Buxom Is Better

Why does she have so many admirers, I wonder?

Prince Herbert: But I don't like her.
King of Swamp Castle: Don't like her? What's wrong with her? She's beautiful! She's rich! She's got huge... tracts of land!

—from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. [1]

Within various forms of media there is a prevalent assumption among creators that large breasts automatically make a woman more attractive. This often leads to significant focus on said breasts, or the character with the largest breasts getting treated as the most attractive in-universe—regardless of who the fans think is really the most attractive.

This trope is not simply "Big Breasts = Hot Girl," the female character needs to be seen as more attractive in-universe because of her larger breasts. Her breasts should at least be referenced in dialogue if not an integral part of the character. Male characters often gawk at her breasts and may be easily influenced if said female character flaunts her breasts, leading to I Have Boobs - You Must Obey! Female characters, especially flat chested ones are often prone to jealously and yearning for larger breasts.

The logical opposite to A-Cup Angst, and Petite Pride, and the Distaff Counterpart to Bigger Is Better in Bed. While Bigger Is Better in Bed applies Bigger Is Better to penis size and quality of sex, respectively, this trope applies it to breast size and attractiveness.

Examples of Buxom Is Better include:

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Anime and Manga

  • In Devil Hunter Yohko, Yohko Mano Lampshades the fact that, despite being the most buxom character in the show, every romance she has ends in disaster. In fact it is her lack of romantic success that ensures her role as The Hero, since the initial activation of being a devil hunter is a Virgin Power. Afterwards, a hunter can have all the sex they want, as demonstrated by Yohko's grandmother.
  • Sailor Jupiter (a.k.a Makoto/Lita) from Sailor Moon has breasts that range from visibly larger to twice the size or more (depending on the scene) of her cohorts. Unfortunately, she can't get a boyfriend to save her life, because she's noticeably taller than average and is so physically strong and active to be off-putting to most guys.
  • Iketeru Futari Huge Schoolgirl Yuki subverts this. She actually doesn't like her big breasts due to the the physical discomfort and all the unwanted attention she gets, but she's willing to use them to seduce her childhood friend Saji. Unfortunately for her Saji only has eyes for the more petite Koizumi. She eventually gives up on Saji, becomes a model and finds a new love interest in Kaede, only to find out that Kaede has a phobia of breasts, due to a Marshmallow Hell incident with his mother when he was a baby. Fortunately Kaede gets over it becomes a couple with Yuki.
  • In Onegai My Melody, schoolgirl Iijima has very large breasts indeed and lusted after by the boys in class for having such "bodacious boobs."
  • Chapter three of the manga series Asklepios has the protagonists trying to convince a village girl to let them operate on her to remove a tumor on her ovaries that resulted in an huge increase of her bust size, but at the same time is killing her. She initially refused because she thought her love interest liked big breasts, but eventually took the surgery when said love interest say he cares about her and not her bust. After the surgery is over, he even says she looks better flat-chested.
  • Bleach: Although there are a lot of buxom babes in this manga, only one fits this trope: Rangiku Matsumoto. She's not above using her appeal to help her get what she wants, such as the time she tried to convince Ichigo to let her sleep at his house by unbuttoning her blouse. Aside from the occasional reference (usually comedic, but sometimes insulting) in the manga and its related omakes, the anime takes this much further and has a field day using Matsumoto's chest as actual weapons to help her manipulate men (usually Hisagi). There's even one omake (turned into an episode) where the shinigami are at the beach and she begins training Orihime in the art of carrying water with breasts instead of buckets - much to Ichigo's horror (Nanao in the episode).
  • Jungle de Ikou! Mii has extremely huge breasts, the explanation being that since she's the spirit of fertility and reproduction her huge breasts represent Earth's life-giving energy.
  • Rosario + Vampire: Kurumu Kurono (pictured) repeatedly invokes this trope as her major selling point in her quest for coming up on top of Tsukune's Unwanted Harem.
  • Ukraine from Axis Powers Hetalia has huge breasts, representing the country's large and fertile farmlands, or in other words, "huge tracts of land."
  • Kaoruko from Akahori Gedou Hour Rabuge, her large breasts are the reason she's much more popular them her flat chested partner Aimi.
  • The rival cake shop in episode nine of Kamen no Maid Guy makes use of this trope. They get away with selling terrible food to their predominantly male customers because they're too busy staring at the waitress' large breasts to notice how bad it is. Also this trope is very much in effect for Naeka, much to her annoyance and her friends' financial gain.
  • Airmaster Nakanotani Mina. Unfortunately it's much to her dismay as it's the main reason why she get hit on so much. Ironically despite being the most attractive female in the series Mina and her breasts are mainly played for satire and the source of many awkward situations .
  • Haruka Gracia in Basquash. She's from the moon, where it's fabled that due to the low gravity women all have gargantuan, perfectly spherical breasts, so here her "lunar bust" became the focal point of attraction from most men and jealousy from most women [dead link] .
  • Over half the male cast in Desert Punk is enamored with Junko's huge breasts and she is more than willing to take advantage of that.
  • The premise of Manyu Hikencho takes this trope Up to Eleven. The size of a woman's chest not only determines a woman's attractiveness but her wealth and worth in society as well. Small breasted women are outcasts and well endowed women are showered with wealth and power.
  • Macross Frontier. Ranka goes to the Miss Macross competition and suffers A-Cup Angst in the face of the competition, all of whom follow this trope to a T. There is also an infamous line said by Sheryl Nome while she's groping her own breasts.

Sheryl Nome: "My chest isn't the same as yours: Mine brings people hopes and dreams."

  • Yo-Han from Need a Girl! makes extensive speeches about how Bigger = Hotter. He is very much a breast man.
  • Slayers sometimes get weird in this regard. Lina with quite good figure is called "flat" and is awfully concerned about this. Of course, it's more understandable when compared to her usual companions—that's either Amelia or Naga...
  • The homunculus Lust in Fullmetal Alchemist has pretty impressive breasts, though it only gets brought up once.

Mustang: I can see how she tricked you. You've always been a sucker for big boobs.
Havoc: I'm sorry sir. (cue Cherubic Choir) I just love them so much!

Comic Books

  • Love and Rockets has quite a bit of this. Luba's breasts are enormous. So are most of her female relatives, especially her mother Maria and half-sisters Fritzi and Petra. Their huge busts are constantly commented on by others and are a very integral part of the characters of Luba, Maria, and the rest of the girls in the family. The attention they receive runs the realistic gamut from fascinated and aroused men, disgusted men with a preference for thinner women, and jealous women who call them names like blimp-chest. Luba in particular has complained that her build makes people automatically assume that she is a slut. Petra actually had the largest breasts out of all the women in the family until she had a breast reduction, going down to simply "regular busty." Luba's daughter Doralis has a delightful combination of huge rack and voluptuous hips and ass. Her other daughter Guadalupe looked like she was going to escape the "family curse"... until she got pregnant.
  • Alejandro Jodorowsky's Megalex:
    • Adamâ, one of the book's protagonists. She has large breasts and wears a very revealing set of overalls. Fellow hero Ram obviously is fond of them and gropes her when she tells him to "grab my waist" to hold on during a hippodrile ride. She is not amused by Ram's mistake.
    • Shalise, the holographic projection of the police clone training ship. She tells the clones that she's been "endowed with a feminine personality" while she caresses her considerable bust.
  • Knockout from Invincible wears large prosthetic breasts, her boyfriend wishes otherwise but her salary has doubled because of them.
  • Buxom Is Better is an actual plot point in W.I.T.C.H., and it is generally accepted that larger breasts are a sign of greater beauty: three of the five girls all try or actually do use magic to enhance their breast size, leader Will angsts about her small bust, and Irma tries no less than twice to artificially enlarge her already sizable breasts using magic. Lets not even get started on the near-constant Breast Expansion fetishism that is seen throughout the series, but needless to say it's omnipresent. The TV show seems to go even further. Even the transformation sequences feature visible, onscreen Breast Expansion every episode, the characters talk about it directly the very first episode, it's referenced or directly addressed several times, and the show actually made headlines in the UK for being so outright blatant about it. Basically, in W.I.T.C.H., if you're flat-chested you're flat out of luck.
  • Jamie Schaffer, the muscle of the Chaos Campus cast, has enormous breasts... however, they're not natural. She puts on a façade of being deep and "real", compared to her sorority girl comrades, but she's actually more shallow and vain than them and got, quote, "larger and larger breast implants" over the years to compensate for her small height. She's actually described in her bio as "Ripley with silicone implants".
  • Gold Digger features this conversation between the busty Catgirl Brittany and her also-busty sister Gina:

Brittany: You've gotta be joking!!! You're gorgeous! Look at you! Look at these! <hoist>
Gina: Eek! (Narrating): "I remember thinking: 'Jinkies! where did those come from'?"
Brittany: Do you know how many gals would kill for a nice, firm set like yours??? What man wouldn't fall all over himself just to get to talk to you?

Fan Works

Film

  • Superbad has an (unseen) girl who apparently had huge breasts, but she got breast reduction surgery. Seth claims that this is "slapping God in the face," but Evan counters that "she had back problems," and "now that she can exercise comfortably, she's in the best shape of her life."
  • In All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Chloe invokes this trope by wearing a padded bra to make her breasts appear larger. When she takes it off, we get to see that she's rather flat-chested.
  • Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. She is based on a pinup drawing, after all.

"I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way."

  • The eponymous character from Kick-Ass is obsessed with large breasts, going so far as to watch photos of female african tribals.
  • The male lead in Friends with Kids sincerely believes this, leading to A-Cup Angst from his would-be girlfriend.
  • Zigzagged in Weird Science. When "building" the virtual girl - that somehow turns into Lisa - they consider giving her huge boobs, but then change their mind and give her reasonably-sized ones. Later in the fic, however, when they try to do it a second time as a "gift" for some boorish - and shallow - upperclassmen, said upperclassmen insist on making them huge. Fortunately, this second attempt fails.

Literature

  • In one of the Gossip Girl novels, one girl uses artificial means to try and increase her breast size, but it backfires because she becomes too big. Jenny Humphries, on the other hand, has naturally huge breasts that garner her plenty of attention from male characters.
  • Alicia, one of a series of Alpha Bitches in the Clique series. She has huge breasts for her age, sufficiently large that it's a plot point. The boys at her school love her and shower her with affection. The other girls, including her Girl Posse, make fun of how absurd she looks at thirteen with such big breasts.
    • It's outright stated she apparently was forced by her parents, to get silicone implants at the age of twelve thanks to some shady plastic surgeon, presumably to make her more "viable" for marrying off to another rich guy. While air headed, even she hates this happened to her.
    • Likewise, Massie's internal dialogue outright states she has implants too, or had, as she compares a particularly bad event to the time her impalnts "burst".
  • Kylie in Duumvirate was buxom before she could genetically alter herself. After, she jumped chest-first into this trope.
  • In Warbreaker gods are mortals who have died and come Back from the Dead. One of the perks of this resurrection is that each of them looks the way they always wished they could look. For goddesses, this almost always means having a huge rack.
  • The trope is given a bit of a disturbing cast in The Hunger Games: a near-throwaway line from Cinna near the end of the first book mentions that the Games officials almost had Katniss's breasts surgically enhanced without her knowledge or consent while she was tranquilized and recovering from the Games, to make up for the weight she lost during the whole experience. Fortunately, Haymitch threw enough of a fit that they backed off and agreed to let Cinna simply pad her clothes instead.

Live-Action TV

Yoon-sung: (denying interest in a girl) And more importantly, you’re a B-cup, aren’t you? I don’t ever see anyone under a C-cup as a woman.

  • One arc on 30 Rock featured Jack Donaghy's romance with nurse Elisa, played by the patron saint of Buxom Is Better, Salma Hayek. Liz's take?

Liz: If I had knockers like that, I'd be thanking God too.

  • In the first season of Eastbound and Down, Jerkass protagonist Kenny Powers is obsessed with the ample breasts of ex-girlfriend April; in her first scene the camera zooms in on her cleavage as Kenny stares. In Season 2 he dates the gorgeous but less bosomy Vida, only to decide that he's "a tit man" and go back to April.
  • In one episode of Two and A Half Men, the current girlfriend of Charlie wants to get her sizeable breasts reduced due to back pain, to the horror of Charlie; the crisis (from his POV) is avoided when he tells her that once they're done people will notice her ass more - whereupon she decides to cancel the operation and keep her chest (and live with the backache).
  • Two Broke Girls has a joke about Max's huge rack in the first few seconds of the pilot.
    • In episode "And the Kosher Cupcakes", when Max and Caroline meet the Jewish family they're delivering cupcakes to, the mom exclaims "Look at the breasts on this one!".
  • Penny on Happy Endings says that she used to draw attention to her cleavage to get bigger tips during her waitressing days. It's still one of the first things that people notice about her.

Recorded and Stand-Up Comedy

  • A stock line: "(insert name of buxom actress here) has admitted in an interview that her breasts have opened doors for her."

Tabletop RPG

  • People with the Eros genemod in GURPS: Bio-Tech have "exaggerated sexual characteristics" as part of the modifications for making them attractive. Sarcastically from the vignette: "Yes, you too can be stacked like a pleasure bioroid."
  • In Shadowrun, the player can get breast implants of varying sizes. Gamemasters are encouraged to use discretion in determining actual in-game effects.

Video Games

Daniels: I've got green across the board. The forward tanks are buoyant and elevated.
Donnelly: Are ya talking about the Normandy or Miranda?
Daniels: I'm talking about the one covered and protected, not bouncing in the breeze.

    • And in the third game, Liara's father, Matriarch Aethyta practically goes starry eyed remembering her mother "Nezzy"'s magnificent rack, with predictable results as far as Liara's reaction is concerned.
  • This appears in Tales of Vesperia with Judith, who is regarded as the sexiest party member because of her large breasts.
  • In a meta example, the developers of League of Legends have explained that so many of their female characters have enormous busts because subtlety is hard to do with the graphics engine.
  • The governors' daughters in the 2004 iteration of Sid Meier's Pirates! were ranked plain, attractive and beautiful. The major difference between each level of attractiveness is an increase in breast size.
  • Saints Row the Third has a sex appeal slider in it's Character Customization. For Females all it does is increases the size of their bust.
  • In the Queen's Blade PSP game, Spiral Chaos, Reina and Cute cup their breasts in disappointment while looking at Cattleya's massive melons.
  • In BlazBlue, the source of many A-Cup Angst was due to big breasts, Kokonoe threw a tantrum over Makoto's bigger breasts, mentioning her small breasts makes Noel REALLY mad, and she wished to get a bigger breasts like Litchi's. And when Tsubaki was groped by Taokaka and called "Average" despite having decent-sized breasts, she's pissed. And big breasts was one of the reasons Litchi was such a Hello, Nurse!.

Visual Novels

  • Mia Fey from Ace Attorney was once able use her large breasts to get information out of a Dirty Old Man witness. Also, in the first game she gets a small boy to start talking with a Cheshire Grin smile when Phoenix had a hard time getting him to cooperate at all.

Web Comics

Web Original

  • In Chakona Space, Chakats all have positively huge breasts (with in-story justification that they're actually made from a spongy tissue that stores a sort of natural sports drink they secrete when they're not in full pregnant lactation mode). Of course, there's no shortage of endowments among non-chakat races, either.
  • Tasakeru: Faun, who is not only "spectacularly well-endowed", but only (barely) covers her assets with a bandolier.

Western Animation

  • In one episode of Squidbillies, a doctor says Granny's fifth-degree burns can be masked with "enormous fake breasts." Granny keeps demanding that they be bigger on a computer simulation until it warns that they threaten the orbit of the planet, at which point she says to stop because she wants them to "look natural."

Real Life

  • Breast enlargement surgery is called breast enhancement or augment surgery because of this trope. They are a major business.
  • While women with large breasts generally do attract attention and admiration, there is also a good number of reasons why buxom is not always better in real life.
    • Clothing is produced for the average/slim body, so in order to get clothes that flatter a buxom body, one needs to either have clothes tailor-made, spend time and/or money to fix ready-made clothes, or to limit oneself to certain textiles and patterns.
    • Carrying sizable funbags can get really hard on the neck and back. Properly fitting, adequately supporting bras can help this of course, but when you are truly big, those are neither pretty nor very affordable.
    • If your body type doesn't match your bust size, it can look awkward.
    • Which is why Big Bra to Fill exists. Hollywood is fixated on abnormally slender women, and a poorly executed version of this trope can very quickly turn into Gag Boobs.
  1. ↑ A Subverted Trope, as she really does have huge (literal) tracts of land, which is what the king was talking about (while making a 'big boobs' hand gesture.)
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