The harem trope is mostly famous in anime and manga, which undeniably defined the concept to the point of making it into a full genre on its own, but it isn’t unique to Japanese culture. Funnily enough, the concept of a harem in a story is so old that it might even predate the “other” use of the term reserved for a king with too many concubines: Yusuf (the Islamic version of Joseph with the coat-of-many-colors) was said to have an unwanted harem of sorts, as well as Adonis in Greek mythology. Odysseus and Herakles could both count as well. If I tried to list all the ancient mythic characters who had some form of harem, I’d be at it all day.
The female-centered harem (or “reverse harem”) is just as old; Psyche and Penelope from Greek Mythology both had an unwanted swarm of suitors, and there’s many stories of beautiful maidens from around the world with a similarly large number of suitors. Interestingly, these examples give us an excellent example of what happens when you take the wish-fulfillment out of the equation. Men are after Psyche for her beauty and nothing else, and Penelope is pursued by men hoping to marry into the throne of Ithaca.
This seems to be a key issue regarding harems today: should we write these kinds of stories for wish-fulfillment, or not? The major elements of a harem are not usually hard to find in reality. The problem is, as soon as you start playing them up realistically, the wish fulfillment seems to come apart.
Now you might be thinking: why am I trying to inject realism into a harem story at all? If the point of a harem is wish fulfillment, why not skip the realism and just get on with the fanservice? Well, a common complaint in wish fulfillment stories is that they give people an unrealistic view of reality, which, while not much of a valid complaint in adult stories focusing on adult audiences, is a legitimate concern when most harem stories are aimed at impressionable teenagers. It might be useful to write a story packed with useful life-lessons to the target audience.
For example, maybe the reason the male protagonist has so many girls who are into him is because he comes from money and they’re just after that. Or maybe some of the archetypes in the harem wouldn’t be so fun or attractive in real life. A useful coming-of-age tale could be dressed up initially as a harem story with a stroke of realism.
Another issue is that well-crafted characters stick with people, even decades later. If you want to do a harem story that lasts longer than a simple, flash-in-a-pan that gets quickly forgotten about, focusing on making the setting, the protagonist, and the harem feel like they could exist in real life is one effective way to do it. Besides just drawing comically large, animated breasts.
Let’s start with the bit where a half dozen girls are fawning over the same guy. That one easy to explain. Look at any dating app: right now, somewhere between 1-5% of men on dating apps are getting matches from 80-99% of the women, depending on the app. Most of those men are guys with a lot going for them, though, so that might be a problem if you want a vanilla protagonist. But what if you drop the protagonist in a location where he is the best-looking male character? I have personally been to band/music/theater camps, and there were a lot of good-looking girls there, and a lot of overweight guys with no self-confidence. It wouldn’t be that unbelievable to have a guy who is average-looking to us but top-tier by the standards of the setting. Throw in a common interest in music, or theater, or the arts, and you have enough to justify girls being interested in him. This sort of harem has a time-limit. As soon as he’s back to being a normal fish in a normal pond, some of those girls are going to ditch him.
If your vanilla protagonist is a girl, just make her modestly dressed and moderately attractive with no glaring red flags, such as animal abuse, a cocaine addiction, or genocidal political opinions. Guys will do the rest, and your audience will get it.
Okay, so we have a realistic explanation for why the harem/reverse harem exists, and why they’re all attracted to the male/female protagonist. Now comes the question of why the harem aren’t at each others’ throats.
In real life, stereotypes about women being catty don’t come from nowhere. If they’re all after the same guy, sooner or later, one of them is going to resort to underhanded tactics to bring down the others. Strangely, I’ve never heard of this happening in a harem anime, but I have read stories like this in books published in the U.S. Some women in the audience will inevitably get mad if this happened, but reality isn’t always pretty, and in real life, if you get enough people interested in the same goal, sooner or later, one of them will try to fight dirty.
On the flip side, most guys I know with any self-respect will only pursue the same woman so far before breaking off. There are three reasons for this: 1) pursue too long without any confirmation that she wants a relationship, and you’re in danger of being called a stalker; 2) men in general handle competition for the same woman differently, and if she still can’t decide, then the solution is to go find someone else; and 3) if she doesn’t pick a guy after a few dates, chances are, she’s deliberately stringing them along and doesn’t have the best of intentions.
All of this means that, even if a harem situation did appear in real life, it won’t last very long. Of course, this doesn’t really matter if your story is set in a relatively short time period (like band camp). But then you have other problems to deal with.
For starters, there’s the personalities of the harem and the protagonist. This is where I find people saying that shonen anime do harems better than the harem genre, because a shonen protagonist is allowed to have a personality that might actually attract a harem. The problem here is that, if you choose to give the protagonist a fleshed-out personality that’s not just a stand-in for the audience, you kill the wish fulfillment element of the story, since not everyone watching will have that protagonist’s skills/ambitions/confidence/workout routine. This is why so many harem anime are so divorced from reality; real life doesn’t grant wishes, and wish fulfillment isn’t realistic.
Female protagonists don’t have it much better. In the Twilight Saga, Bella gets a total of five different hunky guys after her, and she’s deliberately described as being as plain and boring as possible. At some point, some of these guys would get bored and leave, but the books added a different lure to keep them interested: Bella’s blood smells delicious. Yes. Seriously. This is something I’ve noticed in certain anime harems as well.
In Maburaho, magic is genetic, how many times you can use it before dying is determined at birth, and how powerful your spells are is also determined by your genes. So, the protagonist has three girls constantly vying for his affections partly because their parents are trying to get them to have his super-baby, and go to some extreme lengths to try and get pregnant. Like, resorting to rather…forceful, tactics.
But a harem’s real selling point isn’t the protagonist; it’s the love interests, and the real personalities you should be working on are theirs. There is a reason why so many personality types get recycled, often by people who have no idea how they initially clicked with audiences to begin with. And to be fair, in reverse-harems, this is fine. Plenty of people will complain when the female lead has a magic stalker who just appears in her room and watches her sleep, but the readers of such books don’t seem to care. But if you’re actually trying to add some realism into your story, you’re going to have to do more than just copy and paste things like “tsundere” and “shrinking violet” into your story.
• The tsundere is perhaps the most abused of character archetypes, to the point where she might need an entire article dedicated just to figuring out how they’re supposed to work. The worst examples are just violently abusive girlfriends whom, in real life, men should avoid as much as possible, and maybe even seek a shelter. Some of these characters make the yandere look sane. To make this character believable, look to some of the older examples, like Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion, who is so messed up in the head that you can understand why she acts the way she does. A more recent example is Taiga from Toradora, who also has a serious case of mental disfunction. And neither of these examples come from shows that qualify as harems, oddly enough.
• The yandere is one you can and probably should do without, unless you want to turn your romcom into psychological horror. This is one that should be explored on a mental level more than any other character, because the twisted mind of a yandere can easily steal the plot of the story. Doesn’t mean she’ll be the audience favorite, but it’s possible.
• Next, we have the protagonist’s sister. Don’t. Just don’t.
• The tomboy, the childhood friend, and the all-A student (class rep, class president, etc.) are all variable that you can do just about anything with them. Writing realistic characters in these categories boils down to writing realistic characters who happen to fit into these tropes.
On the other side, a reverse harem usually has a similar problem. I originally got into writing in part because all of the books I could show my cousins at bookstores in the YA section were girls’ romance of some kind, including spies with love triangles, monsters with love triangles, teenage dystopias with love triangles, and the rare ordinary high school story with a love triangle. Or more than just a triangle (the line between a love triangle and a harem is sometimes blurry).
If you’re trying to write a reverse harem story with realistic male love interests, then let’s consider some of their archetypes as well.
• The pretty boy is one of the two that shows up in every story. The problem I have with these characters is that they usually have no personalities beyond their looks, which, if animated, usually puts them alongside several other male characters who are equally good-looking. If they do have a personality, that tends to ruin the point of the pretty boy, as they are often meant to appeal to girls who don’t know what they want yet and just look for a good-looking blank slate that she can mold into what she wants later.
• The bad boy is the other workhorse of the reverse harem. The bad boy can come in a few different flavors, each with his own appeal. First, if he’s breaking the rules of school, or wherever the story takes place, there’s an element of bravery, or at least bravado. Most people, sadly, only obey the rules of society out of cowardice, and a bad boy who breaks those rules is not a lot of things, but he’s not a coward. Second, if he has a temper and gets violent, even with the female lead, there’s appeal in the fact that he’s willing to get violent. Most boys/men are trained from birth not to solve problems with violence, and by the time they reach puberty, most of them don’t know how to solve an immediate danger (such as an attacker/mugger/wild animal) other than to run to the nearest teacher and hope that they do something about it, and anyone who has been to a public school (and even some private ones) knows that this never works. Enter the bad boy, who’s not afraid of getting suspended and will beat the stuffing out of someone who picks a fight with him. A lot of girls like guys like this because they want the protection. Unfortunately, in real life, it’s very common for guys like this to get violent with their girlfriends, who are much smaller than him, and not so be so brave with an attacker his own size.
• Other important male harem members should include jocks, artsy guys, maybe a sweet guy who volunteers at soup kitchens, etc. The same rules apply as with some of the female archetypes: start with actual realistic characters who happen to fall into these tropes.
There’s really a whole lot more I could go into regarding this, and if I get people asking for more info, I might revisit the idea of harem tropes played out realistically again later. For now, focus on writing the characters like you normally would, and consider spending time asking your friends of the opposite sex what they think. After all, some women enjoy traditional harems, since the focus is usually on the female characters, who are sometimes more fleshed-out than most female characters in stories aimed at a male audience. The same can be said for male readers and a female-lead harem.
Harems do not have to be subpar wish fulfillment. They can allow an audience to consider what kind of person they would truly like to go after in the real world, and if done well with characters that reflect how people act in the real world, there’s a valuable life lesson in there. It doesn’t even matter if the harem never gets resolved, because that isn’t the point. The point of a dance isn’t to get to a specific spot on the dancefloor; the point of the dance is to enjoy the dance.
