I leave the thread for a week and apparently shit went down lol.
Anyhoo while playing catch-up, the mention of lack of shotacon and Pico pages back reminded me that those three OVAs, while it got spread around Western spaces for shock value and memes, were 100% original material heralded by two people behind it: the director Katsuyoshi Yatabe, and the screenwriter Katsuhiko Takayama.
Yatabe's a veteran in animation while Takayama came in at the turn of the millennium, no idea on if they're secretly shotacons themselves or not, though the director practically left the industry a few years after the third one. The screenwriter, however, remained and has contributed to screenplays for some popular anime of the 2010s such as
Future Diary and
Aldnoah.Zero. And based on that shit-eating grin, he got away with it, though he hasn't written shota since.
Now there is the character designer, Saigado. They've been drawing smut since 2000, and they have a
Twitter account. And a
second one. And a
third. And they did do a promotional doujin of Boku no Pico when the OVA was first coming out (suggesting that yes, this OVA could only be sold at conventions, you were not likely to see a sealed copy in a video store unless it's secondhand), and they're credited with the story for it. And even though they still draw hentai with plenty of adult women, apparently it's Pico who made them famous given you will see Pico's face plastered everywhere (second link especially) and is the avatar used for MAL's picture.
Very sus.
Also the studios (yes, two are credited) that created the OVAs have since gone defunct, one especially disappeared after the third OVA was released. Not uncommon for indie/doujin studios to dissolve once something finishes up/money dries up, but it was still a studio that existed for the sole purpose of trolling(?) the world with Pico. Unless someone is brave enough to comb through the credits, I don't think we'll know who was behind the main "Sugar Boy" studio and where they slinked off to afterwards.
If they were doing this to tap into a market that hadn't been touched outside of doujinshi circles, guess this was just capitalism at work. Given they had enough funds to make
three OVAs suggests that the first had sold
so well that there are more shotacon otaku out there than we think, and it really is all just about the porn. At least lolicons can make the excuse for the character designs and cute girls doing cute things because girls are
literally expected to dress and act cute and just be pure, shotacons can't unless the character in question was a femboy. It was always about the coom, lolicons
eventually gave in to the coom.