When it comes to odd sexual quirks, the love of an animated character stands out. With other taboos your goal is at least feasible; the only thing stopping you is yourself. (Or the law, depending on the nature of your taboo.) However, being attracted to an animated character presents a few problems, the most obvious one being that these characters don’t exist in real life.
I’ll be the first to admit that I find Velma from Scooby-Doo to be rather cute. Something about a cute, curvey, smart girl with glasses just gets to me. However, in real life most girls don’t want to solve the mystery of the abandoned amusement park and get angry at you when you buy them an orange turtleneck and ask them to say, “Jinkies!” every now and then.
Try as some might, they’ll never be able to interact with the animated character of their choice and although conventions often host cosplay tournaments, it’s not like you’re going to meet up with the real deal anytime soon. Most people in this situation would just get over it and try to find someone who closely resembles their animated crush, but in a world where you can buy used panties from a vending machine, anything is possible. “It’s not really that different than being attracted to a girl because of her race or because something about her body sticks out to you,” says a source who wishes to remain anonymous.
“People just find it strange because they’re not use to seeing animated characters portrayed in that manner. For most people they think of cartoons and they instantly think of Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny, but that’s just a narrow way of seeing things.” While it’s easy to call people who like this kind of stuff perverts, I wonder if it’s really all that strange. If you ask a lot of guys who their first crush is, there’s a possibility that their answer will be the name of some over-sexualized cartoon character from their youth. Someone they can look at and in the back of their mind say, “If only she was real.”
Young people, especially males, have been shown over-sexualized versions of women all their lives. Whether it was Catwoman, Rogue, or Cammy from Street Fighter II, it’s hard not to be astonished with the way they were drawn. “Part of the reason they’re drawn a certain way is that the creators wanted to draw something they would enjoy.
If you had to draw the same character over and over again all your life, wouldn’t you want to at least look at something nice? It also doesn’t hurt that it’s an easy way to get young boys to buy their merchandise.” Merchandise is somewhat of a tricky area when it comes to things like this. Some companies openly sell anything with an over-sexualized vixen on it. Body pillows are sold in Japan with a full-sized picture of certain anime characters on them. Some go a step further with pictures of those anime characters in a much more sexual manner.
The question that should be asked though is, “Is this even hurting anyone?” Certain sexual quirks require you to be tied up, beaten, humiliated, and even bled, but being attracted to animated characters is still considered to be too taboo. “It’s not like people are trying to stop us or anything. It’s nothing like gay rights, unless you count the stuff that’s aimed towards a gay audience, it’s just people ogling at pictures of cartoon characters. Some of the stuff can be pretty interesting, too.
It’s not like regular porn; sometimes you’ll actually get a good story out of this stuff.” At the end of the day isn’t that what we really want? Something to keep us entertained.
