>>3999086Anon, do you know where the word shota comes from? The erotic element isn't assumed. It's an intrinsic part of shotacon. And using the word straight doesn't address your issue anyway. While not allowed on this board, /ss/ is more common than homoshota and every bit as erotic.
Your conflation of "straight" with "not erotic" is yet another example of your anti-homo bias leaking out. And it is this bias that is preventing you from understanding what eroticism even entails.
This topic was brought up a while ago back in one of the female gaze threads; eroticism isn't limited to the things that make men's dicks hard. There's both levels to it and different erotic elements that have more or less appeal to different sorts of people. The simplest way to explain this is via an example. And I'm going to choose one that contradicts both your assumptions about eroticism and the way you present boys and boyhood.
FLCL's Naota is not especially popular with shotacons. Anons here do like him, but he doesn't have a dedicated superfan like Selim or Allister and he rarely comes up in discussions of the best/cutest shotas. And outside of here he's even more forgotten, barely having any fanart. He was also never popular with girls in the way some shounen protagonists get fangirls. No, the audience he appeals to is boys. Not as the object of eroticism, but rather as its subject.
Naota is a very sexual character. There are boner metaphors every episode, he makes all the female spooks' noses bleed with his "guitar", and he's constantly finding himself in erotic situations. He isn't a wish fulfillment MC. But he is a self insert for the confusing, frustrating, exciting, and uncontrollable sexual urges of boys his age. He is erotic, but in a way beyond the selective limitations you try to place upon the concept. And boys, who his eroticism is designed for, are not the sterile, sexless dolls of your purity fantasies.
