Sexy Packaging

Okay, she might mention a "Fur Bikini" in the lyrics.

A cover or packaging for a product uses overt sexual imagery (exactly how overt can depend on the product).

The product really could be anything: a movie, a game, even consumer goods. And it doesn't matter if the product actually involves sex or not. It could actually be covers for porn films, or it could be the sticker on a jar of peanut butter. What matters for this trope is the cover shows something sexy.

And the exact form doesn't matter, save for who is most likely to buy the product.

It can even overlap with Covers Always Lie if the product has a scene like this in the cover, but not in the actual work. If this is so, then avoid it. They're probably polishing a turd.

This trope is quite common when it comes to Sword and Sorcery books and pulp romance novels, which often feature cover art portraying large, muscular heroes along with gorgeous, buxom, nearly-nude women.

Of course this is justified if the product actually is about sex in some form.

A Sub-Trope of Sex Sells.

A Super-Trope to Fanservice Cover, Lady Not-Appearing-in-This-Game.

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Examples:

• Music

Advertising

• The St. Pauli Girl Beer logo certainly helps push sales.
• Jean-Paul Gaultier iconic perfume bottles shaped as a corseted torso.
• There was a package that had a woman snuggling up in a white fox coat, and having a seductive look on her face. The package was for some incense, but it was "musk" scent, so it might have been a form of Sex for Product.
• The Australian car rental company No Birds is a deliberate subversion of this trope, as its boast was the implication that it didn't need to rely on scantily-clad women (for which bird is Australian slang) to sell its product.

Anime & Manga

• Ah... and Mm... Are All She Says presents an In-Universe, inverted example. When relatively popular hentai Sequential Artist Norush is due to publish his second tankoubon, his editor advises him to design clean covers for it so as to avoid the buyers' embarrassment at the cash register.
• The original DVD covers for Azumanga Daioh show the girls in a very unflattering light◊: exposed stomachs, embarrassed expressions, and skirts that are dangerously close to being blown upwards by the wind. Granted, they're frames from the opening animation... very strategically chosen frames. A bit ironic, considering it's a female-driven series that doesn't resort to fanservice to entice viewers. The Sentai Filmworks◊ re-release uses artwork that's more faithful to the series' tone.
• Berserk's cover for the 13th volume shows a smiling Guts holding a completely naked and unconscious Casca whilst they are surrounded by demons.
• The Blu-ray cover for Blue Submarine No. 6 shows Kino in an overly sexy outfit◊ which she never wears in the anime.
• A Centaur's Life is a Slice of Life manga that occasionally features nudity, but unlike some of its monster girl-themed competition like Monster Musume, it's usually in an everyday context and is less focused on Fanservice. Nevertheless, while the first few volumes had covers that depicted the everyday scenes the manga focuses on, there have been an increasing number of covers that are obvious attempts at Fanservice that are at odds with the content or depictions in the actual manga. Perhaps the most notable is Volume 8, which features an Off-Model version of the main character in a swimsuit, featuring her larger-than-usual breasts dripping with water prominently on one side of the book, and a close-up of her dripping behind on the other. In general, her breast size has also been increasing with each cover, far ahead of her in-story depiction, and included the visible shape of nipples through her clothes.
• Dance in the Vampire Bund's covers tend to feature Really 700 Years Old but child-like looking Mina Tepes in various states of undress and "come hither" posing.
• Even though the original first couple of covers of the Excel♡Saga manga by and large avoided fanservice, later covers always have female characters in strange, revealing clothing, like Go-Go Enslavement gear or a Stripperiffic Sexy Santa outfit.
• Franken Fran, a manga whose content itself would be rather hard to explain, likes to go the extra misleading mile by having the covers be the main female characters in poses out of a medical fetish book. Often there's a horrific version of the same picture on the next page, such as the cover of volume 3, which features a sexy picture of Adorea, complete with cute face — despite the fact that her actual face is a mass of tentacles designed for swallowing people whole. The aforementioned horrific version reveals that the "cute face" was just a biological mask.
• Of the many gorgeous Gankutsuou covers available, Netflix chose this one◊ to advertise it. Those not in the know wouldn't be blamed for thinking it's a Yaoi series, and while there is Homoerotic Subtext by the boatload and at least one canon same-sex crush, it's nowhere near representative of the content.
• This is poked fun at three years straight in the New Years anime specials of Gintama. The first two times Gintoki holds fake DVD covers featuring him and Hijikata shirtless in suggestive poses, then it's the Benizakura Arc movie tickets... Hijikata is barely in it anyway.
• The cover of the first manga volume of Inu × Boku SS, a slice of life manga about a group of half-Youkai living in a boarding house, features Ririchiyo sitting on Soushi's shoulder, with it looking like he's putting a hand up her skirt. Even though the series barely features any nudity or sexual situations at all, and the covers of later volumes reflect that, the first one is enough to make some think the story is Ecchi and put it back on the shelf.
• The Najica Blitz Tactics DVD sets contain a set of female panties inside. Given the abundance of female undergarments featured in the show, it's quite fitting.
• Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt:
  • The Blu-ray release features a nude Panty straddling a large gun on the cover. It has a strategically-placed sticker over Panty's torso so it can be sold at mainstream retailers like Target or Walmart, which is notably absent at online retailers or specialty stores like Suncoast Motion Picture Company.
  • The Forever Bitch Edition shows Panty and Stocking, seemingly naked◊, eating a breadstick in a very... suggestive way.
• The first volume of Peepo Choo has a huge picture of a scantily-clad Reiko.
• Most of the covers for Princess Tutu are pretty tame, although there is one cover that features Rue in a birdcage wearing a corset and a tutu that covers almost nothing. It's based on a real ballet (as all of the covers are), and it's highly symbolic, so it's not too out of place... but then ADV decided to use that picture as the cover for the boxset. Considering Rue isn't even the title character, the fans were confused and embarrassed by the move. Luckily in later editions, the eponymous Magical Girl is shown on the cover in a less provocative pose.
• The original multiple-volume release of Welcome to the NHK used this trope on every volume. Going off the covers, you'd believe the show was about sexy ladies instead of an anxiety-ridden hikikomori man, though some of these images do appear (briefly) in the actual anime. The complete collection/season sets do not use this trope.

Comic Books

• Issue #8 of Batman: Gotham After Midnight shows a gorgeous, lingerie-clad woman Bound and Gagged on the floor. Nothing remotely close to this happens in the actual comic. Similarly, there's a Nightwing cover that has him standing over a Bound and Gagged Huntress.
• While the standard cover art of Blade Devil is pretty tame the Indiegogo variant covers quickly gained infamy for featuring the main heroine in an explicit Naughty Tentacles hentai scene that appears nowhere in the actual story. (While the graphic novel does have some sexy content it's mostly a straight action/fantasy series about a swordswoman fighting monsters.)
• In the early 2000s, Marvel published an Emma Frost miniseries covering the character's early life, which was mostly teen drama, had relatively low-key artwork, and might have appealed to young women. Unfortunately, the first seven covers of the comic were incredibly sexed-up pin-up shots of the adult Emma wearing a costume that was even more revealing than the costume she normally wore at the time in New X-Men, and if you've read that title you'll know that wasn't easy to achieve. This probably contributed to the series' failure. This is one of the worst examples, but many Marvel comics with solo female protagonists during this era featured heavily sexualised pin-up covers, often by Greg Horn, that give little clue as to the content inside.
• The Juan Jose Ryp cover to issue 4 of Frank Miller's RoboCop features a bloodied Lewis drawn in such a way that she resembled a pole dancer◊. His covers for some of the other issues also feature scantily-clad women.
• The comic adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has some quite painfully fanservice covers, depicting Lisbeth Salander as some kind of Suicide Girls-style goth/alt pin-up. Particularly inappropriate given the nature of the work as a protest against male exploitation of and sexual violence against women.
• Hack/Slash has a troubling Omnibus image, giving a panty shot of Cassie Hack with special attention being drawn to the groin area.◊ While the comic has lots of fetish wear, it is surprisingly tasteful in its fanservice.
• Most of the covers to Marville feature cheesecake shots of a random redhead, with the covers only slightly related to the actual content of the comic, such as "Hey, she has a dog! One of the characters owns a dog!" or "Hey, she's holding a Wolverine claw! Wolverine is in this issue!" The series was conceived as part of a bet with another writer to see who could make the better-selling comic, and this strategy of blatantly misleading Sexy Packaging was obviously used as low-effort reader bait when it was clear Marville was losing, badly.
• Parodied by The Middleman. The first issue was available with a normal cover, or (as a Comic-Con exclusive), the "Special Completely Inaccurate Variant Cover Edition", which features a muscular barbarian with a scantily clad woman lying at his feet.
• Nightwing has been in a number of suggestive poses on covers, given Dick Grayson's status as Mr. Fanservice. The cover of the very first issue of Nightwing Vol 2 depicts Nightwing doing the splits in mid-air, with the focus on his crotch.
• Spoofed in one of the Outland collections (the successor to Bloom County) is titled "His Kisses are Dreamy... But Those Hairballs down my Cleavage..." Needless to say, the title speaks for itself, but just to elaborate, it has Bill the Cat puckering his lips and an ample-chested woman with a tear rolling down her cheek.
• Princeless: Get Over Yourself #2 lampshades this trope. The cover◊ has an image of Adrienne's sister Angelica spread out naked for the reader. The nudity is interrupted by the real Adrienne bursting out of the cover and criticizing the artist for drawing a skeevy image that has nothing to do with the actual story.
• Played with by the collected editions of Sex Criminals, which feature NSFW covers, but covered in dust jackets for books on topics like DIY pet euthanasia.
• Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do: All of the covers place a great deal of emphasis on Black Cat's breasts, ass, or both at once.
• In 2014, Marvel hired noted erotic artist Milo Manara to draw special covers for some of their new titles. One of them was the this◊ cover to the 2014 launch of the Spider-Woman series (also a part of the Spider-Verse storyline). Not only did some fans get up in arms over the suggestive pose, they got up in arms over how uncomfortable and bizarre that pose was.
• Vampirella...you didn't see that coming, right? But just because Dynamite did a makeover and now dresses her decently, it won't exclude her wearing her classic costume on the cover...
• Standard for Dynamite; many issues of Warlord of Mars have covers featuring Dejah when her role is minimal or non-existent. It happens mostly in the original main series, however.
• World War Hulk: The Heroes for Hire tie featuring the infamous cover seen here. While the interior features not a single tentacle naughty or otherwise. Various readers and critics vocally disapproved, pointing out the dripped slime on Black Cat's cleavage, and that one tentacle appeared to be unzipping Colleen Wing's catsuit as being particularly over the line. Oh, and then the title was cancelled two issues later.
• Wonder Woman
  • Wonder Woman (1987): During William Messner-Loebs' run the cover art did not always reflect the story inside the book very well, and during her stint on a Sangtee Empire prison planet one cover depicted her with her back arched wearing essentially a bikini and a collar with chain leash. Her outfit was not the same in the book and the Empire did not bother with chains.
  • Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia: The cover of the book is Wonder Woman's boot on Batman's head, evoking Dominatrix-like imagery. Unlike many other examples, an event like this actually does happen in the story.
  • In-story, Carelton Group Publishing proposes a Fanservice-laden cover for Diana's book, with her lying nude and seductive on a couch. Diana opts for a simple cover with a depiction of her lasso on a white background.
• A strip found in Tom Gauld's You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, depicting a business meeting:
  "Mike, we're so excited to see these new D.H. Lawrence book covers you've designed for us!"
  "I've chosen images that represent Lawrence's key themes: class, nature and capitalism."
  (beat)
  "Just kidding! They're all pictures of sexy ladies!"
  "Hooray!"

Comic Strips

• Liberty Meadows is a hilarious comic, but Frank Cho's love of busty women on the cover makes it almost a certainty that reading it in public will get you some funny looks. Jen's cover on the fourth collection is especially outrageous in this regard. In Cho's defense, the interiors are often just as sexualized as the cover, making it as much a case of Truth In Advertising.

Films — Animation

• Some promotional material for Titan A.E. showed the main female character in a breast-baring Stripperiffic outfit, which appears nowhere in the film. The male main character actually ends up showing more skin in the film itself than she does.
• The DVD release of Superman/Batman: Apocalypse had an image of a Brainwashed and Crazy Supergirl clad in a Stripperiffic outfit (which she briefly wears) used in place of an actual shot of the heroine in her iconic costume. According to Word of God, the cover artist was told to do this after the failure of the Wonder Woman (2009) DVD.
• The VHS and main DVD covers for Atlantis: The Lost Empire invert this trope: Kida is depicted wearing a dress (with one of the sleeves being visible), but in the movie proper, she wears a very revealing outfit consisting of a bikini and sarong, and she doesn't start wearing a dress until the very end of the movie due to her now becoming a Queen.

Films — Live-Action

• The original Psycho poster, as well as the covers for the 1980 VHS and 2020 Blu-ray and UHD, had Janet Leigh in a bra as the central image.
• The Australian "special edition" DVD of Clerks (which they called the 'Snowball Edition') proudly displayed the logo atop the midsection of a bikini-clad model. Because, you know, that perfectly sums up a black-and-white movie about the drab life of a convenience store clerk.
• White Christmas: The 60th-anniversary video release does this to the leading ladies. We see just the heads of Kay and Crosby, but the full bodies of Rosemary and Vera. Rosemary is drawn to wear a dress far more slinky and form fitting than anything she wore in the movie, and Vera is wearing her holiday dress from the end, but without the petticoat, to show her dancer legs (based on similar publicity shots for the movie).
• Dark Angel: The Ascent: Veronica does not appear in the torn clothing some of the covers show her as. She does, however, appear fully nude when she arrives on Earth.
• The Michelle Yeoh movie, Wonder Seven, has several of its promotional posters, including the one that's displayed on IMDB, featuring Yeoh in a tight leather leotard and fishnet stockings, sitting in a seductive pose. At NO point in the entire movie, did she ever shows up in this attire.
• One DVD cover◊ (and some VHS backs◊) of the obscure comedy The Misery Bros. focuses on Debbe Dunning's sexy lawyer.
• Not quite a "cover" as such, but the movie poster for Star Trek V has an addition on its Japanese version which fits this trope down to the ground: a scantily clad alien catwoman was crudely placed onto the original artwork, where she hadn't been in the Western version of the poster. The scantily clad alien catwoman in question only appears in one (very brief) scene in the movie itself.
• The cover of the American video release of the Korean action film Shiri features a nearly naked Asian woman with a gun. This does not reference anything within the film itself.
• The cover for the American release of Infernal Affairs. It features an attractive woman in a blue dress holding a large gun. The movie has maybe three female characters in it, but none of them are bombshells, even see any weapons over the course of the story, or have much more than five minutes of total screen time.
• Parodied in This is Spın̈al Tap, where the cover to the band's latest album "Smell the Glove" is described as a naked woman with a collar and leash having a leather glove^note "You should have seen the picture they wanted to use. It wasn't a glove, believe me." shoved in her face by a man dressed in BDSM gear, causing quite a bit of controversy. When the album comes out, they give it the least offensive cover imaginable; complete matte black (without even the name of the band or the album).
• If you know nothing about American Beauty, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a porn flick, given its title, tagline ("Look closer"), and prominent image of a woman's midriff and a red rose. This was probably invoked deliberately... look closer - don't judge a book by its cover!

Literature

• The covers by Margaret Brundage for Weird Tales in the mid-1930s. Authors like Robert E. Howard would deliberately put sexy scenes in their stories so that she would be assigned to draw them and get them the cover story.
• The Mortal Instruments: Most of the first book's cover is taken up by a shirtless male torso; presumably it is supposed to represent the male lead, Jace, who never gets shirtless in that book. Then again, a good portion of the text is dedicated to describing how attractive he is, so you can't say that it's totally misleading.
• Harry Turtledove's The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump. With the best will in the world, it is impossible to find any connection between this mess of women in clingy dresses, Lovecraftian monstrosities, and big vases◊, and a story about an EPA officer investigating magical pollution. It looks like it was picked, entirely at random, from a big pile labelled "Fantasy Covers (Lurid)".
• Jame, heroine of the Chronicles of the Kencyrath, is a skinny flat-chested girl who is often mistaken for a boy — so of course the most recent covers give her not only large breasts but her shirt partway open to show it off. Therefore it also crosses over with Covers Always Lie.
• InCryptid: The cover of the first book shows Verity in a Fanservicey pose, a short skirt, and baring her midriff. However, it's completely supported by canon — she works as a cocktail waitress and often doesn't have time to go home and change before patrolling for monsters. Seanan McGuire has gone on record saying she actually chose the cover artist Aly Fell for having "the right sort of irreverent cheesecake aesthetic".
  Seanan: For all the people that go "oh my god, it's cheesecake": it's well-drawn cheesecake, her waist is thick enough that you can tell she has internal organs, she is wearing remarkably sensible shoes, given that they are high heels — they are also dance heels, they're chunky, they're made to be moved in — and she's got muscle tone.
• The American covers for the Mercy Thompson series show Mercy wearing very skimpy clothing, which she very seldom, if ever, does in the stories. For example, the cover of Blood Bound shows Mercy in her mechanic's coveralls - but she wears them unbuttoned to her navel and with just a bra underneath. Needless to say, Mercy would never dress in such an impractical way while working on a car.
• The Diadem Saga: The Daw Books English covers of Lamarchos◊ (drawn by Michael Whelan) and Irsud◊ (by Eric Ladd)^note She actually does spend quite of this book nude until she persuades her minder that the larval host of the next nayid queen should be allowed clothes. show Aleytys fully nude from behind. The cover of Star Hunters (by Michael Mariano) is a little tamer, with Aleytys in a long skirt and a bikini top, The Nowhere Hunt has her fully clothed but with gratuitous Male Gaze of her ass in tight pants, while the cover of Ghosthunt shows her from behind in a translucent red gown. The German covers of Diadem from the Stars and The Nowhere Hunt go even further, with Aleytys's bare chest fully visible.
• The cover for the initial American release of Spice and Wolf. It's kind of hard to sell a series focused on medieval economics, even if one of the lead characters is a cute wolf girl. The publisher attempted to rectify this by first releasing Volume 1 with a cover that shows a live-action and possibly naked girl with a wolf tail who looks nothing like said wolf girl, Holo. It makes it look like some sort of trashy erotica novel or ecchi Magical Girlfriend series, when it's really a historical fantasy. Outcry from fans led to it being issued with the original cover as a dust jacket.

Live-Action TV

• Parodied on the British sitcom As Time Goes By: The protagonist, a (white, older) Englishman named Lionel, has written a memoir of the decades he spent growing coffee in Kenya. In one episode, he is made to pose for a cover photo, dressed like an adventure hero in khaki, including a shirt revealing a lot of bare chest. A scantily-clad blonde is sprawled at his feet.
• The in-universe Nikki Heat novels in Castle have the eponymous detective on the covers with a gun and little else. Beckett, the "muse", is unsurprisingly not amused. Despite clashing with the reality, however, it's not unfounded in the text of the defictionalized Nikki Heat books, as one of the major differences between Beckett and Nikki Heat is that Heat, in Castle's words, is "kinda slutty."
• Some Doctor Who novelization covers fell into this, with a few covers in the Virgin Doctor Who New Adventures line notable for featuring somewhat sexualized renderings of companion Ace wearing a skin-tight outfit. Not that the actress, Sophie Aldred, seemed to object, as around that time she took part in a photo shoot in which she wore a real-life version of the costume for the cover of a book she wrote about her time on the show, and came off looking just as good as the rendering.
• Parodied in Friends:
  Mrs. Bing: I have sold a hundred million copies of my books, and y'know why?
  Ross: The girl on the cover with her nipples showing?
  Mrs. Bing: No. Because I know how to write men that women fall in love with. Believe me, I cannot sell a Paolo. He's not a hero. You know who our hero is.
  Ross: The guy on the cover with his nipples showing?
• Ernie Kovacs parodied this trope with a series of "more sex and violence" book covers, showing Little Women as ladies of ill repute, Peter Rabbit as a gangster, and a Webster's unabridged dictionary with a picture of a silhouette of a lady behind a window blind, with blurbs all over the cover such as "Unexpurgated!", "Four Letter Words!", and "Nothing Left Out!"
• Supernatural: The Winchester brothers discover their hyper-masculine monster-hunting lives are being chronicled in a series of pulpy novels. The covers show them shirtless, with Sam being portrayed by a long-haired Fabio.

Magazine

• Super-Science Fiction: About half the covers featured some light-skinned lady (usually with blonde hair) and what little clothing she wears is skintight. None of the covers, however, were based on the stories in the magazine.
• Humorama: These digests usually had one big naughty gag cartoon on the cover complete with a Ms. Fanservice, though some covers would squeeze more than one cartoon onto it with plenty of pretty women.

Pinballs

• The fourth edition of TRON: Legacy replaces the original backbox display with one featuring Quorra and Gem standing back-to-back.

Tabletop Games

• The Ravenloft supplement Van Richten's Guide to Lycanthropes features cover art depicting what is possibly supposed to be a painful transformation into a terrible beast under the light of the full moon, but more closely resembles a woman in a nightgown mid-orgasm.
• A series of "historical" d20 System game supplements were published by Avalanche Press. Most of the books featured a scantily clad large-breasted woman on the cover, even for settings set in the most frigid climates.
• The ESCI Wargaming figure set "Barbarian Warriors", intended to reproduce Germanic tribal enemies of the Roman Empire, was marketed using box art showing a very lightly clad blonde woman fighter, who looked as if she was on the verge of a Wardrobe Malfunction. The woman warrior took centre-place among the warband on the box cover, and the art can be seen here. Out of forty-six 1:72 figures in the set, two were female and bore a vague resemblance to the cover girl.
• A certain French RPG sourcebook from the early 1990s (L'Empire ténébreux) featured a vivisection chamber where doctors from some bipedal reptiloid species (more specifically, humans wearing a mask) dissect screaming naked human beings who have been flayed alive. The centerpiece involves a woman whose howling face has been stripped to the muscle, yet whose bare breasts remain somewhat intact. How such a cover made it out the door, much less onto store shelves, even in Europe, remains a mystery.
• Exalted has one notorious example◊ where the focus of the picture seems to be the crotch of the scantily-clad and strangely disproportionate woman on it. Just to add insult to injury, fans had been saying for months that the artist who drew that mess, Hyung-Tae Kim, would be perfect for Exalted. They apparently forgot to add "... with a sane editor guiding him".
• Vampire: The Masquerade:
  • While it's certainly not cheesecake, a certain image on the back cover of the Tzimisce clanbook led to the book being sold in many stores in a solid black porn-bag. In-house artist Joshua Gabriel Timbrook had supposedly been chewed out for running late on the deadline, so he dashed the image off, handed it in, and went home the evening the book left for press.
  • The BDSM-tinged cover for the supplement Ghouls: Fatal Addiction, while not out of line with the content, is considered a bit much by many gamers. Ghouls inspire a lot of BDSM-related content (in the corebook, the picture accompanying the text about them is an out-and-out slave auction); this is just what happens when it comes full-flower.
• GURPS:
  • Among 3rd edition books, the naked sorceress on GURPS Wizards rather sticks out among otherwise sensible covers.
  • The proposed covers for the 4th edition were so poorly received that Steve Jackson Games ran a design contest to replace them. An unfortunately-shaped rocket launcher dubbed the "dildo gun" became a meme.
• Nearly all of the supplements for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition produced by Avalanche Press have a Heavy Metal-style cover (some by actual Heavy Metal artists) that have almost nothing to do with the book's contents. And the models for those covers? Actual porn stars. Really.
  • A particularly egregious example would be Doom of Odin: Tales of the Norse Gods, which has an "archer" (well, she is holding a bow) who appears to be performing a hot squat.
  • They even lampshaded it at one point. In Vlad, Blood Prince of Wallachia, during a discussion of period clothing, they add in the breezy comment "For an example of period female underwear, see the cover!"
• The fourth book of the Dragon Warriors RPG paperbacks, Out of the Shadows, features a female mage surrounded by snakes◊ with a Navel-Deep Neckline who does not appear in any of the following: the character class (Assassin) featured in the book; the monster write-ups; the sample adventures. Those are all the book contains.
• The first edition cover for Ironclaw is a fan-art of Lina and Naga from Slayers as a fox and a wolf, Naga dancing in the background in her signature dental floss.

Video Games

• Oh, lord Record of Agarest War's US packaging. The entire outer box for the limited edition is covered in the most Fanservicey images they could pull from the game. For reference, the actual game is a Dating Sim/Strategy RPG which is pretty Fanservicey at times, but is not nearly the wall-to-wall sex romp they try to make it seem like.
• X-Blades does this a lot with the heroine (of course, within the game as well).
• Arkista's Ring◊ for the NES pictures Christine in a Chainmail Bikini.
• Covers for Battle Chess show the queen in a much skimpier dress than in the actual game.
• Onechanbara. But then, the games are heavily laden with Fanservice anyway.
• No box art for EverQuest came without that Firiona Vie (aka "that bikini-clad elf chick"). Strangely, SOE made a deliberate decision to move away from sexy packaging for EverQuest II - the initial release and the first expansion featured a scantily clad human chick named Antonia Bayle on the cover, but all the other expansion packs have featured images of that expansion's main antagonist.
  • Similarly, the Spellforce series.
• Runaway 2: The Dream of the Turtle: The cover of the retail package has Brian carrying Gina over his shoulder. Gina is wearing a red bikini and we get a Male Gaze shot of her butt. Alternate covers show Brian carrying Gina, still in red bikini, but in his arms this time. We get a plain view of her assets.
• Recent games under the Rockstar Games badge (including Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne 3 and L.A. Noire) often incorporate into packaging at least one sexually attractive female character who never actually appears in the game itself. This practice may be traced back to Rockstar North of Grand Theft Auto fame, which started doing this with actual female characters in Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City before moving on to using throwaway female characters beginning with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
• The original PC-98 version of Popful Mail featured its titular heroine in the process of getting dressed on the cover, showing off some skin, legs, and her leotard strap falling off.
• The package art of the "Burst" iteration of Senran Kagura shows a ninja scroll inserted into a female main character's cleavage in a rather suggestive manner. Actually justified, as the franchise does revolve around busty ninja girls and contains a lot of Fanservice.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The Elder Scrolls: Arena is notorious for its cover featuring a warrior woman in a leather bikini standing in a colosseum, largely because the game contains neither sexy women nor gladiatorial combat. Forget about the engaging Wide-Open Sandbox: on this cover, there's a barbarian girl in skanky Stripperiffic Breast Plates, the likes of which appear nowhere in the rather Fanserviceless game. Arena was originally intended to be Exactly What It Says on the Tin: a fantasy gladiatorial RPG. It was only midway through the project's development that it began to evolve into the open world of Tamriel, based on the developer's home-brew D&D setting. Given that the cover, along with the title of the game, was designed early on for marketing purposes, it's actually rather appropriate. The French cover of Arena depicts a Mr. Fanservice-looking dude, along with a wizard companion nowhere to be found in the game, preparing to slay some goblins.
  • The cover of Battlespire goes all three ways at once: it's significant (weapon and enemy show-off), minimalistic, and features the Sexy Silhouette of a Daedra Seducer.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines' cover prominently features the blonde-haired, big-boobed, pigtailed, mini skirt wearing, Lesbian Vampire Jeanette Voerman looking alluringly at the viewer while showing off her backside. Obviously, this was done for Fanservice purposes, since she's only a minor character and only shows up for about a third of the plot. They already had a live person (Erin Layne) modeling Jeanette for some fanservicey promotional material, which at least helps explain the choice of character.
• Every single installment of Spellforce series has a scantily clad woman in the cover art. At least she's often a plot-relevant NPC.
• Feel the Magic is hit doubly here. If either the title was changed, or the female lead was wearing more on the box, it wouldn't do much more than raise eyebrows. Unless the title change was to the one actually used in Europe, "Project Rub". Together, they unfairly make the game look like a sex simulator. The Japanese version is even more provocative; the female lead is topless, and the title is the significantly more sexually charged "I Would Die For You".
• For the European box art for BlazBlue, the distributors organized a contest on NeoGAF and let fans vote in on whose artwork would be shown off on the box. This◊ was the winning submission, but when the distributors got in contact with the artist, they decided to use a drawing of Noel instead. This◊ Boobs-and-Butt Pose was the result. Complete with a tacked-on placeholder logo to boot.
• Akane the Kunoichi is an otherwise adorable Retraux side-scroller that for some reason features a sexy anime-style illustration of the main character in a very breast-exposing outfit on the cover◊ and also featured prominently whenever you perform a special attack. Apparently they were really proud of that one drawing, to the point of using it over and over (again to re-emphasize, the entire game otherwise uses 16-bit graphics with the main character portrayed as an adorable inch-tall chibi sprite).
• The artwork used to advertise Dinamic's 8-bit computer game Game Over (a Luis Royo piece originally used for Heavy Metal) caused a bit of a scandal when it was imported to the UK, where the leading ZX Spectrum magazines each handled it differently: while Your Sinclair magazine had the audacity to print it as a poster, partially exposed nipples and all, Sinclair User decided to Censor Box the offending area with a large Dinamic logo, and Crash had staff illustrator Oliver Frey subtly redraw the bustier's cups to be slightly less revealing while still showing a Navel-Deep Neckline.
• Dark Earth is a somber RPG set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, where the protagonist Arkhan is afflicted by a transformation that can slowly turn him into a creature of darkness. As seen here, some cover arts feature Arkhan in the process of turning, but others feature stripperific busty blonde exotic dancer Delia, who is a secondary character at best.

Webcomics

• Quite ironically inverted with Elle And All The Others. The cover of each chapter shows an action-packed scene with an occasional Shout-Out to popular video games. The comic itself is little more than Porn with Plot.
• Lampshaded in Questionable Content #420 with an unseen Heavy Mithril cover that has a dragon having sex with naked blonde chicks while beheading an unicorn in space.
• TwoKinds used to have Flora stark nude, hugging Trace from behind as its banner art. Now that it's moved to Keenspot, the author toned it down a bit.

Web Original

• These are typically tagged as "bringing sexy back" and "wink wink nudge nudge" on LousyBookCovers.com, which also makes fun of a great many other kinds of execrable book covers such as those containing blatantly stolen images (tag: "image search gone wrong"), highly visible image compression artifacts (tag: "pixelation"), and horribly stretched or squished pictures (tag: "aspect ratio"), among other hideous and often offensive design failings.
• Good Show Sir, which specializes in science fiction and fantasy, has tags like "hunkbutt", "devil's dumplings" and "starkers" for these. Though the last one is sometimes Fan Disservice, as the naked ladies are not all human.
• A trend in video thumbnails is lampshaded in this video from CollegeHumor. "It doesn't matter what the video is about; just have a butt in the thumbnail and people will watch it." Since the video has nearly 2 million views, it's proven itself.

Western Animation

• Spoofed in an episode of Family Guy where Meg gets a makeover and becomes a pop starlet. The family's producer says they need to get her half-naked and slap her on the album cover in order to attract listeners with "hot jailbait ass". The covers shown include Meg as the Statue of Liberty ("Statutory") and her sitting naked in a frying pan ("Meg On Your Face").

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