This is going to sound a lot more incriminating than it actually is, but I know that r/femboys exists on Reddit so I went to the subreddit and typed "Astolfo" into the search bar, and counted as many posts as possible that had cosplays of the character until I got bored. I didn't pay attention to the username, so I don't know how many of them are the same sets of people or actual different accounts, but there were over 120, scroll down even further and there's at least 200.
Also, the subreddit has half a million users on there, so there are probably cosplays of that character in the thousands.
So this only reiterates the point that Astolfo, and by extension, anime, had a large part in the creation of the femboy fetish.
They also like to sexualize the usage of emoticons for some reason, I guess because emoticons are "cute" or "innocent", and they want to appear as such.
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