The harem genre is generally seen as one of the lowest quality, bottom of the barrel appealing, trope filled genres around. It's uncertain if anyone actually enjoys these series for the 'plot' or hook they try to offer, but the answer is probably a resounding no. So what makes the harem genre so bad and is there any way to make it better? I recently took a deep dive into the genre in order to see if there was anything salvageable out of it and am now here to tell you all about the ins and outs of harem manga.
Well before we dive into the question, I think it's a good idea to define what the harem genre entails. Now a harem is essentially a group of girls all sharing the same love interest in one guy (or multiple guys liking one girl, called a reverse harem), but the definition goes a bit deeper than that. For now, we can go with the simple-ish definition that a harem manga is anything that has three or more potential love interests for the main character. This allows us to take a look at a broader range of things that are 'harem like', but that I don't necessarily consider harem.
So first let's talk about pure harem and the fatal flaw in it. I define pure harem as any story where the harem itself is the primary or one of the primary focuses of the entire series. This means that what goes on with the characters in the harem are the main focus: so major plot points are new people being added to the harem or infighting among the harem. This is where I think most people have a problem with the genre. This is where we get the stereotypes and tropes and cookie cutter characters. However, this is not necessarily the author's fault, but rather an inherent flaw in the design of harems: to keep a harem manga going, every girl must have a somewhat equal chance to be chosen in the end.
For a lot of people, including me, characterization and development are of upmost importance in any good story. If you have dull or uninteresting characters, then how can you expect to draw the audience in? If you can't differentiate yourself from the crowd, why should people read your work? Because harem manga need to keep audience retention, it has to spend a lot of time on each girl it decides to add, which means you don't get time to fully develop any one of them. Most good stories have either a tight cast of a few characters or a long run time with a larger cast because this allows the audience to get acquainted with every part of the character. When we spend time with them and see them struggle and grow, we feel empathy and become attached to both them and the story, which should be the goal of every manga that takes itself seriously. But when you take a character and you whittle them down to having the singular goal of winning the main character's heart in the end, and put that character along side 5 other ones that have the same idea, then can you really make the audience feel empathy for or relate to that character? The answer is no. The same goes for the main character. A lot of harem MC's tend to either be the most bland and generic 'self-insert' characters that the reader can put themselves in the place of, or they get no time for development themselves. All the focus is on the girls in the harem so the MC won't get a chance to change or grow either. So now that every character is underdeveloped, how can you draw any attention? The answer is that you use tropes.
Now, if you go up to anyone who has been around the manga world for a while, I'm sure they could tell you all the harem stereotypes: the tsunderes, the innocent girls, the younger sisters, the well endowed older sisters, the childhood friend, the lolis, the yanderes, the airheads, the super thirsty girls, the 'tries to be pure' girl, the really kinky girl, and the list goes on and on and on. Harem manga need to employ tropes so that people can instantly latch on and see their favorite trope with some small twist. It's pretty much clickbait if you want to think of it that way. Now using these tropes and cliches are not necessarily bad in their own right, and can be used to good effect as long as you build upon those templates, but the problem is that harem manga rarely do this. This is caused by the problem I talked about earlier where there are too many girls with too few end goals in mind to give ample development in most cases.
In the vast landscape of harem manga, one is often hard pressed to make something that stands out from everyone else, so a lot of authors tend to implement rather contrived plot points and schemes to make them stand out. These can include things like getting stranded on an island, having the MC turn into a baby, having a family member kidnapped so the characters have to act a certain way, etc. These seem like good ideas, but they all just fall flat most of the time and make the series look like it is trying too hard. These problems generally come out in the middle of the story when the novelty of whatever idea they were running with in the beginning finally begins to wear out.
Another problem that harem manga tend to come up against is pacing. To give each girl a time to shine, time needs to stand still for the characters in the manga, leading to a really stagnated feel. A lot of chapters go by without anything major happening because every girl needs to be given a chance. This is why manga like Nisekoi can go for up to 240 chapters when the plot could have been neatly finished in 50-100. If the chapter you're reading doesn't contain your favorite character, then it'll often feel like filler, which generally is what kills a lot of manga. So when you're looking at a cast of 4-7 girls, with all but one feeling like filler, you come up with a manga that feels like 60-70% filler. There's a reason why no one praises the last arc of Naruto or the last few arcs of Bleach. People don't like it when nothing happens, but when you try to appeal to a large audience by using so many characters,then that's the risk you have to run. Pacing difficulties also lead to characters who get introduced later to be largely irrelevant to the story. Many times they'll just feel like unneeded drama (which they probably are) and are generally not really even considered as a contestant in the harem contest.
And this directly leads to a problem even hardcore harem fans will run into: the problem of the first girl. This is actually something that I don't mind too often, just because in terms of the story, it makes the most sense. The problem is basically that the first major girl that is introduced ends up becoming the one the MC chooses in the end. A lot of people don't like this because first girls tend to feel more generic than ones introduced later, so a lot of people's favorite character doesn't end up winning in the end. I would argue that the first girl should definitely get more of a chance of being the winner in the end just because they are probably the first piece that gets the story rolling. This means they should be more important to the main character, which gives them more favorable odds. In the end though, this is more up to preference than anything else
Wow so that was a lot on the problems of harem manga, but is there any examples of good harem manga? Well, I honestly can't think of anything that I would say is critically that great, but there are a few that stand out, and all for different reasons.
The first way to make a good harem manga is to make the focus not on the harem. This sounds like cheating, which it technically is, but it works out. Take for example Akatsuki no Yona. It's an adventure story of a runaway princess traveling around her country with a group of powerful men helping out the poor and needy. All of the men she travels with are interested in her, so you could say that it is a reverse harem. However, the focus of it is not on that front, but on the unfolding story between her, the current king and the people of the land. In fact, the story is more of a romance between her and one of the members of her group rather than a harem, because she doesn't show any interest towards the majority of the guys there. In this way, Akatsuki no Yona succeeds at being a harem manga by just being a good manga that happens to have a harem in it.
Another way is to give the characters actual goals instead of just trying to get the guy in the end. Quintessential Quintuplets is probably one of the best, almost pure harem manga out there, and a great reason for its success is because of the uniqueness of the characters. The main harem consists of a set of quintuplets, which actually helps differentiate them more so than not. This is because since they share a common history, you only need to tell it once or twice to set them on the same stage. From there, each character moves forward, allowing them to develop into fuller characters in the process. This means that they can have goals like wanting to graduate to become a baker, idol, teacher, or anything else, and not just get the guy. The story develops in a way so that, even when a girl doesn't like the guy at first, the audience still learns about them beforehand and can start caring about them from the beginning. By setting more goals for the characters, they feel more developed, leading to a more captivating story.
An interesting way to make a harem manga work is to introduce the harem later on in the manga rather than at the start. Good examples of this are Senryuu Shoujo and Seitokai Yakuindomo. The first starts out as slice of life romcom while the other is a slice of life comedy, but both end up developing into more harem territory after the halfway mark. The series don't give off a harem feel despite having harems because the audience already sees it as a different genre. It's tricky, but it can work if you do it right. That being said though, a lot of times these types of manga can lose their audience if they stray too far from how they started, so it's risky.
The next way to make a good harem manga is to make the main couple relationship obvious from the start. Now, this may defeat the purpose of a harem manga, but I think it helps shake off the bad baggage that the term carries with it. A good example is Toradora. While there are technically three different love interests in the story, and the anime really tries to make you think that the other two girls might have a chance, there's just no way you don't see the main couple forming from the first few episodes. No other girl is given nearly as much screentime as the main girl, which makes the story feel like a normal romance when it can be technically seen as a harem. Boarding School Juliet is also a great example of this.
The last way big way to make a harem manga work is to fully embrace the fact that you are not going to be taken seriously. The worst type of story is a bad one that thinks that it's good. So when you know that you are in a genre for people of the lowest common denominator, you try your best to just hit that demographic and have fun with it. My favorite example of this is Monster Musume. It doesn't even try to make itself into any sort of cohesive story, but just plays with the different monsters you could potentially turn into a hot girl. It has fun with its concept and plot, and it gives off the feeling that it's just gonna do what it wants to, and it doesn't care if you read it or not. It's similar to the feel that Seitokai Yakuindomo or JoJo's Bizarre Adventure give off.
So that was a study on harem manga. Now what was the takeaway from all of that: to be a good harem manga, you have to be as far from a harem manga as possible, or give up on being good. The essential formula for harems just are too different from traditionally good story writing to the point where only a very few select harem manga can ever even come close to being considered as well written. But in the end, harem manga were never meant to be looked at critically, and should be enjoyed for what they are in the end. After all, you can't live off of fast food, but you can't deny the fact that it is tasty every once in a while.
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