POV Boy, Poster Girl

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Electric Wave Woman and... Youthful Man. Yeah, that's it. At least he is youthful.

A form of Main Character + Love Interest couple, where both characters are the Main Character in a certain sense.

The boy is a generic Audience Surrogate, The Everyman, maybe an Ordinary High School Student, and he is the Point of View character, treated as The Hero by the plot itself, and therefore, as the Main Character.

The girl is a more exotic character, the center of all advertising material, her name maybe even appears in the title, and her presence starts the plot and keeps moving it, making her into the face of the entire work, and providing a reason for people to watch the show.

Compare to First-Person Peripheral Narrator, where the first person narrator is not the protagonist, and to Manic Pixie Dream Girl, where the "Poster Girl"'s in-universe role is to shake up the male protagonist's life.

See also Non-POV Protagonist.


Examples of POV Boy, Poster Girl include:

Anime and Manga

Film

Literature

Video Games

  • Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance in Half-Life 2 and its episodes. Though Gordon is the player character, the two get equal billing on promotional material, including boxart, and it's Alyx's introduction that really kicks off the plot in Half-Life 2. It's implied that Alyx was the Resistance's top operative until Gordon shows up.
  • Non-romantic example: Light and Pastel in the Twinbee series.
  • Unlimited Saga offers another non-romantic example with Laura and Henri. While ex-Pirate Laura is prominently featured in most of the game's official art and on the selection screen as a Main Character, her scenario centers around Prince Henri and how she becomes his bodyguard, protecting him from assassins as they roam the land searching for answers. Henri provides the story's narration, frequently mentioning how awed and amazed he is by his enigmatic protector.
  • Good luck finding promotional art of Final Fantasy X that features Tidus rather than Yuna; strangely enough, the original boxart has Tidus on the front and Yuna on the back... and is one of the very, very few pieces of promotional material that features him in any kind of prominent position at all. Yet the game is told as a first person narrative from Tidus' point of view, and while Yuna's journey is a prominent feature of the main plot, Tidus' actions and circumstances are what drive it - specifically, in that they cause the perspective shift that ends up ultimately bringing about the end of Sin's never-ending death/rebirth cycle of despair.