In some stories, the young male character is paired with a male, usually in a homoerotic manner, which is most common in yaoi/Boys' Love (BL) works meant for female readers, but some of these works are male-oriented, such as Boku no Pico.
The term refers to a genre of manga and anime wherein prepubescent or pubescent male characters are depicted in a suggestive or erotic manner, whether in the obvious role of object of attraction, or the less apparent role of 'subject' (the character the reader is designed to associate with). Shotacon ( ショタコン, shotakon), abbreviated from Shōtarō complex ( 正太郎コンプレックス, shōtarō konpurekkusu), is, in Japanese contexts, the attraction to young (or young-looking) boy characters, or media centered around this attraction.
