Minor/youth attraction in fiction

Due to societal stigma against minor/youth attracted people, most portrayals of minor/youth attraction in fiction are negative and focus on child sexual abuse. This page lists stories where map characters are portrayed as multidimensional, and their feelings for children are important to the plot.

Books

Fire and Hemlock

Fire and Hemlock is a fantasy novel by Diana Wynne Jones that details a love story between a young girl named Polly and Thomas Lynn, and adult man.

For a Lost Soldier

For a Lost Soldier is a 1996 novel by Rudi van Dantzig which tells the story of an 11-year-old boy in the nazi-occupied Netherlands who develops a relationship with a Canadian soldier.

Keepsakes and Treasures: A Love Story

Keepsakes and Treasures: A Love Story is a short story by Neil Gaiman from his collection Fragile Things. The narrator, Mr. Smith, is a pedophile exclusively attracted to young girls. His boss, Mr. Alice, is attracted to teenage boys. Both characters are depicted as morally gray.

Lolita

By far the most famous example of minor/youth attraction in fiction is the 1955 novel Lolita written by Vladimir Nabokov. It focuses on a hebephile who becomes infatuated with his landlady’s 12-year-old daughter, whom he kidnaps and begins a sexual relationship with after her mother’s death. The book has been adapted into two separate movies by the same name in 1962 and 1997.

Past the Dark Field

Past the Dark Field is a collection of short stories focusing on non-offending anti-contact maps.

Starfish

Starfish is a science fiction novel by Peter Watts. One of the main characters, Gerry Fischer, is a sympathetically written pedophile.

Movies

Beautiful Girls

Beautiful Girls is a 1996 movie about a group of school friends reuniting ten years after graduation. The protagonist is shown to be attracted to a 13-year-old girl, who is also interested in him. However, he turns her down.

Head Burst

Head Burst (original title: Kopfplatzen) is a German movie that was released in 2019 and was shown in cinemas in 2020. It's about a pedophile who begins struggling with his attraction when a mother and her 8-year-old son move into the apartment next to him.

Labyrinth

Labyrinth is a 1986 movie, starring David Bowie. It tells us a story of a teenage girl Sarah and a goblin king Jareth, obsessed with her.

That's My Boy

That's My Boy is a satirical comedy released in 2012 which features a sexual relationship between a young student and a teacher. Though initially seeming disgusted by the student flirting with her, the teacher later seduces him. The movie has been criticized as trivializing the sexual abuse of boys by adult women, as the protagonist not only consents to the relationship, but is celebrated by his fellow students after they get caught in the act.

TV Shows

Black Mirror

The third episode of the third season of the Netflix show Black Mirror, Shut Up and Dance, focuses on a pedophile who is blackmailed by hackers who record footage of him masturbating to child pornography. They use this footage to force him to perform a series of tasks escalating in their seriousness and ending with a fight to the death against another offending pedophile. Despite following their orders, his secret is revealed and the episode ends when he is confronted by police. This portrayal stands out because the protagonist is portrayed as sympathetic and the audience is supposed to root for him, with his attraction to children only being revealed at the end.

Shameless (US)

The first season of the American TV show Shameless (US) features a consensual relationship between a middle-aged man and a 15-year-old boy. It also shows one of the protagonists, a middle-aged man, being attracted to a 15-year-old girl, but not acting on this attraction despite her advances towards him. She eventually rapes him while he is under the influence of drugs and thus unable to fight back, and other characters, especially one of his sons, then assume that he raped her. In the second season, he is investigated by police, but the investigation is dropped when she reveals that she was the one who took advantage of him, not the other way around.

Manga

Bungou Stray Dogs

Bungou Stray Dogs is a Japanese manga series by Kafka Asagiri and Sango Harukawa which has been adapted into several other media formats. One of the characters has the ability to summon a supernatural entity taking the form of a young girl, who he refers to as his wife.

Plays

Faust

Faust is a two-part play written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and regarded as one of the most important works in German literature. In the first part, the protagonist of the play falls in love with a 14-year-old girl and employs the help of the devil to pursue a relationship with her. Both her mother and brother die as a consequence of disapproving of the relationship. The girl eventually gets pregnant and ends up drowning her newborn, for which she gets convicted and goes to prison. When the protagonist tries to rescue her, she refuses, and subsequently voices from heaven announce that she shall be saved.

Poetry

Erl-King

Erl-King (original title: Erlkönig) is a famous ballad written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1782 about the death of a young boy. Before his death, the boy claims to see a supernatural entity which he calls Erl-King, who tries to convince him to give up on his life. Though many aspects of this ballad are up for interpretation, pedophilic themes are referenced, especially in the line "I love thee, I'm charm'd by thy beauty, dear boy / And if thou'rt unwilling, then force I'll employ”. The idea that the Erl-King could have been attracted to the boy, and the boy’s death as a possible metaphor for sexual abuse, seem likely considering Goethe himself described feeling attraction to young boys.