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What Do You Mean, It's Not for Little Girls?

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Rated M for "My Daughter?"

YouTube user: Is this a children's show? If so, why is there a picture of girl mounting another girl lying on the floor?
Uploader: It's NOT a children show.
— Comments on the opening to Hidamari Sketchnote 

So you find a new show and it has an all-female cast, lots of pastel colors, and improbably high levels of cuteness. And you think "this would be a perfect show for my eight-year-old sister."

And then you discover that the show airs at 3 AM and has a fandom that's mostly 16- to 40-year-old males. After the initial shock is over you start to wonder why any man would even consider watching a show like this, or why your male buds that like it even have such interests in a series about feminine shenanigans or are invested in flowery romance between girls that can't even express attraction to guys. Alternatively, you might be a woman or girl wondering why this series you and your fellows enjoy wasn't even primarily made for them, as it would have all the trappings of a perfect girls' show. Or, you might even be a lesbian yourself wondering why this perfect Yuri Genre show was made for the opposite older straight male demographic.

Well, it's because men like cute girls. (Not in that way.)

That's not to say that such shows necessarily contain things that would be inappropriate for your little sister, it's just that they're not specifically intended for little girls to watch. Some of these shows do manage a female fanbase on the side. Relatedly, entertainment actually targeted to young girls, especially in the field of music, has become increasingly sexualized, blurring the lines further. The classic examples are idol singers and girl groups such as Britney Spears, the Spice Girls, and Destiny's Child. (While Korean Pop Music is much less sexualized, it is still intended for older girls above the age of 14 instead of young girls.) Just take a look at any Toddlers & Tiaras-type show.

On works with cast of other side of gender spectrum, sometimes female-oriented works with Bishōnen characters and bright and flowery setting can be confused as Shōjo genre works for young girls, where in reality, some of these works are classed as either Josei or Boys' Love made for adult female (or male, in case of Boys' Love) audiences. Even an Otome Game that has all the trappings of content for younger girls can make you wonder why are they made for older female demographic.

A subtrope of What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?. Not to be confused with a Subverted Kids' Show, which is meant to horrify, or a show that is for little girls but also has an older male fanbase.

See also Moe, Boys' Love Genre, Josei, Girl-Show Ghetto, Testosterone Brigade and Values Dissonance. Can be a problem if a Moral Guardian shows this to a child and it's a Yuri Genre show. Compare with Multiple Demographic Appeal.

Again, note that all that is actually required for this trope is that the work is aimed at an older and/or male or unisex audience, not that it has any overt child-unfriendly content.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Advertising 
  • It's Happy Bunny looks like a cute cartoon character but is associated with insulting slogans.

    Anime & Manga 
  • Azumanga Daioh is about the daily lives of a bunch of high school girls. The manga is serialized in Dengeki Daioh, a Shonen magazine.
  • Lucky Star's bright colors and cute, childish-looking female characters make it seem like it's aimed at young girls. Most of the characters are actually in their late teens (the art style just makes them look younger) and the anime has a lot of references to Otaku culture that would go right over a younger audience's head, plus there are several jokes about Konata's father having a particular interest in underage girls. While the manga is technically shonen, the anime aired late at night.
  • In fact, the majority of "cute girls doing cute things" shows are targeted towards the Seinen Demographic. Case in point: Is the Order a Rabbit?, Kiniro Mosaic, A Channel, Kanamemo, Yuyushiki, Hanayamata, K-On!, Hidamari Sketch and GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class and Place to Place are all serialized in the same seinen magazine line (Manga Time Kirara).
    • K-On! was originally intended for a male audience, but appears to have garnered an extensive female fanbase in its wake as well. This is largely due to the anime adaptation toning down the fanservice and Ship Tease from the manga while adding more character focus. The anime even aired on the Japanese Disney Channel with some minor censorship, and Scuttlebutt has it that in France, K-On! has been promoted in young girls' publications like Winx Magazine.
    • Hidamari Sketch: See the quote. It is relatively clean, but the manga is aimed at the seinen demographic and the anime first aired at Otaku O'Clock, with spots of Les Yay here and there.
    • GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class is a light-hearted 4-koma Manga about 5 art school girls, with an almost childishly simple Puni Plush art style and virtually no real conflict or drama. Its demographic is listed as Seinen.
    • Place to Place is a very cutesy, relatively clean slice of life show about a schoolgirl's first crush. Despite this, its manga runs in a seinen magazine, and the anime aired at 1:25 a.m. on TBS.
    • Laid-Back Camp is a comfy, relaxing series about a group of friends going camping around the country during the off-season. There is pretty much nothing overtly objectionable about the series (aside from perhaps Minami's occasional drunken antics), but the manga runs in a seinen magazine and the anime adaptation tends to air late at night.
  • Hanamaru Kindergarten focuses on a trio of kindergarten-aged girls and their teacher, and they're drawn in a cute art style. The manga ran in a seinen magazine while the anime adaptation aired at Otaku O'Clock, and the main source of humor is how one of the little girls wants to marry her teacher...and her mother is completely fine with that, all while being Played for Laughs.
  • Inuyasha has a female lead, a focus on romance, and a majority female fanbase. It is a shonen work, not a shojo one.
  • Love Live!:
    • Despite being about cute, brightly-colored female characters working together to make their dreams come true as idols, it's actually a seinen franchise (its manga adaptations and supplementary materials are published in the seinen magazine Dengeki G's). That said, it's also become popular enough with young girls that like K-On!, the first anime ended up airing on the Japanese Disney Channel. Aside from the obligatory Beach Episodes, the various anime series are mostly devoid of fanservice, which is largely restricted to official artwork in supplementary print material (including most infamously a magazine print of Rina Tennoji donning the memetic Virgin Killer Sweater), leaving the franchise safe for younger viewers despite being aimed at adult men.
    • In Hong Kong and Taiwan, Love Live! is a kids' show, airing on My Kids TV, the same channel that airs PriPara. It also appears in the same children's magazine as franchises like Pretty Cure, the works of Disney and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
    • The second series, Love Live! Sunshine!!, aired on the Japanese Disney Channel and NHK's E-Tele service, both of which are aimed at kids. It also got a series of children's books!. Not to mention Funimation actually marketed Sunshine to American girls, putting it on the shoujo section of its website and advertising male idol series aimed at girls on the Blu-rays.
  • The Lyrical Nanoha franchise may look like a typical Magical Girl series for young girls at first glance, but its primary target audience has always been adult men. Its promotional materials and manga adaptations are printed in seinen magazines and it began its life as a Spin-Off of the H-Game Triangle Heart 3: Sweet Songs Forever. The first season even has some fanservice; the next ones less so. In some countries they removed the fanservice and marketed it as a shonen show. They still left all the cases of child abuse by the villains, though. Even though it's a Magical Girl series it's very heavy on the sci-fi and seems more like a Gundam series—intentionally, after one of the writers noticed that Nanoha's Barrier Jacket made her look like a moe Gundam. Later installments take away the Magical Girl elements and put more emphasis on the sci-fi and action elements, making it much more obviously aimed at men.
  • Similar to Nanoha, Happy Seven and Rakugo Tennyo Oyui are both Sailor Moon-style Magical Girl Warrior shows that cater to the moe aesthetic and air at Otaku O'Clock.
  • Princess Tutu is a surprisingly dark fairytale despite its cutesy name and artwork - not only that, but the manga is actually a shonen, despite ADV Manga mislabeling its demographic as for 5-10 year old girls.
  • Moetan is about a Magical Girl who teaches her crush English. Blatant (Older Than She Looks) Lolicon Fanservice ensues.
  • Pretty Face: In one of his omake, Kano talks about how a little girl came up to him at Jump Festa with her mother and told him she loved Pretty Face and got his autograph. The manga is actually shonen and has quite a lot of fanservice.
  • Strike Witches might seem to be for girls judging from the cast, but any of the promotional art should make it clear, from the skimpy outfits and aerial combat, that it is filled with Fanservice all the way through.
  • When you first hear that Kiss Players is about Transformers powering up by getting a kiss from a human girl, you might think that the series is aimed at young girls. But then when you see the blatant, unrelenting sexual imagery, you think different.
  • Can be averted or downplayed with Azur Lane: Slow Ahead!. It's averted if one knows that Azur Lane, the game the manga is based on, is a Fanservice filled Bullet Hell game targeted towards men. It's downplayed if one focuses on the marketing that emphasizes a Moe aspect and that the leading girls are cute and youthful. The actual series however makes it clear that it's not a full on "Cute Girls Doing Cute Things" show, thanks to all the Dysfunction Junction Black Comedy and Fanservice from the mature ship girls that is retained from the game. The Power of Friendship is also secondary to the girls lusting after the Chick Magnet Commander driving a few plots, though he remains The Ghost. A few comic strips or episodes will clear things the marketing doesn't.
  • Horimiya is a charming Romantic Comedy that is full of pretty boys, lacks overt fanservice and a more relatable female lead in Hori. It is also targeted towards the Shounen demographic.
  • Inverted for Spellbound! Magical Princess Lil'Pri, while it is for girls, it is also for a more open market then just young girls due to Telecom's Past Productions.
  • The trope is actually inverted by Sabagebu!. Knowing this trope, one might think the series is for a seinen audience, especially considering it mixes in a surprising amount of blood in an otherwise moe series, but the manga is in fact shojo.
  • Chi's Sweet Home is about a cute little kitty cat and it's in a... seinen manga magazine. There is nothing actually inappropriate for young kids in the series though (indeed, the anime aired on preschool channel JimJam alongside such fare as Hello Kitty and Angelina Ballerina), so how the heck a manga as child friendly as this ended up in a seinen magazine will be a Riddle for the Ages. (Fridge Logic suggests that the staff of the magazine probably thought Chi's Sweet Home would serve as a palate cleanser for the readers in case the seinen mangas got too violent for their taste).
  • Tantei Opera Milky Holmes, while slapsticky, was aiming for the otaku audience from the start. Some of the things Twenty does are a big enough giveaway.
  • Bamboo Blade: It's about a group of high school girls who are in their school's kendo club. And the manga is serialized in a... seinen manga magazine.
  • YuruYuri might be about cute middle-school girls, but it has plenty of yuri and it's clearly for a male audience. There's also the running joke about how Akari's older sister Akane secretly has a very incestuous obsession with her.
  • Chobits is by the creators of Cardcaptor Sakura (which is primarily aimed at little girls) and has a similarly cute art style, but it's actually a Seinen series with a fair amount of Fanservice and existential themes. It was adored by teenage and preteen girls at the Turn of the Millennium anime boom, probably because their parents glanced at the covers (which all depict Chii wearing pretty, elaborate outfits) and thought it must be innocent and girly.
  • Sasami: Magical Girls Club is a Cute Witch anime that superficially looks a lot like Ojamajo Doremi. It aired at 1:30 am, and it's actually a spinoff from Tenchi Muyo!, a sci-fi harem series that's definitely not aimed at young girls.
  • A Little Snow Fairy Sugar is an extremely cutesy show about a young girl who hangs out with cute little fairies who create the weather. It aired at Otaku O'Clock and the manga adaptation was Shōnen. This is a very odd example, noting that the show itself is very G-rated.
  • Although Non Non Biyori is relatively clean and can be enjoyed by little girls, this show aired at around 2:00 AM.
  • Also from Studio Shaft is Puella Magi Madoka Magica. It has cute character designs by the creator of Hidamari Sketch, and the show itself starts off innocently enough; but by the end of Episode 3, it becomes a dark and deconstructive take on the genre more suited to an adult audience. The fact that Gen Urobuchi is heavily involved is also a big tipoff to anyone who knows his Signature Style. The third movie invokes this even more; it starts out by thrusting the characters into a stereotypical Magical Girl series setting, and then cranks up the horror.
  • Wandering Son is a Slice of Life centered around kids aging from elementary to high school. The anime has a watercolor style as well. Despite all this it's a seinen, and its content delves deeply into gender and growing up in a way more common in works for teens and adults. It's less graphic than a lot of the mangaka's other works though.
  • Bokura no Hentai has a very cute, almost simplistic art style and the protagonists are mostly middle schoolers. Marika is very much The Cutie with an idealistic viewpoint who basically thinks she's in a 70s shojo manganote  ... But it's a rather dark seinen series dealing with anything from puberty to sexual abuse.
  • Girl Friends (2006) focuses a lot on fashion, cosmetics, and other typically girly things, giving people the impression that it's a Shoujo manga. Even the fact that it's a Yuri Genre series doesn't prevent this, since yuri manga aimed specifically at girls does exist, so people just assume that it's meant for a LGBT conscious young adult audience considering how realistically it handles the issues of a budding sexuality. Thus, people tend to be surprised when they discover that it ran in Comic High, a seinen magazine.
  • Yuki Yuna is a Hero and the rest of Yuusha De Aru are a seinen Magical Girl Warrior series with Slice of Life elements and a cute art style. It has some fanservice that would be unusual in a series for middle school girls, but it's mostly tame. The series revolves around girls helping people out and has a huge flower motif. A little over halfway through the series it takes turn for the worst that gives Madoka a run for its money. The girls are less Kid Heroes and more Child Soldiers meant to be sacrifices to the World Tree in a slow, agonizing manner. One of the characters even attempts suicide on-screen, and it's said she attempted it over ten times.
  • School-Live! is a cute-looking manga about high school girls surviving a Zombie Apocalypse on their own. Despite the cute character designs, it contains a large amount of Nightmare Fuel, a fair share of gorn, and a truck load of general despair. The anime adaptation is Lighter and Softer but still gets fairly dark.
  • Satou Kashi no Dangan wa Uchinukenai sounds like it's something out of a shoujo manga. It's about a somber middle school girl who is befriended by the eccentric New Transfer Student who thinks she's a mermaid. There's a lot of hand-holding between the two and the light novel has moe, brightly colored artwork. But with a title like A Lollipop Or A Bullet you shouldn't expect cute fluff from the manga. It's anything but. Umino is severely abused by her father and in a truly Tear Jerker of a Bittersweet Ending she ends up brutally murdered by him.
  • Symphogear is a show about a group of girls who fight with the power of music, but the fighting outfits that they wear are a tad revealing, and the show is much darker than it seems (think Puella Magi Madoka Magica). Just in the first episode alone, there is death and blood.
  • Mao-chan is basically a Moefied Evangelion (minus the more disturbing elements). The "transformation sequences" are more technological than magical and are stylized like military uniforms. Of course, it was written by Ken Akamatsu, so that should come as no surprise.
  • For that matter, Akamatsu's next work after that, Negima! Magister Negi Magi. "Cute 10-year-old boy genius ends up as a teacher at an all-girls middle school" sounds like the premise for a Slice of Life or Romantic Comedy series. Then the first sneeze comes and you realize it's going to be that kind of series. Then you reach volume 4 or so and you realize that it isn't; it's actually a shonen action series (though the fanservice never really goes away) that was designed as a Harem Anime comedy for a couple of volumes because Akamatsu had been pigeonholed by Love Hina and needed to disguise his true intent from his editors.
  • From the perspecitve of an American, Show by Rock!! isn't tonally any different than any other series about a girl band, a la Jem or Josie and the Pussycats. The truth is that this is actually an attempt by Sanrio to market to young men, and it shows on Otaku O'Clock. The mobile game it's based on, however, has a wide and diverse audience (in Japan, at least).
  • Sanrio also brought us Aggretsuko, a series about a cute red panda who's also a put-upon and deeply frustrated Office Lady. Despite the characters looking no different from any other cutesy Sanrio critter, it's squarely aimed at adults and has some content inappropriate for kids. Unlike many examples, it's aimed at adult working women rather than men, however.
  • Magical Play would be easy to mistake as a children's magical girl series, considering its artwork prominently features its young cast and it's categorized under "Kids & Family" by distributor Sentai Filmworks. However, the DVD is rated TV-14, and the show is, in fact, a magical girl parody with fanservice-based humor and some surprising violence.
  • Rozen Maiden is a fairly colourful, seemingly Magical Girl-esque manga about seven living dolls in various styles of Elegant Gothic Lolita clothes... and rated seinen, because it contains life-or-death battles, themes of abuse and Parental Neglect, and generally offers a surprisingly bleak outlook seeing how the dolls eventually have to kill each other because There Can Be Only One. There is however, a Shōjo spinoff called Rozen Maiden: Dolls Talk, but it's a Lighter and Softer comedy series.
  • A movie theater listings website for New York City listed the delayed viewing of the BanG Dream! 5th Live concert under "Family", when the series in question is actually aimed at otaku.
  • Chihayafuru is a series about a high school girl who gets into competitive karuta (a type of card game). It's often mistaken for a shoujo but ran in a josei magazine.
  • Amazon lists Sound! Euphonium under Kids and Family for this reason. While it is about cute girls in a band, it was made for otaku.
  • King of Prism is a Spin-Off of Pretty Rhythm: Rainbow Live, which was originally marketed towards elementary and middle school girls. However, King of Prism is aimed at an older female demographic and the series' director, Masakazu Hishida, had initially pitched it as a late-night series (and the television broadcast of the third film, Shiny Seven Stars, was broadcast at 1:30 AM). Despite elements of the other Pretty Series appearing in King of Prism, it is not officially listed as the Pretty Series to keep its marketing demographics separate.
  • O Maidens in Your Savage Season by Mari Okada is a serious look at a group of teenage girls struggling through puberty and would thus seem aimed at an audience of teenage girls. It ran in Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine.
  • Akebi's Sailor Uniform is a Coming of Age Story about Komichi, a girl who's just entered middle school, which makes it seem as though it's aimed at preteen girls like her. The manga is actually seinen, and while it's mostly clean there are still some very noticeable moments of Fanservice and Male Gaze.
  • Yuri Kuma Arashi has a cute and brightly-colored art style, and some of the characters are really bears disguised as human girls, with their bear forms looking more like cute teddy bears than real bears. However, the anime is largely about lesbians dealing with a homophobic society, and it contains some violence and quite a bit of nudity and sexual themes; the opening alone revels in sensual imagery.
  • Oshi no Ko may look like a cute show about the life of an idol from its' artstyle, but it's actually about the dark side of the idol industry, and a major plotline is that the main idol in the story gets murdered.

    Comic Books 
  • Barbara Slate's Angel Love comic book series of the 1980s, having rather cute cartoonish artwork, yet dealing with serious topics such as drug abuse, abortion, critical illnesses, and incest.
  • Zig-zagged with The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. The series was originally promoted as if it was aimed at hard-core comics fanboys who were reading it for the character's Ascended Meme status and the many jokes about obscure Marvel continuity, but it has become very popular with actual preteen girls, with enthusiastic support from Marvel-fan geek parents who are happy that their daughters have a Marvel comic to read that is optimistic and morally-uplifting in its tone and not full of sexual Fanservice, graphic violence, and depressing Black-and-Gray Morality and Downer Ending-filled plotlines. It helps that the fanboy in-jokes aren't obnoxious about rubbing it in non-fanboy readers' faces that they're missing out on anything. Ryan North and Erica Henderson have made it clear that they are completely happy about this and deliberately intended the comic for both demographics.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Josie and the Pussycats (2001) is, on the surface, about a Girl Group and has a very lighthearted tone, and as a result seems to be a cutesy film for kids. However, the actual intent of the film was to be a satire on capitalism, something that a fully-educated adult audience would have a much easier time grasping. Unfortunately, reviewers judged it as a kids’ film, and as a result missed the deeper meaning that it was going for.

    Literature 
  • Warriors is often associated with young girls due to its cat protagonists. It's a unisex series that pushes its Middle Grade Literature rating with the amount of mature content it contains, meaning it's not recommended for kids under 10.
  • Magical Girl Raising Project looks like a normal Magical Girl series with a cute art style, but it's actually a Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction where the Magical Girls must kill one another to survive.
  • Jade Green generally appears on YA book lists nowadays, but for a while in the early 2000s, teachers often recommended it to middle school girls due to its short length and the author's other books (notably, Shiloh). The plot centers around the ghost of a teenage girl whose 40-year-old adopted brother raped her, cut her hand off with the cleaver she was trying to use in self-defense, and left her to bleed out on the attic stairs. The book is set three years later and there's no graphic flashback, but still not exactly PG fare.

    Live-Action TV 

    Music 
  • There's a video of a five-year-old girl singing the "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?" line from Labelle's "Lady Marmalade." Presumably the train of thought was "It's about dancing, right? Girls love dancing!" Too bad it's not about dancing, it's about a prostitute, and the line translates to "Do you want to sleep with me tonight?"
  • One of the group Mosaic.wav's most well-known songs is the ending theme to the very much for little girls Mamotte! Lollipop. So the show's target audience (and their parents) might be a little shocked to find out the band who did the ending theme is mostly otherwise known for doing themes to eroge.
  • Denpa Song in general is this trope as a musical style. Sickeningly cutesy vocals, ultra happy melodies, and high BPM are all staples of the style, making it seem like the target audience is young girls, but with a few exceptions like the above mentioned Kyun Kyun Panic and some songs from PriPara, denpa is made by and for adults in the otaku subculture, and some contain lyrics inappropriate for kids. And, unfortunately, some even have inappropriate lyrics about kids. There is of course some crossover appeal, especially with more mainstream acts like dempagumi.inc.
  • The Spice Girls. It's hard to tell exactly how much of their "Girl Power" theme was serious, and how much was self-parody, but their lyrics make it clear that it was at least about sexual liberation... to the dismay of the parents of the 8 year olds who would parrot the lyrics.
  • Back in The '90s, "Barbie Girl" by Aqua was all the rage with young girls... Despite containing lyrics like "undress me everywhere". Mattel did end up making a Bowdlerized version for their Barbie commercials, however.
  • Oingo Boingo's 1981 track "Little Girls" is indeed about them... but from a certain point of view.
  • Melanie Martinez dresses in sweet lolita-style attire in soft colors. Her voice is sweet sounding and she has songs with names like "Teddy Bear", "Sippy Cup", "Milk And Cookies", and "Dollhouse". She must be kid friendly, right? Nope. For example, "Dollhouse" is about a dysfunctional family trying to keep the facade of a happy family despite the fact the dad cheats, the son uses drugs, and the mom drinks to ignore her husband's infidelity. Even her most PG songs like "Pity Party" are about stuff like having a breakdown because no one came to your birthday party. Most of her songs have heavy amounts of Lyrical Dissonance.
  • Due to being a Disney popstar for years, Miley Cyrus continued to be popular with tweens even after she went Hotter and Sexier.
  • TLC were a much more Darker and Edgier girl group than their contemporaries, with "No Scrubs" using the term "broke-ass" to refer to loser guys and "Waterfalls" having gritty lyrics about HIV/AIDS and the drug trade... to the dismay of the parents of little girls who played their songs in their slumber parties.
  • Hypnosis Mic is a female-oriented music franchise with a Cast Full of Pretty Boys made by Otomate. At first glance, it looks similar to other female-oriented male idol franchises, just with Hip-Hop as the main genre. However, it is markedly more mature than most, with some songs being rated as Explicit. To say nothing of the series' story, that is Darker and Edgier than most female-oriented male idol franchises. The spinoff manga of the series notably ran on three different Shonen magazines and are classified as such.

    Theatre 
  • There are a lot of little girls who love Waitress, despite it having cursing, sexual scenes, and adult themes that would go over a kid's head. An early example of this would be the song "The Negative", which is centered around the results of Jenna's pregnancy test.

    Toys 
  • Little Apple Dolls might be popular with more Nightmare Fetishist preteens, but they probably look like something for your six-year-old daughter or sister. The protagonists are all little girls, but they're Dead All Along and creepy. The dolls are also expensive and made for collecting.
  • Living Dead Dolls is a brand of horror dolls aimed at a 15+ audience. The dolls have been banned in Greek and were almost banned in both Ireland and Singapore because people thought they were aimed at kids.
  • Not all Barbie dolls are aimed at little girls. It has multiple dolls aimed at teenage and adult collectors.

    Video Games 
  • The iDOLM@STER:
    • A cute game series about pop stars! With catchy songs, cute dresses and tons of accessories to dress up. But the target audience is otaku, with overpriced DLC no young girl (or most adults) can afford. Worth noting though is that Bandai Namco Entertainment attempted to get girls into the series with articles about THE iDOLM@STER: Dearly Stars in girls magazines and the addition of a boy band in The iDOLM@STER 2, but it never really caught on. Once their other idol game series actually intended for young girls, Aikatsu!, became popular, they stopped trying to market iM@S to girls. Or at least LITTLE girls.
    • The male-focused spinoff game THE iDOLM@STER: SideM is targeted at girls... Teenage girls and young women, though, not little girls. It's an Idol Game with otome game elements.
    • The animated adaptations also fall under this too. Of note is THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls, which notably has an episode in which had an entire episode's plot be set off by the producer getting Mistaken for Pedophile for following around three idols and sent to a police box, causing the trio and Chihiro to try and search for him.
  • Story of Seasons was originally aimed at a gender-neutral audience, but you wouldn't know it by its mainly female fandom. The first few games had male-only protagonists but eventually they added females, either in a Game-Favored Gender manner (women couldn't play past marriage) or in their own Distaff Counterparts. Modern games always have an option to chose your gender. Starting with Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility, incarnations of the game have began to look a lot more Bishoujo than before, with things coming to a head in Story of Seasons (2014).
  • You'd be surprised at how many clueless parents get Neptunia games for their young daughters. You'd think the Cleavage Windows front and center and the T (M in the case of mk2) rating would be enough... Though it's much more understandable with re;birth 1 and Producing Perfection, which feature modest costumes and very bright colors on the box.
    • What makes Producing Perfection all the more troubling is that alphabetically it is placed right next to the still T-rated (3+ in Europe) but more family friendly Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA games in store displays. Considering Hatsune Miku has a lot of young fans, all it takes is a confused parent who has a child that's into Vocaloid and difficulty remembering long game names seeing two Vita games with an anime Pop Idol on the cover, picking the wrong one and giving their ten-year-old girl a game that gives you points for upskirt shots, has risque dialog pushing the envelope, and even has nude scenes. Not to mention, a lot of parents dismiss T ratings in rhythm games due to otherwise family-friendly games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band having the same rating solely due to language and suggestive themes in song lyrics. That's not to say that the ten-year-old wouldn't enjoy the game.
  • Arcana Heart features an all-female cast, and some of the cover and promo art would not be out of place for a cheerleading sim. It's a Fighting Game franchise that rivals Guilty Gear and BlazBlue in complexity and SNK in difficulty.
  • Touhou Project is a Video Game series about little (looking) girls firing colourful dots, arrows and lasers at each other, with many of the characters wearing frilly Elegant Gothic Lolita outfits (though characters in later games tend to wear outfits in other kinds of fashion). However, the games are one of the most famous examples of Bullet Hell Shoot 'Em Up, even if Cute 'em Up is in full swing. Suffice to say, despite their bright and cheery appearance, the games have loads of characters to keep track of, comparatively difficult plots and are just Nintendo Hard throughout, so while there's nothing in the games that's inappropriate for children (there's no sex or romance whatsoever, the combat is bloodless fantasy violence, and none of the girls are dressed in skimpy clothing), most of the games' content would still be hard for children to follow or understand. The various manga and other related literature also tend to be darker and more depressing compared to the games, sometimes even going as far as being outright scary or visibly violent. That said, despite all this, the series has a huge Periphery Demographic of children (both boys and girls), although many of them don't actually play the games. Many kids attend Reitaisei (an annual Fan Convention dedicated solely to the Touhou series) with their parents, and the franchise's creator ZUN once received a hearfelt fan letter from an elementary school girl.
  • Medabots is a kid friendly franchise. When it was announced they were making a game called Medabots Girls Mission fans thought it was a female-aimed installment aimed at little girls. It's actually a Hotter and Sexier 15+ rated game with Clothing Damage on its female protagonists and lots of blatant fanservice.
  • Most Atelier Series games have teenage female protagonists in a Slice of Life story with a moe aesthetic. This contrasts greatly with the gameplay, which is that of a hardcore JRPG with a brutal difficulty curve if you fail to master the deep and complex Item Crafting mechanics, which might leave younger players frustrated, bored and/or confused. And that's not getting into the large amount of Fanservice (of both the male and female characters) in the later games DLC which lets you change the characters into bathing suits, and a Beach or Hot Springs Episode in most games, which should be enough to prove that the target audience is much older than you'd think, and surveys held in Japan revealed most of the players are women.
  • I=MGCM shares two traits with Shoujo anime series Pretty Cure: Evil-exterminating magical girl warriors and colorful visuals. However, the former is rated 17+ in smartphones and PC due to some Fanservice-laden characters, stripperiffic costumes, and Jiggle Physics in the gameplay. Not to mention some mind-screwingly Darker and Edgier moments, which include some heroines' recurring plotline deaths and a few of them are subsequently corrupted into demons, and Humanoid Abomination demon bosses which make this game almost equivalent to a Magical Girl Genre Deconstruction (and there’s an official NSFW version for PC, and it’s even worse).
  • Touken Ranbu is a free-to-play Browser Game with a Cast Full of Pretty Boys with an easy-to-pick-up gameplay and Japanese history educational elements...but aside from the gacha elements, later campaigns soon turn to Darker and Edgier route with bloodshed. To say nothing of the amount of (relatively tamer) Fanservice in some of the character designs and injured poses (which are less than tamer). Adaptations of the game such as the anime, theatrical adaptation, and musical are actually targeted to older demographics. The anime Touken Ranbu - Hanamaru seemingly averts this trope, being Lighter and Softer than its' source material, until you realize that the manga adaptation of the anime is classified as Shōnen.
  • Twisted Wonderland is a mobile game featuring Bishōnen cast of characters with strong associations with the Disney Animated Canon, but it is a Joseimuke work made for women over the age of 17 (given the platform, majority of smartphone users are adults), with the amount of Fanservice and dark themes such as child abuse and mental illness. However, this hasn't stopped Disney itself from promoting it in child and family-friendly spaces such as Disney magazines and social media.
  • As of 2022, the Uma Musume franchise is increasingly becoming this. Although its out-there premise (real-life racehorses, reincarnated as horse-girls in an alternate world!) was originally expected to appeal only to middle-aged male horse-racing fans and hardcore Moe otaku, the surprisingly wholesome premise of female athletes competing for glory has given it an unexpectedly-broad fanbase. Here's street-pianist and occasional cosplayer Kosame doing a piano rendition of the memetic ''Umapyoi Densetsu'' song from the series - of particular note is the little girl passing by with her parents at 1:50, who not only recognizes the song but knows the dance moves.
  • In the 2000s, several PlayStation 2 games in the Simple 2000 series of Japanese budget games were exported to Europe. Among these titles was Party Girlsnote , featuring a bright pink cover that looks like a generic Ultra Super Happy Cute Baby Fest Farmer 3000 shovelware game. This cover says absolutely nothing about the actual gameplay, in which women dressed only in bikinis compete in various minigames, including one where they push each other off a platform and into a pool using only their buttocks, and another in which they suggestively rub a thermometer to increase its temperature until they manage to launch a rocket placed on top of the thermometer. Each minigame is followed by a replay during which the camera angles often focus on the women's breasts and crotches, and there's actually a setting that controls how much their breasts will jiggle during gameplay. The European cover also stands in stark contrast to the original cover for the Japanese market, featuring a group shot of the bikini-clad cast and a CERO 18 rating, whereas the game somehow managed to receive both a 3 rating from PEGI in most of Europe and the equivalent 0 rating from the German USK.
    • This blog post discusses Party Girls and two less egregious examples from the same series, Demolition Girl and Paparazzi. While the former, in which the player battles a bikini model who has been transformed into a giant after being bitten by a strange creature, is described as the tamest of these examples overall, the very first mission involves examining her breasts and buttocks for research purposes, and the cover features a shot of the aforementioned bikini model from behind, which the article describes as "going directly against the PEGI rating, which I’m sure hurt sales some both for bewildered parents and perverts." The latter focuses on photographing the same model, who the player can actually make "adopt a sexy pose"; it also contains at least two uses of "damn". Both games were also rated PEGI 3, in addition to respectively getting 6 and 0 ratings from USK (in contrast, they were both rated 12 by CERO).

    Webcomics 
  • minus. is a brightly-colored cute-looking webcomic about an omnipotent little girl, albeit with a ton of Fridge Horror, but if TV Tropes is anything to go by, most of the people who read the comic are men.

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • Bee and Puppycat, being influenced heavily by the aesthetic of Shōjo and Slice of Life anime, along with its cute, pastel colors, isn't demographically aimed at children so much as young adults around the age of Bee herself. That said, it's not particularly vulgar, crude, or even inappropriate for the standards of an adult cartoon: if you don't mind a cartoon cat saying the word "ass" every few episodes, it's perfectly safe for kids.
  • The Powerpuff Girls was not originally intended for little girls. Craig McCracken created it as a parody of the Magical Girl genre, as he was getting sick of Sailor Moon playing on Cartoon Network's Toonami block every day. As a Take That!, he set the girls' ages very low, had them do very inelegant things, and made the villains cheesier than Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinners. The intended audience for it was the same as Dexter's Laboratory — animation fans in their teens, 20s, and 30s — but it had to be child-appropriate (This was in the days before [adult swim]). A show like this naturally attracted little girls anyway (though the show was unisex aimed). One can only imagine how things would have turned out if McCracken was more annoyed by Dragon Ball Z playing on Cartoon Network every day. McCracken's college assignment that spawned the series, Whoopass Stew (the title alone should make it clear which demographic he wasn't shooting for), went as follows. Girls beat the crap out of the Gangreen Gang. Amoeba Boys rob a bank. Girls try to stop them but get stuck in their bodies. Girls prevail by flying to the sun, which kills the Amoeba Boys in seconds. Speaking of Magical Girls by sheer irony, Toei Animation (the creators of Sailor Moon) remade the series as Powerpuff Girls Z, an actual retelling of the series with a magical girl theme.
  • Making Fiends is actually a relatively dark cartoon about attempting murder with demons, and the colors are anything but bright, pastel or pink. But the two main characters are young girls. The original web animation was for a neutral demographic, but the daughter of a Nickelodeon producer loved it, and so Nick made a deal with Amy Winfrey to turn it into a cartoon. If you look at any of the message boards for Making Fiends, you'll see that male fans are extremely rare, though the show has gotten positive reviews from many male critics. Considering Nickelodeon only aired six episodes of the show back in 2008, it could just be that people in general, male and female, haven't had a chance to see it.
  • Steven Universe has a majority female cast, is all about family and friendship, has quite a bit of romance, and uses bright colors (even the protagonist has a pink theme, though he's male). The creator Rebecca Sugar has been quoted saying that the show is predominantly aimed at 6-to-11 year old boys (and it has a TV-PG rating in America), but the show itself actually has a Multiple Demographic Appeal. It's aimed at an unisex audience and contains quite a few Shout Outs to older works (such as Magical Girl anime) that younger fans probably wouldn't pick up on.

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