited.

The name is a portmanteau for Shōtarō complex (正太郎コンプレックス), refering to Shotaro Haneda, the main character of Tetsujin 28, who embodies (and names) the Cute Shotaro Boy trope, which many people found appealing.

Compare Lolicon. See also Cute Shotaro Boy and Mary Kay Letourneau Teaches Here.

Examples:

The nearly thirty year old Shikijo-sensei in Mahoromatic is obsessed with catching the attention of high schoolers, and prone to perverted fantasies about the lead male. In the manga it's elementary students.
Ayaka's affectionate fawning over the ten-year-old Negi in Mahou Sensei Negima. She claims it's just being a maternal figure to him, but no one buys it.
- Come to think of it, almost the entire class is far more affectionate with Negi than they would be with a boy their own age, often all at once, if not outright in love. Then again, Negi seems to be shotacon-inducing whether he likes it or not. Misa makes one of the few non-squicky rationalizations, explaining that in a few years the age difference won't be as noticeable [1]◊.
  - The creepiest example is one of the most innocuous at first glance. Evangeline looks and physically is Negi's age... because she stopped aging five centuries ago. Not to mention the crush she had on his father.
  - There are a couple of exceptions that still manage to fall under this trope. Natsumi seems to be falling for Kotaro instead of Negi, but the latter two are the same age. Meanwhile, Ako is crushing on Negi's "older cousin Nagi", who is actually Negi in disguise (so she's still crushing on a ten-year old, but doesn't realize it).
- This troper once read a joke (or was it?) that stated that if Ayaka ever learned everything about Negi - a mage, a prodigy, a hero, etc - her reaction would be "like that of a Christian who came home to find God sitting on their couch".
Haunted Junction's resident Tsundere and miko (shrine maiden) being a shotacon is a running gag in the series. In fact, she obtains a magical medal from a Casanova-like male ghost because he looks like a Bishonen in his 20 and she only likes younger boys. (And later does get a Cute Shotaro Boy ghost as her busboy)
[[Buttmonkey Hale's]] teacher from Hale Nochi Guu gets this for him which squicks him out.
The obsession one of the (adult) female spies has for (prepubescent) Nakahito in Steel Angel Kurumi, to the point that she writes love poems and makes a borderline-pornographic doujinshi (fan comic book) about him. She also competes for the opportunity to kiss him in Encore.
- Oh, and not to mention the lead love interest.
Arguably the Kanami family in Onegai Teacher. This is somewhat obscured by the audience of the show, as Mizuhois a blatant teenage boy fantasy. Nonetheless, Hatsuho's affection for a son-in-law younger than her daughter and implication their family seems to go for younger men is a little suspicious. This is mostly averted in the show, where it's only their teacher/student relationship that's seen as potentially scandalous, and the rationalization of Kei being technically 18 years old is to handwave why he could be married to her in the first place.
Honey from Ouran High School Host Club offers shotacon fanservice to his regular customers. Ironically, he too is one of the oldest members.
Taro Hanaukyo, the lead from Hanaukyo Maid Tai, inherits a staff of hundreds of beautiful maids, zealously interested in ensuring his needs are met. Every need. Too bad he's not even out of short pants, and a little put off by female attention — in the first series, literally allergic to it.
Yu-Gi-Oh GX: Two of the Seven Star Assassins, a vampiress and an Amazon, had crushes on high school students Kaiser and Misawa. Nothing new about that, but what many fans found surprising was how little these were altered in the dub.
One of the strangest examples comes from Loveless, where the (male) university student, Soubi, aggressively pursues the sixth-grade Ritsuka. What makes it creepy is the fact that this is because, put perhaps too simply, when Ritsuka's older brother died, he "inherited" his older brother's boyfriend/battle partner.
- To his credit, Soubi states in the first volume of the manga and anime that he "can't get excited over a child", implying that he intends to wait until Ritsuka's old enough. Though that doesn't stop him from being very physically and verbally affectionate towards him.
FLCL: Haruko (19) and Mamimi (17) are both after the protagonist Naota, who is 12.
Taken to a slightly disturbing extreme in Papa To Kiss In The Dark: Mira, the main character, is a 15 year old boy engaged in a full fledged sexual relationship with an 29 year old man... who happens to be his father. It turns out that his papa is actually... his uncle. which decreases the level of creepiness even if only slightly.
Boku no Pico and it's sequel, Pico to Chico are hardcore yaoi examples with a title character who appears to be somewhere between eight and twelve years of age.
Western comics example: The various incarnations of Barry Blair's Elflord. Several of his male characters, including the sidhe Windblade, look underage, although their exact ages are never stated. Tight pantyhose and even full nudity occur with monotonous regularity, and sexual relationships between boys and other boys or men are frequently implied.
Diva's obsession with and rape of Riku in Blood Plus.
In The Legend Of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, when Link is a child, the (adult) character Nabooru says that if you help her, she'll do "something great" for you. That part is actually perfectly innocent: "something good" or "something nice" always means an item, so if you've played this far, even if you've never played a Zelda game before, you're not thinking "yeah, I'll bet." However, Nabooru gets kidnapped and you wind up using the item you retrieved for her, which, as dialogue makes clear, isn't what she planned on giving you. When you see her again as adult Link, she says that if she knew you'd grow up to be so handsome, she'd have kept her promise. So, since it's definitely not the item, just what was she planning on doing for a ten-year-old that she wishes she could do for him now that he's an attractive adult?
In X-Men, the X-Babies have all the powers and attributes of the originals. In the case of the X-baby version of Longshot, this includes his Chick Magnetism. Adult women can be seen drooling over this six-year-old version the same way they do the real Longshot (in fact, more so, since it's for comedic purposes.)
Miyu in They Are My Noble Masters has a thing for young boys, to the point that she reads magazines devoted to them everywhere and urges her butler (and curiously also her sister) to wear shorts. At one point she gets a preteen boy band as a present, much to her delight. Of course, she can be easily seen as a shotacon Otaku Surrogate.
Kanokon. Chizuru is pretty much the poster girl of Shotacon, with her repeated attempts to sex up the series' small, timid male lead.
Samurai Warriors' Mori Ranmaru◊. Enough said; in the original game he even has plenty of Ho Yay with Akechi Mitsuhide.
One of the female shopkeepers in Rebena Te Ra in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fate has a pronounced attraction towards preteen boy Yuri. At first, it seems like she just thinks he's cute, but it soon becomes evident that she's got it bad for him. Another NPC expresses serious concern that she's going to do something rash to get him.
- When she meets him again a few years later, she's still fawning over him (and has been thinking about him the entire time, too).
In the manga version of Chrono Crusade, Satella starts being flirtatious with Chrono the moment she sees him. This isn't too odd, considering he's Really Seven Hundred Years Old and moments later she sees him in his true, bishounen demonic form...but when she later gets drunk and pulls him into a hug that ends up with his face in her breasts while he's back in his childlike form, her butler confirms Chrono's greatest fear: "Miss Satella likes younger boys."
Ginrei and Daisaku's relationship in Giant Robo is a little, uhm, suspect, at times.
Everything renowned Hentai author Juan Gotoh has ever done falls into this category (even his inexplicable foray into guro). His most notable work is Boys Empire, a nine-issue series centering around a twelve-year-old named Makoto who ends up (for reasons even he can't work out) sleeping with all but two of the female characters in the series... including his sister and mother. It's actually very sweet by Hentai standards.
In an episode of Shin Chan where first grader Shin and his college student babysitter Nanako were both attending high school... Let's just say Nanako gets lines like "Get used to me being on top, Shin." and "I'm getting so wet just standing here looking at him. I should probably go inside where it's not raining."
An example occurs in Colleen Doran's comic series A Distant Soil. The extremely twisted and very dangerous Lady Sere has a habit of finding beautiful young boys, taking them to her bedroom, then discarding them once they get "too old."
Bat man. 'Nuff said.
In one episode of Fairly Odd Parents, 10-year-old Timmy is implied to have had a whirlwind relationship with a woman named Carly, and had her name tattooed on his arm (and vice-versa). He can't seem to remember it at all, though.
The (albeit brief) Claus/Sophia relationship from Last Exile.
Jennifer's...er, interesting first encounter with Laharl in Disgaea might cause some weird looks. A lot of weird looks. Maybe some fantasies, too. Highlights include attempted Marshmallow Hell, unprovoked sex-ed lessons, and asking him if he's been anally penetrated by tentacle monsters. Yeah, it's one of those games.
The South Park episode "Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy".
The yaoi manga Magical Travel Boy has a boy wizard who is between the ages of 8 and 10 getting lost on a field trip and entering a relationship with a 30something year old man. They try to clean it up by having him transform into a teenager form when actual sex happens, but then slaps you in the face by having him transform back half way through. What's worse is that the kid looks about six and the guy is implied to be even older than he looks.
The Hayate The Combat Butler manga has this in the form of Church Militant Sonia Shaflnarz, who has an inordinate amount of interest toward 13-year-old Wataru. Her manga profile even outright states that she likes "cute little boys."
- Wataru is also treated the same as the female characters in the various Beach and Hot Springs episodes.
In Dragon Drive, Maiko interprets Ms. L's interest in Reiji this way.

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