Admiring the Poster

She'd have voted for him a third time if she could.

Tails: I mean, your TV is an old Dominique Wilkins poster. ...You're watching a poster.
Sonic: Fuck off! I love this poster.

— Sonic for Hire, "Paperboy"

Pin-ups are posters displaying sexy people or sexy characters in sexy poses and situations. And well, they're meant to be ogled, are they not? Therefore, in fiction, you'll often find characters Admiring the Poster.

How far this goes depends on how raunchy the work in question is. Often this is limited to simply staring at the thing desirably or commenting on it, but sometimes the person may walk up to the poster and feel it up, kiss it, or lick it. This may be part of a Kissing Warmup, especially if the character is a teenager, but it might even become part of masturbation. Particularly shameless individuals may even do this with posters that aren't intended to be titillating to begin with.

If the work is comedic, the pin-up in question may actually react to the character ogling them in some way.

Related to Celeb Crush and Perverse Sexual Lust. May or may not involve a Poster-Gallery Bedroom. Sub-Trope to Eating the Eye Candy. See also Male Gaze and Female Gaze if the camera takes the viewpoint of the characters.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Ruri Hibarigaoka in Anne Happy falls in love with the figure in the "We apologize for the inconvenience" construction site sign. She is seen wiping down that sign daily, and treats it as if it was a real person.
• Fate/Grand Carnival: The opening features a scene where Gawain, Lancelot, and Tristan celebrate in front of a poster of Swimsuit Altria, much to her horror.
• Interstella 5555: Shep has posters of his favorite band all over the personal quarters of his ship, including a large one of his (obvious) Celeb Crush Stella on the ceiling over his bed. We see him fall into a romantic reverie in which he imagines Stella reaching out of the poster and pulling him in.
• Photon: The Idiot Adventures: Photon stops to admire a large billboard ad in the market square that features a nearly nude woman with ample breasts. "Like nee-san," he notes, as the woman reminds him of his older sister, who'd left the family home after being betrothed to a townsman.
• Yo Kai Watch: Jibanyan has a poster of the girl group NyaKB (Next HarMEOWney in the English dub) over his bed, which he kisses every night before going to sleep.

Comic Books

• Archie Comics: In one comic, Archie and Reggie are looking at a pin-up poster and say "Wow!". But this was in school, and when an angered Miss Grundy catches them, he sends the two boys along with the poster to Mr. Weatherbee's office. When they return, the teacher asks them what the principal has to say. Their answer: "Wow!"
• Red Ears: Parodied in one comic. A young woman puts up a poster of a Hunk in her bedroom, then presses herself up against it and starts touching herself on her bed. Eventually, the guy in the poster pops a boner, freaking out the girl.

Comic Strips

• Foxtrot: One strip has Jason tell his mother that Peter is looking at his calendar. Andy approves, saying she also likes to plan out the new year. Jason corrects her, saying he's staring at the bikini-wearing girls. Andy says he wishes his father would talk to Peter, Jason says it'd be pretty easy seeing as they're both looking at the calendar.

Fan Works

• Evershade: In "Reforming", Kyle has thoughts on this, while undergoing an Attractive Bent-Gender situation:
  If I was going to be a superhero one day, did that mean there'd be posters of me too? Does that mean that I'd be... Other guys' wet dreams? My mind was invaded with pictures of guys dreaming of me like that. Of getting turned on at the sight of me. The same way I did with Racetrack here. I felt my insides rot away and die.
• Triptych Continuum: Pony Go Boom: As said in its only chapter, "Ta-da!", for an image of pony who was called "attractive enough" before this paragraph:
  The posters themselves were magnificent. The unicorn mare wasn't the whole of them, of course, for every act had to be listed — but the attendees needed that vital warning, and so a rather pretty form took up a significant portion of the broadside. Luna spotted those posters over and over again as she trotted through her nation's capital at night, and took the required number of replacements as a sign that a few of them were being placed on bedroom walls.

Film — Animated

• In Turning Red, Mei invokes in her friends this by pulling out a magazine with 4*Town on the cover and on a two-page poster inside.

Film — Live-Action

• Subverted in The Shawshank Redemption, adapted from the Stephen King novella "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption". Andy Dufresne wants people to think this trope is in play, and it helps that he changes posters as time passes, but it's really to hide his escape tunnel out of Shawshank Penitentiary.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master: Joe is seen throwing some loving glances at a blonde pin-up girl on his bedroom wall. After he briefly dozes off, the girl is missing from the poster and appears inside his waterbed... which turns out to be a lure from Freddy, who bursts out and kills Joey.
  Freddy: How's this for a wet dream?
• The Matrix: The young programmer Mouse designs a fetching Lady in Red for one of the training programs. At the crew's rendezvous location inside the Matrix, he's shown lounging on a leather couch and getting turned on by an autographed pin-up from the Woman in Red.

Literature

• Downplayed in The Talisman: Speedy's office is decorated with old nudie cutouts and pin-ups, but they were already there when he started his maintenance job. He leaves them up because they remind him of his days as a traveling blues musician.

Live-Action TV

• In one episode of Last of the Summer Wine, the trio visit an engineering company that Seymour has tasked with building his latest invention. While waiting, they discuss the pin-up calendar on the wall. Seymour disapprovingly remarks that the topless young lady appears to be selling "industrial cleaning equipment", at which Compo quips that she's definitely got some equipment he'd like to get his hands on.
• Saturday Night Live
  • A sketch had a teenage boy's posters come to life to help him through some tough math homework. Most of the characters on his posters have good motivational advice, and he seems to be hearing them out at first, but then he gets distracted by a pin-up poster, who does nothing but talk about all the hot dogs she can eat. He ends up failing his test because he just drew a bunch of hot dogs on the paper.
  • In the music video "First Got Horny 2 U," a teenage Kate is shown making out with (and seemingly humping) a poster of Taylor Hanson because he looks like a pretty girl.
• The Wire: In the season 4 opener, "Boys of Summer", then-mayoral hopeful Tom Carcetti smiles and mouths a kiss at a playboy-style poster he put up in one of the rooms inside his campaign headquarters, featuring a curly-haired woman leaning down to touch her feet.

Music

• Del Reeves' "Girl on the Billboard" is about a truck driver who becomes obsessed with "the girl wearing nothing but a smile and a towel in the picture on the billboard in the field near the big old highway." He's not the only one; the traffic near the billboard is apparently a mess because of all the oglers. He eventually tracks down the artist to ask who the girl is and is heartbroken to learn she's not real.
• Alabama's "She's Got That Look in Her Eyes" is a love song about Farrah Fawcett's famous poster. The poster also prominently features in the music video: a man's affection for the poster annoys his wife, but she's understanding enough to buy him a new copy of it to replace the one he had as a teenager.
• Frank Zappa: "Punky's Whips" is about a fictionalized version of Zappa's drummer, Terry Bozzio, who falls in love with a publicity photo of Punky Meadows, the guitarist for the Glam Rock band Angel. The song consists mostly of Bozzio staring at the photo and lusting after Meadows in an over-the-top fashion while vehemently denying that he's gay.

Theatre

• On the Town: Gabey, a sailor on 24-hour leave in New York City, sees a poster for "Miss Turnstiles" in the subway and immediately falls in love with her. A large portion of the plot involves him trying to meet the girl from the poster.
• In A Very Potter Musical, everyone vocally admires Dumbledore's Zach Efron poster and despair when they're forced to destroy it because it contains Voldemort's soul. In the sequel, Dolores Umbridge prefers Taylor Lautner and at one point strokes her poster of him.

Video Games

• Exaggerated Trope in Persona 2. The old janitor at Seven Sisters High has his room filled with posters, newspaper and magazine cutout, and even a 30-year-old calendar featuring an actress called "Saiyuri Yoshikawa". Every single picture has "the lips worn around the area", and Ulala notes that they're moist too. And then there's the box full of ropes and candles in the corner... "for emergencies, you hope".
• A subversion. Bowser's second interlude in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door shows him finding Peach in Petalburg with the intent of kidnapping her. While he and Kammy Koopa find it strange that she's not saying anything, they brush it off and consider a silent princess might have some perks. A horrified Koopa Troopa comes along revealing Peach to be a poster and quickly rolls it up and runs into his house. Bowser is feeling a bit embarrassed about it.

Web Animation

• In Sonic for Hire, Sonic is shown to be obsessed with a Dominique Wilkins poster, even considering getting it framed to be an "investment". When Mario and his cronies destroy the poster in the Season 2 finale, this drives Sonic over the edge, and his first order of business after usurping Mario's mafia is to imprison the real Dominique Wilkins in carbonite as a replacement for the poster. When Darth Vader later frees Dominique from stasis and Tails destroys all of Sonic's money, Sonic then resorts to getting a Gerald Wilkins poster. However, in the Series Fauxnale of Season 7, Sonic admits to the Creator, who turns out to be Dominique Wilkins himself, that he never actually liked the poster, and only gushed about it when he got high off drugs.

Web Videos

• In Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, Yugi's Grandpa remarks to a poster of the Blackluster Soldier that "No one must know of our forbidden love" while rubbing his hands all over the poster.

Western Animation

• Clarence: Belson hosts a sleepover where he's pranking all his classmates. When one falls victim to the "unscrewed salt shaker" gag, Belson brags that he has to stay in the bedroom and not participate for the rest of the night. The kid could give a rat's ass because he gets to eat his dinner while studying Belson's Lara Croft poster.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: In "If It Smells Like an Ed", the Eds invoke this in order to check Kevin's footprint against another; they put up a poster of Nazz in a bikini, which Kevin stares at non-stop.
• Family Guy: In the Season 17 episode "Trump Guy," Peter kisses a portrait of Barack Obama after Donald Trump damages it.
• In The Loud House episode "Kernel of Truth", Rusty Spokes looks at a poster he found at his school's recording studio of a woman who he thinks is cute. Zach is disgusted because the woman is Zach's mother.

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