Self Fanservice / Video Games

• While A3 has a Cast Full of Pretty Boys, the Japanese fanbase tends to give Hisoka very well-defined abs. This includes fanfics. In shipping context, it often involves Homare being in awe at Hisoka's six pack. While the justification is usually Hisoka's former spy background, the game art maintains only Hisoka's petite build. At the same time, the game arts are notorious for not rendering muscle definition most of the time and have caused cases of Unreliable Illustrator.
  • On the other hand, one side often draws Homare very thin and without any muscle definition whatsoever to make him look cute and vulnerable. Meanwhile, the other side draws Homare with more muscle definition or make him muscular in fanfics, and sometimes it reaches Heroic Build proportions. Unfortunately, the game has a fluctuating artstyle. At the same time, it falls into a case of Unreliable Illustrator; Tasuku calls Homare big (except in the English localization), and the sixth anniversary roommate Clothing Switch backstage emphasizes on how "big" Homare is, but the closest thing the official cards and arts have for this is Homare being drawn lean and athletic, when he is not drawn skinny.
• Happens to Amanda from Amanda the Adventurer, in game she is a poorly rendered 3d model character. Fanworks often depict her as an older, taller, and cuter looking version of her.
• Among Us: While the canon characters are Ambiguously Human colourful bean-like creatures, a common portrayal of the crewmates and impostors is as detailed, more realistically-proportioned humans in astronaut suits, usually to heighten the horror elements of the game. As well as comically "thicc" butts.
• Animal Crossing:
  • Sable is a homely but cute hedgehog in her thirties or forties. Expect fanart to ramp up her attractiveness and especially humanized fanart to make her look like she's in her early twenties. Those that keep her age will instead make her very bottom-heavy; some artists make this a family trait, even.
  • Tom Nook is a pudgy middle-aged tanuki who inevitably becomes a slim, young-looking man in humanized fanart. Non-humanized fanart tends to keep his size the same and, if anything, make him into a cute Big Beautiful Man.
  • All female characters lack breasts (either due to them being animals or to emphasise the Vague Age of the protagonists) but fan-artists have a high tendency to give them breasts anyway. Likewise, with Eagle-type Villagers, they're typically built like muscular men.
  • Fan favorite snooty villager Ankha is a particularly common target due to her sheer popularity in the fandom. Her New Leaf outfit wearing a mummy shirt that lends itself to Seductive Mummy interpretations doesn't help.
  • This trope is basically what you get when you subject Isabelle to Rule 34. Body types run the gamut from her canon appearance to more anthropomorphic appearances to even humanized versions; ranging from chubby to svelte to busty or even hyperfeminized. Muscular and athletic interpretations started making the rounds, too, when she was confirmed as a playable character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
    • Amusingly a different version of this trope was shown due to the unholy alliance of Animal Crossing and Doom fans^note the 2020 entries in both franchises came out the same day, with there now being a slew of Isabelle fanart of her either being extremely or reasonably buff and tough (Sometimes very well-endowed) and also wearing the Doomguy or Doom Slayer armor.
• Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning:
  • Baldi is a poorly animated, middle-aged-looking polygonal character with a mouth that makes him looks like he's wearing lipstick, googly eyes, mostly bald with only a single strand of hair sticking up from the top of his egg-shaped head, a voice and nose like Squidward's, noodle limbs, no visible ears, and isn't attractive in the slightest. But in fanart, he is often portrayed◊ as a youthful, good-looking, muscular guy with an appearance◊ similar to Saitama with his one strand of hair becoming a head full of curly blonde hair or suddenly being a side-bang to make him look like a cute baby◊, especially if he is chibified.
  • The Principal of the Thing is just a poorly dithered, barely made out, pixelated realistic image of a man with a weird mouth and face and closed eyes who's holding his finger up and appears to be shouting, with glitched feet. But in fanart◊, he has the appearance of a very tall, svelte, and handsome dude with either curly or messy brown hair and given black eyes. People also ship him with Baldi.
  • Playtime is unnerving-looking with her scribbled-on hair and facial features, while It's a Bully has a warped face and an elliptical torso. Both tend to be portrayed as normal-looking children by fan artists.
  • In the game, Gotta Sweep is literally a broom. He's frequently depicted as a humanoid character with green and white hair in fanart. Nearly all such humanizations make him into a Bishōnen, which clashes hard with his Fat Albert-esque voice.
  • Mrs. Pomp, despite only being a grotesque head in a shoe, has fanart portraying her as a fully humanoid Hot Teacher.
• The Banjo-Kazooie series has this happen to the two main leads. Kazooie, a normal albeit huge bird, often gets turned into an attractive Funny Animal in artwork, a practice that had increased in prominence after the duo's appearance in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Banjo isn't safe either, as some people just really lean in on the "bear" thing or make him into a big, bulky hunk.
• Given that the titular character from Bayonetta is Ms. Fanservice, and the entire game runs on a 50/50 blend of Rule of Cool and Rule of Sexy, there wouldn't be any place for this trope, right? Wrong. Most fanart tends to give her more natural proportions with her arms, legs, and neck despite increasing her bosom and behind, and she often lets that gigantic beehive of a hairdo down, apparently forgetting it's basically the ammunition for her combat magic. And her clothes, but then she's frequently drawn wearing real leather instead of a hair-suit. She also often ends up helpless, overpowered, submissive, and in outright bondage, which are the only ones that really make her creator Hideki Kamiya angry, as he intended her to a dominant Action Girl.
• Beyond Good & Evil:
  • Jade, although attractive on her own, was actually known for her lack of fanservicey-ness because, in contrast to most other female game protagonists at the time, she dresses pretty casually (sporting baggy pants and a jacket over a tanktop) and has realistic proportions. Then along come the fanartists who, if they weren't dressing her in skimpy clothing, were at least upping bustline to levels ranging from "maybe she's wearing a push-up bra in this one" to "Holy back problems, Batman!"
  • On the fangirl end of the scale, there's Double H. Although he has a dorky, appealing personality, his character design isn't especially attractive. Fanart either tends to soften his extremer traits, making him more conventionally handsome, or ignore them completely to make him cute and adorable.
• The Binding of Isaac:
  • The playable characters are canonically tiny, noseless, simplistic 5-year-olds running for their lives from mutants and demons, and they are all heavily implied (and confirmed by Word of God) to be Isaac himself in different costumes. Some fanart instead opts to depict them as adults that have conventionally attractive builds and stay as naked as they are in-game, sometimes with the justification that they're the characters Isaac is supposed to be imagining, and that in-game he's only able to put on the wig/eye patch/etc. to vaguely resemble them. (Which does not explain in-game designs such as Azazel, who has functional bat wings growing out of his back, or Jacob and Esau, who are two people.)
  • In-game, The Siren is a lanky humanoid thing with a Nightmare Face, Glowing Eyes of Doom, and long demon horns. She looks a bit less freakish when her eyes and mouth are closed, however—and perhaps because of this, she is a Cute Monster Girl in most fanart, with her huge sharp teeth downgraded into Cute Little Fangs, and usually with a more defined figure than the Noodle People aesthetic of her sprites.
  • An infamous Game Mod redesigns the Beast — an enormous, demonic monster whose only feminine traits are having a scrap of fabric on her lower body resembling Mom's dress (obscured by a lake of fire in most of her sprites) and being referred to as "the Mother of Harlots" in the Golden Ending — into a three-eyed Hot as Hell demon with an enormous bust.
• BlazBlue: Makoto Nanaya is already Ms. Fanservice, but is also noticeably buff with defined abs, broad shoulders, and large biceps. While there's a lot of fan art that embraces this aspect of her design, artists who aren't into (or can't draw) muscles tend to downplay them in favor of placing emphasis on her bust and curves.
• Bloodborne's Vicar Amelia turns into a horrific werewolf-like feral beast. Fan artists took her disturbing appearance as a challenge, resulting in plenty of fanart that tries to make her look cute or sexy.
• Mutated characters in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead were probably meant to be seen as horrific and deformed, but the game's very small graphics (which can be replaced with ASCII art, as is standard for roguelikes) leave most details to the imagination, so a lot of fanart tends to depict characters as good-looking Little Bit Beastly like this or the bottom half of this, conveniently lacking the "Ugly" or "Deformed" mutations.
• Magus from Chrono Trigger Looks Like Orlok in his official art, but you'd never guess it from the fanwork◊. Admittedly he was redesigned to be much better-looking in the sequels and remake.
  • Lucca is often made less scrawny-looking.
• There's no doubt that the Cookies in Cookie Run: Kingdom, especially new and higher-ranked ones, have some awesome and gorgeous designs going on there, but they're still literally cookies. Most fanworks give them either a "human" or "anime form" or just keep their cookie forms but turn up their attractiveness, but some of them also gain bigger hips, breasts and/or muscles.
• The Dark Souls series has an unseen talking crow character or two in each game who will exchange certain items with the player. The Dark Souls III version, is frequently◊ drawn as◊ a cute◊ harpy girl.◊
• Day of the Tentacle: Laverne is a skinny twig of a girl with a crazed smile and a Mad Eye. Some fanarts tend to downplay that mad eye and make her look more conventionally "cute".
• Dead or Alive: Marie Rose was deliberately made to look and sound like a prepubescent girl, despite her canonical age being 18. It rubbed most western gamers the wrong way, so they usually remedy the issue in H-art by making her look like an adolescent teen complete with a fuller figure.
• Deltarune:
  • Susie is a stocky tomboy with Scary Teeth and several Face of a Thug moments. Her sprites give little to no definition to her bust, implying she's either flat-chested or it's small enough to be concealed by her clothes. In spite of these traits, it's not rare to find fanart where she's given gigantic breasts and a curvy physique. In addition, her masculinity is often either erased to make her more of a conventionally pretty girl, or taken so far in the opposite direction that she gets turned into a musclebound Amazonian Beauty.
  • Ralsei wears a loose-fitting robe that hides his torso and upper legs most of the time, but on the few occasions where he dons other clothes, he appears to be of an average or skinny build. Among certain corners of the fandom, meanwhile, it is a trend to depict him with wide, curvy hips and large thighs.
  • Spamton in canon is a tiny, long-nosed Demonic Dummy prone to making some deranged facial expressions. While a lot of fanarts out there tend to preserve these aspects of him, art of him during his days as a BIG SHOT frequently make him Tall, Dark, and Handsome by doing things such as making his hair look neater or downlplaying his pointy nose or large, square jaw. Similarly, his NEO form (a mechanized body barely held together by wires, and all of his body parts aside from his Arm Cannon hang limp) tends to get this treatment: If fan artists aren't actively sexualizing it, the armor is drawn as looking way cooler than it actually is.
  • The Addisons (a bunch of minor NPCs from Chapter 2) tend to get this a lot. There's nothing conventionally attractive about them in canon (they're all perpetually-smiling multicolored men stuck in one pose), but if you look up "Addison Deltarune", expect to see a lot of fanart that transforms them into Bishōnen.
  • Tasque Manager was already one of the curvier characters in the game, but fanart tends to accentuate it even further. A bigger chest and even bigger hips and rear are very common, as is making her ambiguous outfit into an outright pelvic curtain to show as much leg as possible.
  • Parodied when Berdly commissions a giant statue depicting himself as a muscled man (with nipples for some reason) whose left arm is strong enough to hold Queen. The statue is also clad in nothing but a speedo and crocs.
• In official art, the (mostly middle-aged and older) characters of Disco Elysium are drawn with defined physical detail. They have wrinkles, eyebags, forehead creases, crooked noses, chin fat, receding hairlines, and many, many other traits that serve to make them look like average people in the real world. When not trying to match the game's style, a lot of fanart tends to "smooth out" these features, making them abide more to conventional beauty standards in the process. It can be especially jarring in the case of the main character, who was deliberately designed to be seen as an ungracefully-aged Gonk.
• Elden Ring:
  • A lot of furry artists tend to give Blaidd a much cleaner design than canon.
  • Much of the fanart of Malenia makes her look more like the in-game statues and portraits of her (depicting her before the Rot had gotten too bad) than her model, toning down the Fan Disservice of her current rotted and blight-stricken body. Art that ignores or hand waves away the Rot (e.g. depicting her as cured) still tends to downplay her lean musculature in favor of enhancing her modest bust.
  • A decent amount of fan art interprets Ranni's current doll body as an organic, four-armed witch with voluptuous curves, rather than as a petite and delicate Soul Jar that is made of cords and visibly cracking underneath the robes.
  • While Radahn is a very muscular man, he was rather off-looking even before being afflicted by rot, having a disproportionately small head, somewhat stumpy legs (even before he lost his feet), and a face like a snarling ogre. Fanart, however, tends to portray him as a ruggedly handsome Hunk with more normal "strongman" proportions.
• A divisive example of this is fan-made mods for games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and the Dragon Age series, where in-game modifications to "beautify" characters like Aela the Huntress and Aveline exist, though male characters aren't immune either. Far more controversial are the mods that give Dragon Age's Isabella lighter skin, especially if they're explicitly stated by the mod's creator to be self-fanservice.
• Kuro of Ensemble Stars! is the second-tallest of the cast, a former delinquent, and the very powerful captain of the karate club, but his in-game sprite and CG illustrations only show him slightly more bulky than the other characters. Fanartists usually prefer to draw him as a hunk.
• Alma from the F.E.A.R. games. Of course, post-Project Origin, this isn't quite so applicable. Healthy (as opposed to emaciated) adult Alma is actually attractive (and naked all the time no matter what).
• Fear & Hunger:
  • D'arce and Enki, two of the playable characters in Fear & Hunger, aren't pinnacles of beauty, with the former having a rather frumpy-looking haircut and the latter having wizened facial features. Quite a few fan-arts adjust D'arce's hairstyle to be more flattering, and make Enki far more fresh-faced, sometimes to the extent that he looks like a woman.
  • The playable characters of Fear & Hunger: Termina are quite universally fresh-faced, but are still in rather realistic and thin shapes, with most of the women in particular having rather modest busts. In fan-art, expect O'saa to have a Heroic Build comparable to the athletic Marcoh, Abella to be an Amazonian Beauty, Karin to be a Big Beautiful Woman, and more.
• Most characters in Final Fantasy are ridiculously attractive already, but sometimes design elements are ignored to make them even more so:
  • Faris Scherwiz is often given large breasts in fanart, ignoring that she had to pass for a man, albeit a rather pretty one, ever since she joined a pirate crew. She even lampshades that being a woman on a ship full of male pirates would be a very bad thing. In fan art it's rare that she even gets depicted with smaller breasts than her sister Lenna. To be fair, the game itself does imply she is really busty when Galuf accidentally sees her true appearance, but the fans still really stretch the plausibility of her breasts being concealable from her pirate crew.
  • The games with 16-bit sprites tend to get lots of this in general, despite the characters being visible in-game only as small, pixelated sprites with not particularly a lot of detail on them (and not helped by most of the official art not matching the sprites at all, seemingly being more interested in looking cool than helping people get an idea of what the characters actually look like). In particular, quite a lot of fanart exists of Rydia, Lenna, Faris, Celes, and Agrias with very... "glamorous" figures. Guess fans like to let their imaginations do most of the work...
  • Final Fantasy VI's fans tend to have the Bishōnen Edgar has almost the same amount of muscle as his hunk younger twin, Sabin. There are also some fanarts that age up Relm and Gau.
  • Fans also tend to buff up Vaan and Balthier (both whom are reasonably muscular) to be more the size of Basch. Reverse case also occurs.
  • Ardyn from Final Fantasy XV. In game he's portrayed as a handsome man in early middle age with a slightly humorous, bohemian appearance, Perma-Stubble, prominent eye bags and a sturdy build. Fans often draw him much cleaned up as a more traditional Wicked Cultured Sissy Villain (elements Ardyn does have, if not his most prominent character aspects), if they don't just slather him in so much Generic Cuteness that he appears the same as an average Bishōnen villain in his 20s.
• Fire Emblem
  • Cynthia from Fire Emblem: Awakening is drawn more curvy and with larger breasts in some fan art with examples such as this rather than she actually is like in the game.
  • Female Corrin from Fire Emblem Fates is drawn voluptuous in fanart with thick thighs and large bosom such as this one with her wearing a Team Rocket uniform.
  • Azura, also from Fates, canonically has a very slender figure, but fanart popularly increases her breast and hip sizes.
  • Ike is relatively slender in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and only slightly more muscular in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, but fanartists will often draw him as a huge, musclebound hunk. It doesn't help that some non-canon games like Super Smash Bros. do depict him a lot more muscular than his canon appearances, though not to the extent some fanartists go.
• Five Nights at Freddy's owing its popularity with a certain demographic:
  • In the games, the mascots of the titular pizzeria chain are a gaggle of creepy, glassy-eyed animal animatronics who serve as the threats players must fend off. But fans like to tone down their scary looks when drawing them in fan art, and often downplay their robotic and Uncanny Valley traits in favor of making them closer to cartoonish Funny Animals. Sometimes they are also drawn as attractive antropomorphic animals or humans — most notably Foxy, who has been drawn as an attractive male AND an attractive female. Meanwhile, characters who are already attractive to begin with, such as Toy Chica and Ballora, tend to receive this treatment to an outright exaggerated degree.
  • In the second game, Toy Bonnie is a Lighter and Softer redesign of the original Bonnie character in-universe, and thus the only one of the latter's counterparts to play the Bunnies for Cuteness trope straight. His design features a shorter snout, slimmer build, and prominent eyelashes meant to give him a cuter, more kid-friendly look than his predecessor. Many fan artists, however, tend to play up Toy Bonnie's androgynous traits and draw him as an young, effeminate pretty boy in both Funny Animal and humanized designs, often giving him a more delicate, waifish figure. These same traits also make Toy Bonnie a particularly common target of Rule 63 art.
  • Aside from Foxy, the other notable animatronics to get this are Mangle (who is... well, a mangled endoskeleton ^note and, perhaps uncoincidentally, a gender swap(?) of the aforementioned Foxy), and Springtrap (who is not only severely decayed, but also has the rotten corpse of child murderer William Afton (who may even be possessing Springtrap) inside him).
  • You don't see many humans in the series, but even they aren't safe: Phone Guy and the various protagonists tend to look attractive in fanart (though none of them have an in-canon physical appearance). Special mention goes to William Afton who, despite being rarely being seen as anything more than a Lean and Mean purple Atari-esque sprite with black eyes and glowing white pupils, has often been drawn to look cuter or even outright handsome◊.
• Friday Night Funkin':
  • While there is some precedent for this on Girlfriend's part, as the Ludum Dare prototype calls her "your hot girlfriend" and "Fresh (Boyfriend Remix)" mentions her thighs as one of the things Boyfriend likes about her, her in-game looks don't go beyond modestly cute. Fanart will usually make her curvy enough to match her similarly-looking mom, and emphasize her legs by making her a Statuesque Stunner. She's alternately interpreted as chubby, which ranges in fanart from fuller curves to making her a full-fledged Big Beautiful Woman.
  • Boyfriend's shortness compared to most of his opponents and unusually high-pitched voice grunts typically results in him being drawn in a Puni Plush style, despite his typical sprite showing him with a permanent slouch and a perpetually cocky expression, and only being about an inch shorter than Girlfriend. Those that emphasize his actual age of 19 will draw him more◊ proportionally◊ and occasionally give him a chiseled◊ or svelte◊ rapper's physique. Voiced versions will give him an equally as attractive speaking voice to match, usually using the voice that raps for him in "Fresh (Boyfriend Remix)" as a basis. Additionally, he's often depicted with piercings.
  • Girlfriend's parents are typically drawn more attractively than they're already implied to be. Daddy Dearest is typically beefed up to hunk proportions and his expressions made less wrinkly, while Mommy Mearest (who has a song in her set literally titled "M.I.L.F.") is given an even bustier figure, with her already skintight outfit matching.
  • Due to the already open-ended nature of his games, Guest Fighter Pico had this element of his character attached to him for years. Fanart of his appearance in Friday Night Funkin', however, typically either makes him rounder and cuter (to match his sprite) or makes him muscular under his sweater (to emphasize him as an uzi-toting badass, occasionally with Dented Iron). Works that pair him up with Boyfriend will also make him at least One Head Taller, compared to the couple inches he has on Boyfriend in-game.
• Weirdly enough, this happened with Half-Life's "Einstein" scientist and "Barney" security officer NPC models, which emerged during the peak popularity stint of Half-Life but the AI is Self-Aware.
• The Half-Life 2 Cinematic Mod, which was intended to upgrade the game's visuals, infamously did this to female characters with the optional new character models. Even random female Citizens got significant makeovers.
  • Alyx, who in canon is a tomboyish Wrench Wench, gets numerous character models (many of which were inspired by real-life Victoria's Secret model Adriana Lima) with jiggling breasts and stripperific outfits (some being outright adult), and most infamously one of them had a fully-modeled cervix. The creator's attempt at a more faithful Alyx model didn't get released until towards the end of the mod's development life, and she still shows more skin than in canon.
  • Mossman goes from a middle-aged woman to several years younger than she should be, and in earlier versions of the mod went from white to Asian; unlike Alyx, a more accurate model was never made.
  • This, among other reasons (the creator's negative attitude towards criticism, inappropriate content like sexually explicit graffiti and the random appearance of a sex toy, and in general messing with the game's atmosphere), caused quite a bit of backlash against the mod from many players.
• Corn from Jet Set Radio Future. Compare how he looks in-game◊ to how he looks in fan art. Yeah.
• Kid Icarus: Uprising: While Palutena was already pretty good looking in-game, the fanart takes this to new levels. Her bust size gets bigger and her clothing tends to become more revealing turning her into a full on Hot Goddess.
  • This is to say nothing of Pit; ever since his redesign in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, he's been turned into a bishounen with uke-ish proportions. His Uprising look has him physically resemble a 13-year-old but with a young man's voice, but fanartists and especially Pit/Palutena shippers like to make him scrawnier and younger looking to contrast with his goddess' fanon voluptuous sizes.
  • Viridi in-game has the appearance of an eight-year-old, despite actually being much older. Some fanart ages her up physically and turns her into a Hot Goddess rivaling Palutena, often showing off her hips, legs, and midriff.
• While a good deal of Kingdom of Loathing fan art uses the same simplistic stick figure art style as the game itself, there's still some artists that invoke this from time to time.
• Kirby:
  • Kirby fans mostly leave the characters alone... but whenever Kirby is drawn as a human, fans typically don't make him that chubby and usually make him very androgynous (if not outright making him a girl). You'll often see King Dedede not being as big as you'd expect, either.
  • And then, there is Queen Sectonia, who gets quite the fair share of art. Not just being depicted as human, either. Not even Zero-Two is immune to such.
  • Ribbon is usually made into a Statuesque Stunner, even though she is about Kirby's height in-universe, if not slightly shorter. Other times she is made into a shortstack.
  • Meta Knight is actually adorable under his mask, however humanized fan art makes him a mysterious Bishōnen, and often a seme (or at least foil) to Kirby.
  • Susie also follows the trend of Ribbon in becoming a Statuesque Stunner, as do the Three Mage Sisters, who go from being small and adorable girls with no visible legs and detached hands to being outright beautiful humanoid characters with proper arms and legs.
• Juhani and Mical (aka "The Disciple") from Knights of the Old Republic have had their character models tweaked by fanart and mods to make them look more attractive.
• League of Legends, with its massive amount of attractive characters of both genders and myriad of alternate skins for each champion, is so very prone to this. The simplest example would be the Pool Party skin series, where the champions dress down for a day at the pool/beach. Cue many, many shirtless scenes and bikinis.
  • Probably the champion where this applied to the most was pre-rework Poppy. In case you didn't know, this◊ is what she used to look like. She looked like a butter-faced Gonk, especially when compared to the female yordles, who had round, cuter features, and fan art would copy their features onto her. After she received her visual rework, Poppy ended up looking more or less like she does in fan art.
• All the Special Infected (also, less often, the Uncommon Infected) in Left 4 Dead, especially the Witch and the Hunter. (and especially of all the Witch). Compare this image◊ of how they appear in-game to this fanart (not an extreme example), and that's not even getting into shipping them.
  • Even fans who aren't really trying to pretty them up generally draw them younger than the character models appear to be, i.e. as young adults or sometimes teenagers; the Special Infected may be Younger Than They Look as a side effect of the virus (this is a common fan theory), but they still look like they're at least in their 30s in-game. Again, this happens the most with the Witch and the Hunter. Mind you, getting close enough to take a good look at their faces in-game (as opposed to in Garry's Mod or looking at a reference picture) is difficult and inadvisable, so this is forgivable.
  • Also, since a lot of their grossness comes from icky details, simplifying an Infected's appearance will obviously make them cuter as well.
  • This (NSFW). While the Witch can be considerably cuter with removal of some of her infection details, the one with the pigtails is suppose to be the jaw-molten Spitter.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Dark Link, a mindless, faceless living shadow is almost always drawn as a white-haired pretty boy, often with peach skin and normal eyes in reference to Shadow Link from the manga adaptation of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures. The only time Dark Link has had a face (along with a regular Master Sword) is in Super Smash Bros. from Brawl onward and even that's due to Palette Swap issues. When you fight him in an Event Match, Dark Link is his normal faceless self.
  • Midna tends to get a lot of this in fanart. Her more iconic cursed imp form is frequently made more conventionally "sexy", sometimes to the point of borderline unrecognizability. Her true, hourglass-figured Twili form naturally gets ample love as well, often having her build exaggerated from amply-curved to extremely amply-curved. At the very least, one can generally expect her rear end to get a generous and loving size increase.
  • The Hero's Shade is a phantom covered in worn armor and bearing a skull with a single red eye for a head. But because he's the reanimated version of the Link from Ocarina of Time, some artists draw him as a flush, handsome, living man with his armor in tip-top shape to boot.
  • Navi. In-game, she's a floating ball of light with wings; in the fanart she's sort of an angel with fairy wings and a skimpy costume/wearing nothing. This goes for other fairies in the series that have the same design, but of course Navi is the most well-known. Fans claim she isn't just a ball of light and only appears as such due to Nintendo 64 engine limitations ^note (Word of God wanted her to look like the fairies from A Link to the Past, but the technology made that impossible), despite her still appearing as an orb in official art and in much higher-end consoles.
  • Fi also gets this. Despite her design being fairly androgynous, plenty of artists give her a more noticeably feminine figure. This doesn't always include giving her noticeable breasts, however, and some fan artists are willing to leave her with her slim frame, usually only emphasizing her legs or hips.
  • "Classic Link" from the first two games gets a more Bishōnen look in fan art and loses his long nose. Even official works like Hyrule Warriors soften him up.
  • The canonical eternal child Saria is sometimes given an Age Lift by fan artists... with all that entails. Other times, she's made into a curvy shortstack.
  • Sidon from Breath of the Wild gets even taller and more muscular in fan-art, as well as typically making his legs and torso more proportional.
  • Quite a few incarnations of Zelda herself tend to get drawn with more curvaceous builds than they are shown having canonically. A fine example of this being Breath of the Wild's Zelda, who has her Hartman Hips being taken to exaggerated levels; the version of Zelda used in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate also gets the same treatment, especially after her hurtbox made it look like she had a huge butt.
  • Ganondorf, having the advantage of being a muscular man, is often given a smoother look to make him more conventionally appealing. Shippy fanart of Ganondorf also almost always draws him with long hair, riffing off of his Hyrule Warriors design. The fastest possible invocation of this trope might be when The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was announced. The trailer featured an unidentified skeleton in naught but a loincloth in the cavern Link and Zelda were exploring. In very rapid succession, fans assumed it was Ganondorf's body and started drawing him as a resurrected muscular bishie wearing naught but said loincloth with a heaping helping of Beauty Equals Goodness and Draco in Leather Pants by insisting that this means all the malice is out of his system and he's a good guy now, although the game version, if anything, is even more evil than most other versions of Ganondorf.
  • Purah didn't get a ton of attention in Breath of the Wild or Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, probably due to being de-aged into a child in the former, and the latter game being a spinoff. Come Tears of the Kingdom, her popularity with fanartists exploded as her adult design was introduced to a main series game. Naturally, most of the resulting art makes her rather modest clothing◊ considerably more form-fitting, gives her an Impossible Hourglass Figure, and portrays her with a much more flirtatious personality.
  • Fanart of adult Ruto from Ocarina of Time tends to give her a curvier build and ignore her Organic Bra redesign from the 3DS remake and Hyrule Warriors. If the artwork depicts her from behind, she's also given a blatant rear end, which Zoras lack in-game.
  • Veran from The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages is drawn with large breasts such as this fanart or drawn curvy in fanart than she is in canon.
• Life Is Strange:
  • Max and Chloe's in-game character models look like semi-flatchested stick figures, so they're noticeably curvier in most Rule 34 depictions. Though most make it a point that Max retain her petite waifish figure; including her semi-flatchest. They focus on her lower half instead by giving her wider hips, curvaceous legs, and a plump rump.
  • Max also seems to be popular with foot fetishists, which is especially prevalent in H-art and H-videos of her. Much of which leaves her barefoot to show off how alluringly dainty they are.
  • Rachel Amber's improvements are much like Chloe's. She's usually given a noticeably curvier figure overall with slightly larger breasts. But special attention is often given to accentuating the curvature of her legs as well.
• Little Nightmares: Six, the Runaway Kid, the Girl in the Yellow Raincoat and Mono are all canonically in their preteens and are depicted as visibly malnourished. A little fandom magic makes them all Badass Adorable Moe incarnate, with the addition of being less dangerously skinny. Six in particular sometimes gets aged up and becomes drop-dead gorgeous, occasionally trading her signature raincoat for a yellow kimono to show that she has controlled her hunger urges and has become the Good Counterpart to the Lady who runs the Maw. The Runaway Kid and Mono both become tall Bishounens who are often shipped with Six, acting as a lovely Battle Couple.
• Live A Live:
  • While Lei Kugo is already fairly attractive, fanart will often portray her as a full-blown Ms. Fanservice, usually putting her in outfits that give her a Navel-Deep Neckline and shows off her legs.
  • Masaru Takahara is already a rather muscular guy, but fanart tends to exaggerate his appearance by giving him a full blown bodybuilder physique, a lot of the time even making him shirtless.
  • Odio usually takes on the appearance of a Living Shadow, while his various boss forms take on the appearance of a grotesque giant face, a Gollum-like entity, and a giant, demonic entity, respectively. Fanart prefers to give him a design more closely resembling his handsome Oersted identity, usually with the addition of wings and a cape, while Purity of Odio (the previously mentioned Gollum-esque form) is depicted in a way that resembles Shin Megami Tensei's Lucifer.
• Mega Man:
  • Granted, Splash Woman is cute and has a pretty good waistline for a mermaid, but most fanart of her (and there's a lot) puts her in all manner of seductive poses, give her a larger bust, and generally make her out to be some sort of goddess. Probably uncoincidentally, she's the first (and so far only) enemy female Robot Master, and is also seen posing for a photo in Mega Man 9's ending.
  • The more humanoid Robot Masters are often assumed by fanart to be built like Mega Man, Proto Man, and Roll are: their typical appearance is a removable battlesuit, while they have human features like skin and hair underneath. This can result in Top-Heavy Guys like Guts Man being drawn as beefcakes out of "costume", or Robot Masters with uncoventional body types like Bounce Man being akin to a cute human wearing a Goofy Suit. And this is before the later games introduced Reploids as a race, which could have appearances like that.
• Unsurprisingly, Samus Aran of Metroid has been getting a triple serving of it ever since the introduction of the Zero Suit. See for yourself: original artwork◊, Super◊Smash◊ Bros.◊, fan art. Look on the bright side: at least it doesn't make her look too different from her canon portrayal.
  • Once her dark counterpart was added into Smash Ultimate, Smash fans quickly created "Dark Zero Suit Samus" who rivals the regular Samus' beauty in fan art but with paler skin and dark hair. This is despite the fact that most Metroid fans will happily note that under its "armor" is nothing but a translucent blue mass of veins and bones. Even then that's not stopped certain fans from just making that translucent blue mass into something as curvy as Samus. There's also a certain subset that just make Dark Samus' "armor" into something vaguely human-like and Fanservice-y.
• There is a sizable amount of Minecraft fanart that draws the default player skins (Steve and Alex) as non-polygonal humans, with Steve turning into a full-blown bearded Tall, Dark, and Handsome hunk and Alex into a cute redhead girl with long hair.
• In the Mother series, this happens a lot with none other than Porky Minch. Yes, the fat, short, smelly, pale nerd-guy appears as a hottie from time to time in fanart. There's even a whole deviantArt group about them.
  • An absolutely ridiculous example of this is some of the fanart that Gyiyg/Giegue/Giygas from EarthBound Beginnings gets, usually from the aforementioned Porky-loving artists, where Giegue gets drawn with a feminine body and large breasts. In EarthBound Beginnings, not only is he referred to as a male, but his original sprite in the game depicts him with a very slender body, with certainly nothing to speak of on his chest. If that wasn't messed up enough, he is an alien. And mammaries are a trait of mammals, which are found on Earth. However, in EarthBound (1994), it should be noted that there is a single NPC who says that Giygas might actually be female. Even if he is indeed female, he, or she, is an alien, and thus shouldn't even have breasts in the first place.
  • Duster from Mother 3 also gets the Bishōnen treatment quite a lot, despite not being very attractive in canon. He isn't at all bad looking, per se, in fact, most fans find him quite cute and handsome, but he is mostly described as a rather bum-looking fellow by most characters in-game. Some fan artists also tend to forget that he also has a crippled leg, often drawing him without his limp.
  • Bifauxnen Kumatora often gets more... curvaceous, to say the least, with a more feminine appearance although in canon she is rather androgynous and small-chested.
  • Lucas often becomes the embodiment of an Uke.
  • Not to mention the Masked Man aka Claus, despite being a little bit older than Lucas. In Fanon, he often gets depicted as a Bishōnen, especially when his helmet is off.
  • In fact, all of the main characters get this, often having their ages turned into mid- to late teens, despite most of them being 12-13ish at most. Jeff in particular gets this a lot, due to being a Lovable Nerd.
  • Even Ness is given this treatment. In-game, he is a rather average-looking, questionably pudgy boy, but in fanart he often is drawn to be much skinnier and svelte, and his hair will be much longer with bangs that cover half his face. Some fanart depict him as looking as your typical anime Bishōnen boy but with a hat and striped shirt, others depict him as being an aged-up muscular Hunk mostly in favor to his love of baseball and steak. Inverted in some fanart, who will draw him to be chubbier than usual. The same thing applies to Ninten, who is given a bandanna around his neck to differentiate him from Ness.
• Inverted in Nancy Drew: The Shattered Medallion. When previously-The Ghost Sonny Joon, a quirky slacker, was revealed to be attractive on the box art, some fans complained that he wasn't the pimpled geek they had imagined him to be.
• Neverwinter Nights 2: Downplayed with Bishop. While he is Mr. Fanservice, under his Perma-Stubble and disheveled hair his model has a boyish, almost androgynous charm (especially his concept art). Yeah, good luck finding any fan art that doesn't play up his stubble, muscles, scars, or grizzled exterior for all they're worth to make him macho bordering on Testosterone Poisoning.
• 2B from NieR: Automata gets this despite already being a Ms. Fanservice. Her in-game character model is fit and skinny, but because of the memetic-ness of her Panty Shot moments, R34 artists tend to give her curves rivaling someone like Haydee. Even her own character page on this very wiki attributes Hartman Hips and an Impossible Hourglass Figure to her! Amply demonstrated here◊.
• Characters from Ōkami find themselves subject to this quite a bit. Perpetually masked Oki is invariably assumed to be Bishōnen under the disguise and tiny, Napoleon Issun usually ends up as a cute boy. The most notable example has to be the protagonist, Amaterasu. In-game, she's a nonanthropomorphic wolf. In fanart, she is frequently drawn as either an attractive woman with white hair and Little Bit Beastly traits, or a full-blown Humanoid Female Animal (often in the nude, naughty bits optional). ^note It is true that the wolf isn't Amaterasu's original form and that one character sees her as an attractive young woman, but the player doesn't get to see this, so it still counts as an example.
• Overwatch:
  • Fanartists almost never draw Reaper as pale as his default skin is. It's also implied that his face is disfigured from Ana's reaction at seeing it in one of the comics, but in fanart he tends to look exactly like he did when he was alive.
  • Speaking of Ana, most of the fanarts about her will be of her in her Captain Amari self, or will give her the same proportions as she had in her youth.
  • D.va also tends to be drawn curvier than she is in canon.
  • Mei is a plump young woman with some realistic curves and a proportionately modest chest. Fanart will either greatley exaggerate her bust (and butt) often while reducing her waist, or else turn her into a fullblown Big Beautiful Woman.
  • To give an anecdote of just how pervasive sexualized depictions of Overwatch characters are, there was a Twitter post that pointed how Tracer's model in Overwatch 2 has no ass, and people were accusing Blizzard of copping out and desexualizing characters in light of recent events and whatnot. Then someone put the models side-by-side and found out they were as flat as before.
• Persona 4:
  • Izanami, the True Final Boss, looks only slightly attractive in her non-human yet non-boss form. Then certain fanart transformed her into rather gorgeous versions of herself.
  • Before it was made more apparent in Golden and the anime, Naoto tended to be shown with extremely large breasts in fanart, all due to a couple of relatively minor scenes where she gets flustered by the other girls pointing out her size compared to theirs. Rise also gets this treatment at times, even though she herself points out her modest size compared to her Shadow, who showed up in the previous night's Midnight Channel viewing.
• It's safe to say Pokémon may be the biggest case of this amongst any video game:
  • Red is an interesting case. While he isn't ugly per se, he is more or less quite young. Even at age 14 in the original generation II games, he is still a rather scrawny-looking kid with unruly hair (from what can be seen from his 8-bit sprite anyway). Fans however ignore this, making him Bishōnen, combing his hair down, and coloring his eyes red. This design is known as "Pixiv Red" due to originally being created by an artist on said website. Even for the remakes fans tend to use this design, despite the fact he has a new design, which actually is slick and Bishōnen at that age. "Pixiv Red" is so ubiquitous, in fact, that mislabeling this version of Red can be major Flame Bait in the Japanese fandom, and some Nico Nico Douga videos warn watchers in advance that the video uses this version of the character. Coincidentally, Pokémon Adventures' Red actually resembles the fan version Red more closely, though even then there are also some 4komas that give this Red straighter hair.
  • As soon as Red and his rival Blue were revealed to return as young adults in Pokémon Sun and Moon, fans quickly took note of his thicker build than Blue, and Red got hit with a second wave of this; while his official art already shows him as a rather well-built, handsome young man with sharper features than would be expected from his home region, fanart often exaggerates his muscles to outright hunk levels. In fact, none of the muscles on anywhere but his neck are particularly defined in his official art, it and his 3D model often looking scrawny in comparison to fan depictions. Less commonly, adult Blue also sometimes gets gratuitous muscle added onto him, despite being a more thinly-built Bishounen.
  • Feminine-looking Pokémon — especially Gardevoir (a Cute Monster Girl-like mon "wearing" an elegant ballgown), Lopunny (a literal, anthropomorphic Playboy Bunny with wide hips), and Hatterene (a tiny stick figure-like creature with long hair forming a cloak that resembles a curvaceous body) — are usually drawn in a more anthropomorphic and/or attractive manner compared to their cartoony original designs, with Gardevoir's "dress" being treated as a actual garment that can be removed, and Hatterene's real body being given the shape its hair initially implies; especially, and infamously, by the more... hardcore parts of the Furry Fandom.
  • It's not just the feminine looking ones, either; masculine-looking Pokemon get fan art just as much in the community, especially if they're popular with the gay, furry, and/or Kemono fans. Rillaboom, Pangoro, and Incineroar are well-muscled already, but in fanart they become huge beefcakes with their fur treated more like stylish hair. Even "slimmer" pokemon with such as Lucario, Zeraora, and Chesnaught are often ballooned up into hunky hulks. Machoke in particular gets hit with this a lot within the Furry Fandom due to its more popular reptilian design compared to Machamp's duck like face, in spite of it being the middle evolution. In fact, even non-anthro pokemon such as Arcanine and Solgaleo are often made into masculine anthromorpic hunks in fanart.
  • Mewtwo is also quite popular among the Furry Fandom, and the normal and Mega X forms get even more muscular than before. And thanks to Genesect and the Legend Awakened and its use of a feminine Mewtwo, Mega Mewtwo Y often gets very feminine fanart, with the associated assets, compared to its androgynous look in-universe.
  • Garchomp are often drawn in fan-arts with either a higher amount of muscle mass, or with its single front claws replaced with humanoid-looking hands. Sometimes even both.
  • Cynthia, while already having an attractive design, often gets bumped up a few cup sizes and is otherwise made curvier than she is in canon. Even the official Diamond and Pearl manga got in on this.
  • May is often drawn with breasts several cups larger than her canon one, which can't be bigger than a B and aren't very noticeable. This is partially thanks to the anime, where her breast size was very inconsistent until her reappearance in Sinnoh.
  • Skyla is already a case of Ms. Fanservice in the games, but fan-art typically makes her sexier regardless of whether it's Rule 34 or not. Most of the time this is by making her crop top show off the Underboobs while slightly increasing her bust size. The Japanese website Pixiv actually has a tag called "Skyla's tits" which is on most fan-art done with her.
  • Fanart for Ghetsis freakin' Harmonia tends to ditch his robes and lessen some of his harsher features. Often he ends up rivaling N for prettiness.
  • The Hex Maniac trainer class in Generation VI is usually drawn with very large breasts despite her versus character art showing her with a much more moderate bust. This may be due to a certain Hex Maniac who sells Moomoo Milk to the player character in X and Y. They also are made to be more curvy than they appear in canon.
  • Wicke from Pokémon Sun and Moon, who's already incredibly curvy and easily one of the bustiest characters in Pokemon, still often gets a massive increase in bust size and much wider hips in most of her fanart.
  • Lusamine's canonically attractive and slender design is often edited by fanart to be much bustier than she appears canonically.
  • Nessa is already fairly attractive in Pokémon Sword and Shield, being a model in-game and all, but fans tend to make her curvier in both breasts and hips in fan art than she is actually shown to be in-game.
  • For Melony, this can go one of two ways. Either her waist gets slimmed down, which rarely decreases her ample bust, or she gets turned into a full-blown Big Beautiful Woman, which often has the side effect of increasing her bust size. Both of these tend to make her look noticably younger, too.
  • Hilda's shorts are short, and that is all there is in official fanart. The artwork doesn't emphasize them the same way that it does other characters (for example Olivia). Fan art will, near without fail, make her hips a lot larger and more defined as to really have her short shorts hug curves.
  • Rosa, the female protagonist who followed her up gets a similar emphasis to her breasts to similar degrees despite starting from similar levels.
  • Bea, an Amazonian Beauty, often goes one of two ways in fan art. Either she's even more muscular and imposing in physique or artists downplay her muscles to make her come off as more traditionally attractive.
  • Arezu from Pokémon Legends: Arceus has prominent hips in game and is even described in her character sheet as having a "pear-shaped silhouette". Artists have done what they always do and took them up to eleven.
  • Some artists also make Cogita look younger than she is. As Cogita also looks a ton like the aforementioned Cynthia, she will generally be drawn similarly to Cynthia's in this regard, with the main difference bein the occasional addition of a bit of additional age flab that puts Cogita a bit closer to a Big Beautiful Woman than Cynthia is generally drawn (though she is never depicted as outright fat). More often than not however, Cogita is drawn identical to Cynthia, just with short silver hair instead of long blonde hair.
  • Irida from the same game looks a lot like the female protagonist in body proportions in official art and gameplay: while she wears a tube top and short shorts she has a slender body type that doesn't emphasize them in game. Fan-artists naturally fix this by increasing the size of her chest and hips. A typical fan-art joke involves her slipping out of said clothes, or her sweat causing them to come loose, in combination with her Character Tic of fanning herself to cool off.
  • Zisu is a tall woman who leads the Security Corps, but in game she lacks any visible muscles due to the clothing she wears covering her body. Fan artists will generally depict her as an Amazonian Beauty with visible musculature and the occasional scar or three to build on her canon depiction.
  • Professor Sada of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, who already has a bared midriff, some structure in said midriff, and a bit of a cavewoman theme to her design gets this amped up past eleven in fanart, where she goes full Nubile Savage and Amazonian Beauty.
  • Nemona from the same game, while notably taller than the protagonists, doesn't really have any other physically emphasized qualities. This is amended in fan art, which typically makes her bustier in part to play up her Memetic Molester fan interpretation towards the protagonist's much smaller appearance than her.
  • Rika is a slender Bifauxen woman who many mistake for a man at first glance. Fan art is prone to making this error much harder to make by giving her much larger breasts and an overall more shapely figure.
  • Eri is already a tall imposing girl in game, but fans will typically emphasize either her chest (which is already large, but is made much larger), her physical appearance (which is made even taller and buffer), or both.
  • Iono in canon is a slender-bodied streamer girl wearing a puffy yellow coat that is so large for her as to be endearing, flashing a mesh undergarment of some sort under said jacket. Fans will tend to fill her body out more to make it much more curvaceous as to fully fill in said oversized jacket, or drop the jacket and have her be in just her mesh underclothing, either a leotard or a crop top and shorts.
  • Penny in game is a short, quiet girl who wears baggy clothes. In fan-art it became quite common to depict her as being Hidden Buxom under said hoodie, often with the intended joke of surprising people when it is revealed.
  • This is in fact somewhat common for fanart of the protagonists and rivals in general, which may draw them to look way older than they are in canon; though Red definitely gets it the worst (as detailed above), it's not uncommon to see overly pretty Ethans, Blues, Silvers, Brendans, and Hilberts that look like they're 20 years old. And just like their anime counterparts, the female main characters also get a huge helping of this, especially involving bust size, if not even more so. This can be particularly noticeable on the very flat-chested Selene of Sun and Moon, more commonly in pre-release fanart since her official age of 11 wasn't revealed yet.
  • In general, if any character (human or not) is in an image or manga where they are shipped with someone else, chances are high they will end up being either prettified or hyperfeminine/hypermasculine. Occasionally even both at the same time.
• Potion Permit:
  • While Runeheart's portrait shows her modestly, she tends to be depicted as an attractive buff woman in fanart, owing to her job as a blacksmith. Because of this, she became popular enough with the fandom that the devs made her a romanceable character in the v1.4 update.
  • Among the love interests, Matheo has tons of fanart of him ripped, shirtless, or both, adding more to his decent machismo in canon.
• The Psychonauts fandom has pulled this off both with the hero, Raz (who's supposed to be 10), and local Ensemble Dark Horse and potenial Woobie Sasha Nein. Sometimes, er, both at once.
• The Resident Evil remakes have a number of mods that change the characters' clothes into ridiculous Sexy Whatever Outfits. Some of them will even change the bodies of the characters, so Jill is suddenly sporting Lolo Ferrari-style mega boobs and a micro-bikini while running around Raccoon City in the middle of the zombie outbreak. Most of these mods are for the female characters, but there are a few that do things like make Leon spend the whole game shirtless, for example.
  • Resident Evil Village: While Lady Dimitrescu's original model is considered very attractive by most of the fanbase, it's common for some of her traits to get changed in fan work. The most common changes are massively increasing her bust, making her face younger looking with less wrinkles and changing her ghostly white skin to peach colored. Some of the more popular fan mods replace her long dress with racy lingerie or swimsuits.
• The humanoid women from Skylanders get hit by this a lot.
  • There is an artist on DeviantArt who draws realistic versions of all the Skylanders and does this to all of the humanoid Skylanders, meaning both male and female characters. This included a hunk version of Slam Bam the yeti.
• The Habiticians in Smile for Me, whom co-creator Yugo Limbo describes as "Picasso abominations", naturally undergo this in fanart. That being said, some of the adult characters are more prone to this trope than others:
  • Dr. Habit is a green Muppet-like Manchild whose true appearance isn't much different than the puppet version of him that appears throughout the game. Fans often depict Dr. Habit as a borderline sex god.
  • Ronbo the Clown, who appears to be obese, often has his fat replaced with muscle. This applies whenever he's with or without makeup.
  • Questionette looks the most like a Picasso painting, with her asymmetrical eyes. She is usually redrawn to be more conventionally attractive, but the line on her face and the symbol on her cheek are usually left intact.
  • This is downplayed with Mirphy Fotoparat, whose character design makes her appear to be balding (despite having long hair). Most artists give her a full head of hair, but her lanky figure remains.
  • Strangely enough, this is inverted with Lulia Fame. In the game, she has an Impossible Hourglass Figure; in fanart, she is usually drawn with realistic proportions.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Blaze the Cat is quite a prominent target of this. Fan art tends to give her a humanoid body and greatly expand her bust size. Even when the rest of the cast are normal. Especially notable in that, not only does she have as flat a chest as most of the guys in her design, Word of God has said that she's not happy with this. This statement eventually led to most fan art shifting gears to keeping her bust flat, in favor of enhancing her hips and legs instead.
  • Oh, and Shadow◊ too.
  • Rouge, who is already a flirtatious Ms. Fanservice, gets even more fanservice-y than before.
  • Maria Robotnik was Delicate and Sickly and couldn't be older than 14. Fan artists tend to bump her physique and health up, if not straight-up turn her into a cute hedgehog.
  • A lot of fanart of Amy presents her as a teenager or adult with long hair-like quills and a larger bust size.
  • Humanized fanart tends to make the characters very attractive.
  • It's not uncommon to see the male characters given muscle tone in fan-art. They're also depicted as taller and more human-sized. GothNebula demonstrates this for you.
  • Sonic Dream Team introduces a new character, Ariem, who is a sheep/ram-like woman who appears to be made up of two floating hands and a head, covered by a sweater/robe. Fan artists tend to draw Ariem with an ample bosom and curves that fill out her clothes instead.
• Splatoon:
  • In-universe, the playable Inklings and Octolings are cute but very lean kids in their early-to-mid teens with no curves or bust to speak of and very little muscle definition. So, of course, fan artists that give the girls at least moderately sized breasts and hourglass figures, and the boys six-packs and athletic builds, are not at all uncommon.
  • Callie, Marie, Marina, Shiver, and Frye are already fairly curvy, a trait that is more often than not vastly exaggerated in fan art. Marina's larger-than-average bust tends to be ratcheted up a few cup sizes, and even the relatively flat-chested Squid Sisters and Deep Cut get their share of enhancements. Big Man (who, in-universe, is a cartoon manta ray) is frequently drawn as... well, a Big Man, usually with a muscular, top-heavy build.
  • Fan art of Pearl that doesn't embrace her Ugly Cute aesthetic tends to draw her with an ordinary Inkling girl's face, downplaying her Forehead of Doom, RBF, and snaggleteeth to make her outright adorable. Unsurprisingly, she also tends to pick up curves that are noticeably lacking from her in-game designs. When Splatoon 2 first released, however, Pearl was a much more abrasive character with little of her Hidden Depths evident, and her design was more controversial as a result - so many pieces of fan art drew her as being so hideous it's a wonder she ever landed an Idol Singer role to begin with.
• Not entirely averted in the Star Control fandom, where female fans sometimes draw aliens in human bodies without making them sexy. Even Human!ZEX isn't a Bishounen... but posts in the Livejournal community do tend to skew toward alternate-universe Hurt Comfort Fanart.
  • Giving the VUX flexible necks, longer head-tentacles, and a smaller eye goes a long way◊ towards making them more appealing while still being, well, VUX. Though that may have been artistic license and a need for a visible reaction to get the joke across in this case.
• A weird example with Sarah Kerrigan from StarCraft. She starts out as a fairly sexy human character, who over the course of the series gets infested by the Zerg and turned into the Queen of Blades. While her infested form still looks sexy, the official look is more of a creepy kind of sexy, with major Unintentional Uncanny Valley and Squick involved. Yet, a lot of fans ignore parts of those factors and made her look more sexy in fanarts. Ironically, StarCraft II has her gradually getting a relooking over the course of the game when she goes through a (sort of) Heel–Face Turn, leading her to get a slightly less disturbing, more beautiful look that would fit her portrayal in said fanarts.
• Stardew Valley:
  • Similar to Story of Seasons below, Stardew Valley has this as well. Not only are fan artists much more likely to beautify the already attractive characters, more unconventional characters such as Harvey and Shane get the special bishonen package.
  • There is currently a race among modders on who can make the most improved avatar set for the game. From western to manga-style, everything's possible. Interestingly, in almost all of them, Harvey loses his mustache, Elliot's age gets lowered, and both Maru and Penny often end up with a very different hairstyle.
• Pick any character from the Story of Seasons series who is the main farmer, both male and female, and the bachelor/bachlorette of their choice. Even the Shrinking Violet Meganekkos are usually drawn at a Bishojo level compared the chibi-like character designs (until A Tale of Two Towns and A New Beginning). The series itself has gotten in on the action and has become a Cast Full of Pretty Boys by Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility.
• This trope is omnipresent for just about every Nintendo series, and Super Mario Bros. is no exception:
  • Mario, Luigi, and even Wario and Waluigi have had this happen to them. Mario is a short, stocky, round-faced guy with a big nose and solid mustache. When the trope is applied, you get the most average-looking anime character in existence that happens to be wearing a red cap with overalls, that used a pencil to scribble on their upper lip. Oddly enough he'll always stand taller than Peach, even though not a single video game has portrayed him taller than the princess. Luigi is the same, just taller. Wario replaces all fat with muscles, maybe a slightly less zig-zaggedy and thicker mustache, and Waluigi is just a sly, tall, lanky version of Mario. Though fan art that pretties them up while still keeping their trademark big nose and 'stache aren't unheard of either. Sometimes they'll have messy Anime Hair rather than the cowlick they have in the actual series. This is also frequently inverted; a common joke is to portray Mario as a fat, short, hairy middle-aged man instead of the youthful, able-bodied 20-something he canonically is. Though even then that can be brought back to fanservice levels, converting all that extra weight and age into a Silver Fox Big Beautiful Man. And let's not get into Scott Falco's Super Mario Hyadain animation...
  • Both Peach and Daisy also get this a lot, as well as Rosalina. Peach goes from a child-like, slightly innocently ditzy lady with simple, modest expressions, to a total sex goddess. In the main Mario games, there's absolutely nothing overly sexual about her character other than that she's pretty. However, when Super Smash Bros. Melee brought her into the roster, with its more detailed art style, Peach's fanservice potential rose up considerably. That series has her making coy poses, attacking with her hips and butt, made her taller, increased her bust size by a considerable amount, made her lot more flirty and The Tease and showed off her legs. Even then, however, she's not overtly sexualized. The fans amp up the boobs (which are average to flat in-universe) and tend to fetishize the princesses' dresses by making the top and/or bottom shorter, if not putting them in other Stripperific outfits. Another addition by the fandom is the tendency to depict Peach in particular as someone who Really Gets Around, is a shameless, flirtatious pervert, and doesn't mind guys or girls. However, art of her with the other female characters is much more common. Daisy tends to be more curvaceous and becomes a Big Beautiful Woman or Amazonian Beauty.
  • Vivian is often drawn as a tall, sexy sorceress with an hourglass figure. In-game, however, while she's cute, she's rather short and stout.
  • Bowser, a monstrous turtle, becomes either ridiculously handsome or ridiculously hunky, depending on the artists' tastes, with red hair, yellow skin, horns, and maybe his shell. And that's to say nothing of the countless fanart done by the Furry Fandom which, like with Mario and Wario mentioned above, often exaggerates his bodymass (either his bodyfat or his muscle mass — often both) to ridiculous proportions and/or amplifying his masculine features, ultimately turning him into a Big Beautiful Man in a spiky half-shell. Regardless of choices, the one consistent thing with Bowser fanart, on top of the formentioned "tweaks", is making his head notably smaller and thus a lot more proportionate to his body.
  • And then there's Bowsette and the Super Crown meme. In canon, the Super Crown is used to just turn Toadette, and JUST Toadette, into a version of Peach called "Peachette" that's merely cute. In fanon it's used to turn Bowser, and other characters (Mario series or otherwise) into Hotter and Sexier fusions of themselves and Peach.
  • Toadette herself is pretty much the only Toad to consistently get this treatment: for those who don't see her as a young girl, she's turned into a curvy shortstack with prominent thighs (mimicking her usual stubby legs).
  • Wendy O. Koopa in the series has always been an impish bald monstrous turtle creature. In fanart it is common to for her to be drawn with more human-like proportions (extremely curvy ones at that) and even have a full head of hair.
  • Her brother Ludwig von Koopa is chubby and has a large front tooth in canon. Fanart, however, tends to slim him down, downplay his tooth (or shift it to the side to make it look more fang-like), and alter his facial features to make him more of a Pretty Boy.
  • While Valentina is already attractive, fan artists have a tendency of making her froglike face more humanoid and making her skinny torso more anatomically accurate.
  • Melody Pianissima is already a very beautiful character, but fans often take it upon themselves to remove her conservative fashion sense and make her more of a Shameless Fanservice Girl.
  • Prince Peasley is said to be handsome in his home game (for a Beanish, anyway), and has the charisma to match. Fanart translates that handsomeness into human terms as well, giving him the body of a green-skinned Hunk.
  • This also applies to scrapped characters as well! The cut Peach-clone from Mario Tennis (who's now better known as Wapeach) goes from a cute petite Peach in a silly dress to a hot blonde with various physiques (her regular petite body but Hotter and Sexier, a curvy shortstack, or a Statuesque Stunner like the princesses), and her short dress with X holes near the end becomes the perfect excuse for Panty Shots. Those with the tall and curvy interpretation tend to replace the dress with a Leotard of Power (with or without a cape) in homage to Doronjo (whom Fumihide Aoki referred as an inspiration for this character).
• The fanbase for Team Fortress 2 is full of this trope. Don't be surprised to find fanart of all the classes depicted as young and sexy (though in the Scout's case, he gets more of the latter due to being the youngest of the bunch). Yes, even the Heavy. As a fangirl favorite, Medic is especially prone to this. And let's not get started on the female versions of most characters.
  • The Pyro gets this in spades since no one knows what his true face looks like (or even if he's either male or female). Expect to find fanart of unmasked Pyro as either a pretty boy or an attractive girl.
• Terraria:
  • The seven female NPCs tend to go a long way in fanart from their 16-bit sprites in-game, invariably depicted as young and curvy. The Dryad's outfit in particular is depicted anywhere from a relatively-covering Garden Garment with an exposed midriff and legs (which are, at least, exposed in canon), to a skimpy bikini made out of vines, to her being naked save for three small leaves and the branches/vines that hold them up.
  • Fanart of the Empress of Light tends to increase her figure and make her leotard-shaped armor even more Stripperiffic than it appears to be in-game. To a lesser degree, the nose on her sprite is mistaken for a smiling mouth, so she's usually depicted with a serene expression, instead of the more serious look implied by her actual mouth not being visible.
• The characters of Touhou Project get a lot of this in fanart, since ZUN's official character designs tend to be very amateurish and even ugly at times (though his art has improved over the years). This fannish need to fill in the details leads to some oddities, like Yukari being depicted as an Eurasian supermodel in a tight dress when in canon she typically wears Victorian-style clothes and isn't very well-endowed.
  • Significant improvements to characters' appearances present in any official work in which ZUN did not draw them, most notably in the fighting Gaiden Games and guidebooks like Perfect Memento in Strict Sense and Symposium of Post-Mysticism. As a result, the insane amount of fanarts Touhou gets makes it a franchise where its popularity thrives on Self-Fanservice.
  • The non-human traits of many youkai characters tend to be interpreted by fanartists in whatever way will maximize their attractiveness.
  • Outfit adjustments to show more skin are also common, though outside of specific doujin groups like Ao it doesn't usually reach Stripperiffic levels. Reimu and Sanae frequently sport bare midriffs, Yukari's neckline plunges, Meiling is depicted almost universally not wearing pants despite canonically doing so under her skirt, and any knee-length skirt becomes a miniskirt.
  • Rin Kaenbyo and Chen both have long, sharp red fingernails evoking cat claws in canon. Fanartists tend to give them normal fingernails to soften their designs and make them more conventionally cute.
  • There's also Myouren Hijiri, who was never shown directly but described by ZUN as an old man and would have had his head shaven while he was young because he was a monk... This doesn't stop the fandom from drawing him as a bishounen with gradient hair just like his sister Byakuren.
• Um Jammer Lammy: Lammy is a cute-looking teenage sheep girl who has no breasts whatsoever. You wouldn't know this if you looked at the fanart, which generally portrays her with a huge rack, a much curvier body and looks nothing like the actual character.
• Undertale is almost abundant with this trope, which is no surprise considering it's Popular with Furries:
  • Toriel◊ is often drawn as a curvaceous woman with large breasts and wide hips that her robe lovingly hugs by fan artists, despite Toriel lacking this sort of physique in the game and in official art are too loose to show that physique off. Maybe. She is also drawn as a voluptuous Big Beautiful Woman by many artists, due to her somewhat larger body shape in the in-game sprites.
  • Similarly, Asgore's in-game sprite makes it somewhat hard to make out his build, thanks to his robe/cape covering most of his body. However, many of his fans lean towards making him a Hunk or a Big Beautiful Man (or sometimes both) in fan art.
  • The main character in-game is a visibly pudgy and androgynous Kid Hero, but is often aged up and given a clearly-defined gender — more often, they are depicted as a young woman with a fairly svelte figure, with no hint of their permanent squint and perpetual neutral expression. The Fallen Child, Chara, who canonically looks the same as the human except for skin tone, outfit, and facial expression, also gets this treatment, and some fan art either significantly downplays their creepiness levels from the Genocide Ending or outright removes it, even when the art expressly depicts the events of that route.
  • Sans in-game looks goofy and harmless and is really chubby for a skeleton, but is often portrayed as suave or Troubled, but Cute. And since skeletons are lacking in terms of body parts that could be used for sex, Rule 34 will often grant him the ability to create a tongue or genitalia out of glowing blue energy, based on the fact that he has a glowing blue eye during the fight against him in the Genocide route, despite the lack of evidence that he can actually do so.
  • Much like Sans, W. D. Gaster ends up looking hotter or cuter in fanart, despite (what is assumed to be) his in-game appearance resembling a disfigured Puppet/White Face.
  • For some reason, the grotesquely drawn cashier Burgerpants is sometimes depicted as cute or even as a Bishōnen, although some go for a more chubbier and cuter route.
  • Muffet is a Cute Monster Girl, so being at least modestly attractive comes with the territory. Some artists take things a step further, though, and ignore her less human features such as her lack of a nose or her unusually slender neck to draw her as a six-armed, purple-skinned, but otherwise normal-looking anime girl. But more whom lean on the Anthro side keep her less than human features and focus on making her more curvier and well-endowed, both in the upstairs and downstairs departments.
  • In-game, Undyne isn't bad-looking at all, but once she takes her armor off it's clear that she's on the lanky side and has a pretty flat chest. Fan art will often depict her with bigger breasts, bigger muscles, or both. She also tends to get hair that covers more of her head, rather than being almost entirely bald save for a ponytail like in canon.
  • Even Grillby, despite his game sprite suggesting he is a little short and stocky, is usually drawn by fans as a tall and aloof figure who would be rather conventionally attractive were he not a humanoid fireball.
• WarioWare:
  • The series gets this particularly with Ashley and Penny, giving them more mature proportions and making them noticably taller to make them look more aged up.
  • WarioWare Gold: Wario can literally employ this trope in-universe through the Wario amiibo Sketch feature, where he will paint very self-flattering drawings of himself if you happen to scan a Wario amiibo. The results are probably not too far off from the fanart, depicting him as both a hunk and a Bishōnen.
• Similar to the situation with the Mario princesses above, after she debuted in Super Smash Bros for Wii U and 3DS, fan art was quick to make the athletically-built Wii Fit Trainer◊ much curvier than she is in her own game and in Smash or have large breasts, or have muscles. She's also constantly paired with and compared to Samus in her Zero Suit, mostly due to the similarities in their designs.
• Xenoblade Chronicles: A from Future Redeemed is Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous due to being an incarnation of gender-neutral supercomputer Ontos (stated by Rex to be between the male Logos and the female Pneuma) and never being referred to by any pronouns at all. However, due to their obviously feminine appearance and being voiced by actresses, along with being coded as female ("1") in the game data while their other half Alpha and combined past incarnation Alvis are outright referred to in the story with male pronouns, many fans portray A in fanart as objectively female, putting particular emphasis on her godlike hips and rear along with enlarging her chest (though usually not to the extent of her sister Pneuma, AKA Pyra and Mythra) and portraying her as having strong sexual tension with Matthew (or sometimes even Shulk or Rex).
• Yandere Simulator: Yan-chan's default appearance was deliberately designed to appear plain and average in a Generic Cuteness way. That hasn't stopped multiple artists from depicting her as being much sexier than her in-game model.
• When it comes to Yo-kai Watch gijinkas, Whisper (who canonically looks like a cross between a Bedsheet Ghost and a marshmallow) is often portrayed in one of two ways: a standard Bishounen, or a cute Big Beautiful Man (typically of the chubby kind, but one artist by the name Bechnokid has a more muscular Whisper who's pretty popular in the fandom).
  • Indy Jaws, a shark Yo-kai introduced in 3, also has a tendency to get this treatment. A lot of it is Not Safe for Work, though.
• A lot of the more human characters from Yume Nikki get this treatment. Take Shitai-san, who is a dead guy in-game. Most fanart depicts him as a Bishounen.

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