Put a "pregnant" tag, just pretend that I'm not here.

You know, it would be absolute Hell to have that many newborns all at once. Why can't harem-building protags ever stagger things out over a couple years? They're always either not pregnant or "everyone is two days from giving birth" or every girl is holding at least one one-month-old. (And generally, at least a couple will have twins to ensure the parents are outnumbered.)

NWSiaCB said:

You know, it would be absolute Hell to have that many newborns all at once. Why can't harem-building protags ever stagger things out over a couple years? They're always either not pregnant or "everyone is two days from giving birth" or every girl is holding at least one one-month-old. (And generally, at least a couple will have twins to ensure the parents are outnumbered.)

If they had that kind of impulse control or forethought, they wouldn't have gone for the "juggle the physical and emotional needs of seven separate significant others, all of whom are just interested in you and not each other" logistical nightmare in the first place.

HaroldRowsdower said:

If they had that kind of impulse control or forethought, they wouldn't have gone for the "juggle the physical and emotional needs of seven separate significant others, all of whom are just interested in you and not each other" logistical nightmare in the first place.

Well, that kind of plows directly into my other major gripe with anime harems, being that I've seen maybe two harem animes that actually address the idea of the girls' relationships with one another in any serious fashion, instead going with "they apparently think he's the last man on Earth" no matter how objectively too good they are for the loser harem protag and just making them all jealous of each other to the point of violence for the rest of their lives. (Which can be quite long in a Tenchi Muyo situation...) Amusingly, the good ending of School Days apparently has the two main girls happily coming to grips with just living in a stable threesome because they're friends with a solid relationship that -on that path- wasn't strained to the breaking point, meaning the one famous for Nice Boat is one of the few that actually had that forethought.

But still, the odds of conception are pretty low, so even if he had the stamina to go at it with every girl every night, the odds that they'd all conceive even within the same month are pretty slim.

And even beyond that, they always paint the "and they happily bred like rabbits ever after" without even dropping the slightest hint that parenting might in any way be hard even while smiling and juggling 20 babies that never cry between the wife pile. This is, of course, even in anime where every single parent of the generation before the protag is either tragically dead by rampaging truck epidemic or ambiguous small cough of doom disease or else are drunkard child abusers and/or rapists. After all, you can't have touching, dramatic stories of how once rivals or villains turned good without saying it was all the fault of their tragic backstory, thus proving that just by reaching out your hand to someone, no matter how seemingly evil, you can find the good in someone (and desire to be in your harem) just so long as they're from your generation, and not those irredeemable bastards from your parent's generation!

Not sure why you're even having this conversation of how harem girls are going to handle babies.

The most unlikely thing I've ever seen in every harem animes is the fact every girls, sometimes immortal beings who lived for many millennia without ever knowing love, will fall for this one single loser who doesn't even make the effort for it, and often time will not even recognize her affection.

It's the shallowest form of delusional fantasy, plausibility was never in the equation. So I don't know why "how are they going to raise kids?" is even something worth considering.

Oh and in this specific picture it's the Pokeworld, if they want someone to raise their 500th kid they can just go to the Safari zone and get Kanghaskhans or Chanseys to slavishly do that child rearing for them.

on a side note, lets be serious now in most harem situations child care and rearing is the last thing to come up and even if it does naturally it won't end well. Also everyone has to remember this is the world of pokemon satoshi will never get past being a ten year old, and all of the girls are also ten years old so realistically they're not even thinking about children or the consequences of having children in rapid succession. the only thing they're thinking about is getting his attention and emotional validation of their feelings for him, they're not thinking of sex and the consequences of having children, they're looking for validation of their feelings and day dreaming about a possible future not actually thinking about the future and the hurdles that they will have to deal with growing up.

azurelorochi said:

Not sure why you're even having this conversation of how harem girls are going to handle babies.

The most unlikely thing I've ever seen in every harem animes is the fact every girls, sometimes immortal beings who lived for many millennia without ever knowing love, will fall for this one single loser who doesn't even make the effort for it, and often time will not even recognize her affection.

It's the shallowest form of delusional fantasy, plausibility was never in the equation. So I don't know why "how are they going to raise kids?" is even something worth considering.

Oh and in this specific picture it's the Pokeworld, if they want someone to raise their 500th kid they can just go to the Safari zone and get Kanghaskhans or Chanseys to slavishly do that child rearing for them.

I figured "'they apparently think he's the last man on Earth' no matter how objectively too good they are for the loser harem protag" encapsulated that one. (Also, that affects all romcom anime, not just harem anime...)

Besides, we have had "you're never going to be as popular as an anime protag" covered in series like WataMote/No Matter How You Look at it, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular, and the whole "jealous girls fighting for you is great" covered with School Days, but I don't think there's ever been a deconstruction where some loser knocks up 12 girls and then never sleeps again and has to work 5 jobs paying for diapers and baby food.

NWSiaCB said:

Besides, we have had "you're never going to be as popular as an anime protag" covered in series like WataMote/No Matter How You Look at it, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular, and the whole "jealous girls fighting for you is great" covered with School Days, but I don't think there's ever been a deconstruction where some loser knocks up 12 girls and then never sleeps again and has to work 5 jobs paying for diapers and baby food.

To be fair, there never can be because the moment an anime writer writes a plot outline including the phrase "babies are bad" or "raising babies is tough" or otherwise implying having as many kids as possible isn't the best thing ever is the moment Shinzo Abe appears out of thin air to wring that writer's neck in a panic.

NWSiaCB said:

but I don't think there's ever been a deconstruction where some loser knocks up 12 girls and then never sleeps again and has to work 5 jobs paying for diapers and baby food.

It's because ultimately modern morality pushes for monogamy. If you want this woman to pour 100% of her love for you, you pour 100% of your love for her. Dreaming there's 5 girls who will pour 100% of their love for you while you can afford to pour only 25% for each of them is just selfish and shallow. This should doubly apply if said girls are leagues above you in term of social status, if they aren't already literal immortal goddesses.

That's why harem ends rarely actually happen, harem animes either end inconclusively or the protagonist actually will step up to pick a single girl. Or he has always picked a single girl from the beginning, the harem just continues to hang out around him(SAO). Harem is still considered as this thing you can wish to have, can be in, but never conclude with.

Think of it like drinking. Society will accept if you like drinking, you are fine to drink wherever you wants, but no one will condone you become a full on alcoholic. And even during the "acceptable" phase, you will still be looked down upon by the society whenever you do lose control.

That's why I've always hated harem animes. The protagonist never poured in the efforts to deserve ANY of the girls. It's not romance, it's masturbatory fantasy for incels who think it's the world's fault they are losers and so everyone owes them something in return. They aren't thinking of the girls, they're only thinking of how they want their dicks satisfied. I will never in a million years call that love.

What I want to see though? Is a series where the harem lead's little brother is the protagonist. Where his stupid playboy Aniki knocked up these girls and ended up dying in an accident, so now his brother has to work hard to try and take care for all the girls and their babies, out of the genuine goodness of his heart, not because he's a stand-in for audiences who want to fuck the girls.

And he would still be shunned by the girls for not being as "cool" as his Aniki, while all of them developing to see how much of shallow thots they were to fell for a selfish man, and perhaps one will genuinely fall for the smaller brother.

azurelorochi said:

It's because ultimately modern morality pushes for monogamy. If you want this woman to pour 100% of her love for you, you pour 100% of your love for her. Dreaming there's 5 girls who will pour 100% of their love for you while you can afford to pour only 25% for each of them is just selfish and shallow. This should doubly apply if said girls are leagues above you in term of social status, if they aren't already literal immortal goddesses.

That's why harem ends rarely actually happen, harem animes either end inconclusively or the protagonist actually will step up to pick a single girl. Or he has always picked a single girl from the beginning, the harem just continues to hang out around him(SAO). Harem is still considered as this thing you can wish to have, can be in, but never conclude with.

Except there ARE shows that end in harems. I mean, obviously, there are probably countless actual hentai or eroge that end in harems whose screenshots get posted here, including the endings where they just have the girls all still being jealous and fighting for time with the loser even while each one is holding their babies. Hell, at least one doubles down and says that getting high school girls from rich families pregnant is how to conquer the world. But even in actual shows, there's stuff like Tenchi Muyo GXP, which "comedically" ends on the protag being married to all the girls, all the girls still hating one another, and him therefore never getting any peace for the rest of his life because of an eternal war over whose bed he sleeps in that night.

In fact, it's pushed to the point now where the whole notion of the harem isn't just some instantly rejected fantasy - that's WHY would there be WataMote or School Days covering how this shit breaks down rationally instead of just saying "no, of course we can't have a harem, that's immoral".

Also, I think I should distinguish I'm talking about harem animes that actually at least discuss the possibility of a harem outright, not just stuff like SAO where lots of girls like the same guy even though it's blatantly obvious who he's going to end up in a relationship with. Again, some shows DO have the balls to actually go for broke and make an actual harem, it's just that half-measures and ship-teasing are vastly more common, especially among the run-of-the-mill follow-the-leader shows.

It's sort of like how Tenga Toppa Gurren Lugan just spits in the face of physics, if you want to make a hard-science show, make one, if you want to make a balls-to-the-walls bonkers action scene, make that, but trying to split the difference means you don't accomplish either.

I mean, you could make a show that tries to take a harem seriously, like maybe most of the girls are bisexual an into each other, and the guy has some episodes trying to come to grips with a girl he really likes actually being more into one of the other girls in some odd love dodecahedron. Hell, throw an otoko no ko loved by at least one of the girls into the mix to make it even more of a sexual identity morass. ("Hey, fair's fair, and if there's multiple girls in the love dodecahedron, why not multiple boys?") You know, if you want to push it, there's a lot of virgin (heh) territory to cover in terms of just plain weirding people out on what's normally a kink nobody thinks too much about.

(And Futurama already did one where Fry found out he was one of many different men in the harem of a single woman just for the laughs of a "reverse-harem" situation.)

azurelorochi said:

What I want to see though? Is a series where the harem lead's little brother is the protagonist. Where his stupid playboy Aniki knocked up these girls and ended up dying in an accident, so now his brother has to work hard to try and take care for all the girls and their babies, out of the genuine goodness of his heart, not because he's a stand-in for audiences who want to fuck the girls.

And he would still be shunned by the girls for not being as "cool" as his Aniki, while all of them developing to see how much of shallow thots they were to fell for a selfish man, and perhaps one will genuinely fall for the smaller brother.

That's kinda-sorta the plot of 12Beast... Except the younger brother ends up with a harem, anyway, and just feels insecure about how his older brother seems cooler than him.

NWSiaCB said:

Except there ARE shows that end in harems. I mean, obviously, there are probably countless actual hentai or eroge that end in harems whose screenshots get posted here, including the endings where they just have the girls all still being jealous and fighting for time with the loser even while each one is holding their babies. Hell, at least one doubles down and says that getting high school girls from rich families pregnant is how to conquer the world. But even in actual shows, there's stuff like Tenchi Muyo GXP, which "comedically" ends on the protag being married to all the girls, all the girls still hating one another, and him therefore never getting any peace for the rest of his life because of an eternal war over whose bed he sleeps in that night.

In fact, it's pushed to the point now where the whole notion of the harem isn't just some instantly rejected fantasy - that's WHY would there be WataMote or School Days covering how this shit breaks down rationally instead of just saying "no, of course we can't have a harem, that's immoral".

Except I'm not talking about eroges or hentai, or harem animes adapted from eroges that pretends the harem ending is canon. Eroges and hentai can go with far more reprehensible things when they put that R-18 label on, like straight up saying "all women, be them queens, high priestesses or even goddesses exists only to satisfy the pleasure of men, even if that men is the lowliest of beggars or orcs". That's an actual quote, maybe paraphrased because I certainly feel nauseous to even have to recall such quote out.

That's also why when you make a harem in an actual anime to be film on TV, that sort of quote is just a no-go, regardless of even if your target audiences actually play and (bleargh) agrees with that quote in the eroge.

Also, I think I should distinguish I'm talking about harem animes that actually at least discuss the possibility of a harem outright, not just stuff like SAO where lots of girls like the same guy even though it's blatantly obvious who he's going to end up in a relationship with. Again, some shows DO have the balls to actually go for broke and make an actual harem, it's just that half-measures and ship-teasing are vastly more common, especially among the run-of-the-mill follow-the-leader shows.

I mean, you could make a show that tries to take a harem seriously, like maybe most of the girls are bisexual an into each other, and the guy has some episodes trying to come to grips with a girl he really likes actually being more into one of the other girls in some odd love dodecahedron. Hell, throw an otoko no ko loved by at least one of the girls into the mix to make it even more of a sexual identity morass. ("Hey, fair's fair, and if there's multiple girls in the love dodecahedron, why not multiple boys?") You know, if you want to push it, there's a lot of virgin (heh) territory to cover in terms of just plain weirding people out on what's normally a kink nobody thinks too much about.

Then I simply have not seen this sort of harem, and no, animes ending with a half-assed "this is ep12 so we'll all continue pursuing you!" isn't what I would call a harem ending. What I would call a harem ending is that the anime should devote at least 2 full episodes showing how this shared living works where everyone is at peace with everyone else.

All harems I had the displeasure of seeing had always towed the line of making the harem non-serious, because the writers themselves know that a protagonist who openly wants to fuck 5 girls and take no responsibility is a terrible human being so when that does happens, he deserves a comeuppance(a la School Days).

So on a similar case, any time when a character expresses their wish to have a harem but never got one, they will be treated as a complete joke, or at least their pursuit of the harem being the joke. It's exactly because trying to seriously portray someone who wants a harem as being 100% morally upright would just bring fire to the writer.

The most "serious" I think one could possibly go with a harem ending would just be a foursome ending, where you throw in another guy into the mix where each member can be in openly in love with 2 people of the opposite sex, while being a trusting best friend to the one of the same sex and the same time the group's number is small enough that everyone can openly support each other's romantic pursuit and no one seems like a whore for wanting 3 dicks in them at once. A variation where everyone is bi is also workable.

A trap doesn't work in this situation because in these days, you might as well count the trap as a girl. The numbers of traps who are actually given a romantic arc with a female partner is just as good as nonexistent.

azurelorochi said:

Except I'm not talking about eroges or hentai, or harem animes adapted from eroges that pretends the harem ending is canon. [...] That's also why when you make a harem in an actual anime to be film on TV, that sort of quote is just a no-go, [...] Then I simply have not seen this sort of harem [...] All harems I had the displeasure of seeing had always towed the line of making the harem non-serious, [...] So on a similar case, any time when a character expresses their wish to have a harem but never got one, they will be treated as a complete joke, or at least their pursuit of the harem being the joke. It's exactly because trying to seriously portray someone who wants a harem as being 100% morally upright would just bring fire to the writer. [...] A trap doesn't work in this situation because in these days, you might as well count the trap as a girl. The numbers of traps who are actually given a romantic arc with a female partner is just as good as nonexistent.

Well, much of what you're saying is "I haven't seen it" combined with "I don't want to see it and don't seek it out". That's far from proof that such things don't, much less can't exist (and you even admit they do exist in eroge, and there's no reason why that can't be excluded - School Days was originally an eroge). (Plus, there's a lot of historical fiction shoujo stuff where the main character is shoved into/sneaks into the harem of a king/emperor, and it's just treated as a matter of course that kings, especially non-European knockoffs, can have multiple wives. For that matter, there's actually a for-real Harlequin romance genre in manga filled with junk like "The Sheik's New Wife". No matter how extreme you think hentai is in degrading women, I assure you, there's always a shoujo manga that goes to an even more outlandish extreme.)

As for the otoko no ko, it's not an official anime, but the Yohane webcomics go with the otoko no ko with either his childhood friend or in the last plot arc, a reverse trap. Besides, I'm mostly suggesting it as a way of screwing up the formula in a new way, so saying that it hasn't been done before isn't a minus.

Beyond that, I'm not entirely sure what you're arguing anymore. Them not spending time actually trying to detail how the girls deal with one another - even in a not-really-harem show like SAO - is something I already said I'd wish they'd address. Besides that, if you say harems are generally treated as just jokes, that's basically what I was asking for - a joke harem story where everything backfires and it's not sexy, the same way that School Days or WataMote works.

NWSiaCB said:

Well, much of what you're saying is "I haven't seen it" combined with "I don't want to see it and don't seek it out". That's far from proof that such things don't, much less can't exist

I'm saying is I don't know it exist, but ALL the examples I know were along that line, together with being plenty enough in numbers that I believe I could at least draw a reliable stereotype among them, and that said stereotype is problematic.

If there exists an anime that can portray harems as being "healthy" for everyone involved, maybe good for it. I haven't seen it, I can't accurately draw the conclusion if that is actually "good".

But does that mean the vast majority of the rest are redeemed? No, that much I can state with absolute certainty.

I'm dead set on the fact that most harems are dehumanizing garbage, I'm just willing to accept the possibility that an exception can also exist if and when it does appear before me. I know I hate the taste of offal, it doesn't mean I'm saying no chef ever can manage to make offal taste good to me.

(Plus, there's a lot of historical fiction shoujo stuff where the main character is shoved into/sneaks into the harem of a king/emperor, and it's just treated as a matter of course that kings, especially non-European knockoffs, can have multiple wives. For that matter, there's actually a for-real Harlequin romance genre in manga filled with junk like "The Sheik's New Wife". No matter how extreme you think hentai is in degrading women, I assure you, there's always a shoujo manga that goes to an even more outlandish extreme.)

Oh I'm not arguing that. My arguments goes both ways. Reverse harems is as bad as normal harems. Twilight is terrible, regardless of the genders of the characters involved.

Apart from that, historical fiction is a completely different issue because well one thing it's a truth that happens in the past, trying to deny it can be as bad as trying to whitewash a Polynesian king.

What I did say,was that harems are bad under modern form of morality in most countries. If you set your world in the past, or in the modern middle eastern setting, of course moral codes would be different, the same as it would if you are to set your story on an alien planet.

And with how submissive Japanese women are raised, with how many women married out of needs for financial stability and not love, I also won't deny the fact that someone might have a fetish for being treated like a piece of furniture as long as said person can pay their bills for them.

Besides that, if you say harems are generally treated as just jokes, that's basically what I was asking for - a joke harem story where everything backfires and it's not sexy, the same way that School Days or WataMote works.

Still doesn't change my point. The protagonist of such story still cannot be depicted as being a good person. Maybe you can like him/her for her jokes, but that doesn't make said mentality good.

It would be like Mineta from HeroAca. Maybe you like him because he's funny, but no one would call him a morally upright person, and the story, obeying the general modern morality code, has to make sure he does not succeed.

By the same logic, no fiction I know of so far managed to portray harems as being morally justified. The fact I bring up that hentai was exactly to show that while eroges and hentai can go with a harem ending, it's often shown in the light of "screw morality, my dick comes first".

An ending of "and then they fuck happily ever after" where all the girls are happy as long as they get the penis is not good writing. Combined with the fact that they reduce a person's(woman or otherwise) needs to sex alone is, in and of itself, dehumanizing and decidedly not romance.

Wow this comment section got serious quickly.

MobiusOneDT said:

Wow this comment section got serious quickly.

That's Danbooru for you.

DeadW@nderer said:

That's Danbooru for you.

The comments this atrocity was getting was likely the deciding factor for its approval just to keep it going.

azurelorochi said:

Still doesn't change my point. The protagonist of such story still cannot be depicted as being a good person. Maybe you can like him/her for her jokes, but that doesn't make said mentality good.

It would be like Mineta from HeroAca. Maybe you like him because he's funny, but no one would call him a morally upright person, and the story, obeying the general modern morality code, has to make sure he does not succeed.

By the same logic, no fiction I know of so far managed to portray harems as being morally justified. The fact I bring up that hentai was exactly to show that while eroges and hentai can go with a harem ending, it's often shown in the light of "screw morality, my dick comes first".

An ending of "and then they fuck happily ever after" where all the girls are happy as long as they get the penis is not good writing. Combined with the fact that they reduce a person's(woman or otherwise) needs to sex alone is, in and of itself, dehumanizing and decidedly not romance.

Alright, sorry again, but I didn't quite pick up on what your point actually was until now.

Thing is... so what if they aren't treated as moral?

One of the most popular series a while ago was about a boy who used a grim reaper to try to take over the world and murder everyone in his way. He was absolutely treated as the villain of his story. Protagonists aren't always shining beacons of morality. Even in non-blatantly villainous roles, a protagonist like Kazuma from KonoSuba is absolutely a severely anti-heroic main character frequently shown stealing the underwear of his companions, which is easily equivalent to Mineta, and at the same time, the heroines are pretty terrible people to the point of being rationally totally undesirable as a romantic partner, as well, "goddess" or no.

Again, my suggestion was more along the lines of making a shitbag protagonist that gets their comeuppance, the same way as WataMote's Kuroki is treated - especially in the beginning of the series - as the worst possible garbage to ever try to claim to be a human being. WataMote levels its condemnation not just at the character, but at the presumed core audience for any way in which they might be an hypocritical narcissistic otaku like her. Half the point is to say that if you drown yourself in wish fulfillment anime like she does, to the point that you become a self-entitled little shit constantly judging others for things you're guilty of, yourself, the way she does, then you are below scum.

You're redefining the question into being something beside the original point and much more narrowly applicable than what people understand the terms to mean. Wish fullfillment harems exist, but don't count. Comedic harems exist, but don't count. Realistic, historic harems (or fantasies or sci-fis where they borrow from historic cultures) exist, and where the mechanics of them actually are explained and they even do make a point of having the relationships of the characters in the harem explored, they still don't count because they require being set in a different culture (even though the morality of the presumed audience's culture is what should matter...). You also use the term "harem" to mean anything from "anything with a love triangle" (read: 98% of all anime) to "actual polygamy" (read: 1% of anime), which just confuses the conversation further.

I get that you're vehemently opposed to the objectification of a typical ero harem like this image showcases, but nobody was arguing in support of that, either.

I mean, let's say someone did just go ahead and make a "harems are great, everyone should be in one" show. (Incidentally, it's not anime, but you might want to look up Sister Wives... or maybe you don't....) Just because the author writes something pushing some sort of point of view clearly doesn't mean you have to agree. You're shifting the question to a subjective pass/fail based on how much you are persuaded by the argument, which is a much different argument than whether or not one trying to make that argument can or does exist, much less the argument that there should be a "and then reality ensues", which was what I was trying to argue for.

Some tangential stuff:[expand]
Incidentally, Fushigi Yuugi is a fairly good example of the latter that was actually an anime - the emperor pursues the female main character, but winds up with a sidenote basically saying he knocked up one of the wives he already had so he had an heir before dying and not getting the main girl.

Tokyo Crazy Paradise basically sets up a Yakuza-run near-future where a Yakuza Sandaime (gang leader) needs to have a wife that is both a political asset and a freakin' jedi bodyguard to the Sandaime. The main character girl is a cross-dressing daughter of a cop roped in by family debt to be his temporary bodyguard, where she uses her apparent jedi powers/being Wonder Woman to block bullets and beat up rival Yakuza with a chain she keeps wrapped around her body. The main romantic conflict basically goes down to setting up his arranged marriage political wife and the main character bodyguard wife to be the gradually friendly co-wives to keep all three of them alive - although granted, I never did see how that one turned out, and there's fair odds the other girl gets murdered just to cop out of an actual harem ending.

Finally, Twilight may not be a GOOD work of fiction by any stretch, but it's hardly like it's a reverse harem story. It's highly sexually conservative, in fact, being written by a devout Mormon stay-at-home mother and reflecting the values of someone who looks for a big strong man to provide a stable lifestyle.
[/expand]

I like harem eroge, because the smut is good.
Harem manga/anime on the other hand, is kind of boring since it's either unconclusive or not a harem.

I also like incest, so those eroges with multiple pregnant women leading to multiple pregnant daughters are nice...
And are also completely absurd.

[deleted]

NWSiaCB said:

Alright, sorry again, but I didn't quite pick up on what your point actually was until now.

Thing is... so what if they aren't treated as moral?

One of the most popular series a while ago was about a boy who used a grim reaper to try to take over the world and murder everyone in his way. He was absolutely treated as the villain of his story. Protagonists aren't always shining beacons of morality. Even in non-blatantly villainous roles, a protagonist like Kazuma from KonoSuba is absolutely a severely anti-heroic main character frequently shown stealing the underwear of his companions, which is easily equivalent to Mineta, and at the same time, the heroines are pretty terrible people to the point of being rationally totally undesirable as a romantic partner, as well, "goddess" or no.

I understand that. I also like morally gray characters in morally gray stories where world peace and stability can't happen if someone doesn't dirty their hands. Lesser evil for the greater good.

I like that kind of fiction, the kind that made you question if you agree with the character, the kind that engages conversations to which character is taking the best option.

Harems(the ones I know), is decidedly not that. Most of them endorses the situation of harem and constantly says to the audience "wouldn't you want to be in this situation?"

I'm not going to say it "causes", but it certainly is a major factor in exacerbating the kimo ota's incel mindset, where they think because the world shunned them, because they're not actually as popular as that soccer team captain, "this" is the only remaining way they can view women. That women exists only to satisfy their dick and once that is done, they themselves has no responsibility to care for women in return.

It's not causing school shootings, sure, but it's certainly one of the worst mentality you can live by. One not beneficial to anyone, not the otaku themselves, not their family, not the people around them, not the community at the large, not the people on the internet who talks to them, nor the anime industry.

I starkly stands by the personal code that if you want a better life, to be admired, to have an actual better woman who can care for you, you have to be the better man first.

I also would give almost anything to see the anime media become respected, where adult anime fans are not shunned for being shallow horndogs, and for anime with actual depth to be able to have their merits properly admired by the non-fans. And yes, for the sake that you can use sexual intercourse in anime to communicate romance and intimacy, not for the sake of audience arousal.

Harem animes, as an example of kimo ota-centric genre, is a stark contrast to that, is the obstacle and is the reason I can't ever say "anime fans are genuinely smart and nice people if only you get to know them more!"

No, trying to "know these people more" only worsens everything. The more you look into them, the more you only realize how shallow this pond is.

Again, my suggestion was more along the lines of making a shitbag protagonist that gets their comeuppance, the same way as WataMote's Kuroki is treated - especially in the beginning of the series - as the worst possible garbage to ever try to claim to be a human being. WataMote levels its condemnation not just at the character, but at the presumed core audience for any way in which they might be an hypocritical narcissistic otaku like her. Half the point is to say that if you drown yourself in wish fulfillment anime like she does, to the point that you become a self-entitled little shit constantly judging others for things you're guilty of, yourself, the way she does, then you are below scum.

That's what I'm saying. I am not against the existence of harem itself, if a harem can appear and show that everyone involved in a harem can be healthy, intelligent and genuinely good-natured to each other and the society, or if a harem anime clearly shows that "you wouldn't want to be in a real harem in a million years". Go ahead. Make them.

But as it currently stands, with how anime is such a media where 90% of the works are almost direct ripoff from someone that came before, you're bound to stumble right back into this cheap ripoff of the lowest form of wish-fulfillment.

I mean Re:zero and Konosuba made their message VERY clear that "you wouldn't want to be in an Isekai", but what does the fans and industry respond by? Making more Isekai wish fulfillment stories, complete with harems, of course!

As said, the more you look into humanity trying to find depth, why they turn out to be that way, sometimes you just see that instead it's like these people are actively scooping out the water to make sure the pond can never get deeper.

You're redefining the question into being something beside the original point and much more narrowly applicable than what people understand the terms to mean. Wish fullfillment harems exist, but don't count. Comedic harems exist, but don't count. Realistic, historic harems (or fantasies or sci-fis where they borrow from historic cultures) exist, and where the mechanics of them actually are explained and they even do make a point of having the relationships of the characters in the harem explored, they still don't count because they require being set in a different culture (even though the morality of the presumed audience's culture is what should matter...). You also use the term "harem" to mean anything from "anything with a love triangle" (read: 98% of all anime) to "actual polygamy" (read: 1% of anime), which just confuses the conversation further.

I get that you're vehemently opposed to the objectification of a typical ero harem like this image showcases, but nobody was arguing in support of that, either.

Of course I have to do that, exactly because I don't think tropes are inherently bad. Like Nakama Power, Death Flags, or people being unable to hear other people revealing vital information, the tropes themselves are not bad. What is bad is what surrounds it.

Specifically, from the beginning my definition of harem is "the protagonist x 3 or more love interests". The only example I gave that broke that definition is Twilight, mostly because I can't think of some other western example that goes into that definition, and especially because it's the simplest to understand and the point is applicable enough.

The only example of a "morally" correct harem I had just remembered is Gundam IBO's Turbines crew, because the harem lead clearly states the only reason he has a harem is because all of the girls are abandoned, and "marrying them all" is apparently the only way to legally give them home and complete protection.

It helps that this harem crew is not the main focus of the story, and the harem lead is not the protagonist, so wish fulfillment doesn't get into the equation as much.

Now the anime was able to communicate that you may as well substitute this word "harem" with "family with adopted siblings". I mean they do have sex and kids, but the harem mates are able to coexist with each other peacefully, while their relationship to their "husband" is mostly shown to be "casual sex friend", where no one is critically hurt if they don't get the love, and any of the girls are welcomed to walk away to find a better lover if they want.

Finally, Twilight may not be a GOOD work of fiction by any stretch, but it's hardly like it's a reverse harem story. It's highly sexually conservative, in fact, being written by a devout Mormon stay-at-home mother and reflecting the values of someone who looks for a big strong man to provide a stable lifestyle.

Message remains. "Wouldn't you just LOVE it if these 2 supernatural hotties fight over you?", that's what most of its fans fawned over, and that's what most harem animes fans fawned over when looking at their own anime.

I have no issues with love triangles, or square, or dodecahedron, because most tend to be resolved by the end even if it means someone has to end up single and crying.

Nagi no Asukara is my favorite anime of all time, despite the fact that the protagonist has 3 girls pursuing for him for over 20 episodes. The difference is NagiAsu never presented its multiple love interest situation as something you would want to be in, the fact of having multiple love interests is a problem every character agrees need to be resolved. And thankfully the anime did.

The fact someone ends up single in the end means they can have hope to go find love somewhere else, whereas harems treat its girls who doesn't get the protag like they're trash who failed at life because no other men on earth besides protag-kun has the dick to stick in them.

Harem girls fighting over the protag or protag stating he only want one girl does not count exactly because the story in this case clearly states that the audiences' wishes should not be the same as the characters' in this situation. It's apparent when the protag continuously stumbles into situation like falling into someone's boobs, where the protag got punched for it, but the audience doesn't.

wow seeing the comment section here explode into a social debate is kinda impressive, and honestly after reading everything kinda makes me glad I'm not like some of the harem anime fans they're describing

I like chocolate milk.

azurelorochi said:

I understand that. I also like morally gray characters in morally gray stories where world peace and stability can't happen if someone doesn't dirty their hands. Lesser evil for the greater good.

I like that kind of fiction, the kind that made you question if you agree with the character, the kind that engages conversations to which character is taking the best option.

Harems(the ones I know), is decidedly not that. Most of them endorses the situation of harem and constantly says to the audience "wouldn't you want to be in this situation?"

I'm not going to say it "causes", but it certainly is a major factor in exacerbating the kimo ota's incel mindset, where they think because the world shunned them, because they're not actually as popular as that soccer team captain, "this" is the only remaining way they can view women. That women exists only to satisfy their dick and once that is done, they themselves has no responsibility to care for women in return.

It's not causing school shootings, sure, but it's certainly one of the worst mentality you can live by. One not beneficial to anyone, not the otaku themselves, not their family, not the people around them, not the community at the large, not the people on the internet who talks to them, nor the anime industry.

I starkly stands by the personal code that if you want a better life, to be admired, to have an actual better woman who can care for you, you have to be the better man first.

I also would give almost anything to see the anime media become respected, where adult anime fans are not shunned for being shallow horndogs, and for anime with actual depth to be able to have their merits properly admired by the non-fans. And yes, for the sake that you can use sexual intercourse in anime to communicate romance and intimacy, not for the sake of audience arousal.

Harem animes, as an example of kimo ota-centric genre, is a stark contrast to that, is the obstacle and is the reason I can't ever say "anime fans are genuinely smart and nice people if only you get to know them more!"

No, trying to "know these people more" only worsens everything. The more you look into them, the more you only realize how shallow this pond is.

That's what I'm saying. I am not against the existence of harem itself, if a harem can appear and show that everyone involved in a harem can be healthy, intelligent and genuinely good-natured to each other and the society, or if a harem anime clearly shows that "you wouldn't want to be in a real harem in a million years". Go ahead. Make them.

But as it currently stands, with how anime is such a media where 90% of the works are almost direct ripoff from someone that came before, you're bound to stumble right back into this cheap ripoff of the lowest form of wish-fulfillment.

I mean Re:zero and Konosuba made their message VERY clear that "you wouldn't want to be in an Isekai", but what does the fans and industry respond by? Making more Isekai wish fulfillment stories, complete with harems, of course!

As said, the more you look into humanity trying to find depth, why they turn out to be that way, sometimes you just see that instead it's like these people are actively scooping out the water to make sure the pond can never get deeper.

Of course I have to do that, exactly because I don't think tropes are inherently bad. Like Nakama Power, Death Flags, or people being unable to hear other people revealing vital information, the tropes themselves are not bad. What is bad is what surrounds it.

Specifically, from the beginning my definition of harem is "the protagonist x 3 or more love interests". The only example I gave that broke that definition is Twilight, mostly because I can't think of some other western example that goes into that definition, and especially because it's the simplest to understand and the point is applicable enough.

The only example of a "morally" correct harem I had just remembered is Gundam IBO's Turbines crew, because the harem lead clearly states the only reason he has a harem is because all of the girls are abandoned, and "marrying them all" is apparently the only way to legally give them home and complete protection.

It helps that this harem crew is not the main focus of the story, and the harem lead is not the protagonist, so wish fulfillment doesn't get into the equation as much.

Now the anime was able to communicate that you may as well substitute this word "harem" with "family with adopted siblings". I mean they do have sex and kids, but the harem mates are able to coexist with each other peacefully, while their relationship to their "husband" is mostly shown to be "casual sex friend", where no one is critically hurt if they don't get the love, and any of the girls are welcomed to walk away to find a better lover if they want.

Message remains. "Wouldn't you just LOVE it if these 2 supernatural hotties fight over you?", that's what most of its fans fawned over, and that's what most harem animes fans fawned over when looking at their own anime.

I have no issues with love triangles, or square, or dodecahedron, because most tend to be resolved by the end even if it means someone has to end up single and crying.

Nagi no Asukara is my favorite anime of all time, despite the fact that the protagonist has 3 girls pursuing for him for over 20 episodes. The difference is NagiAsu never presented its multiple love interest situation as something you would want to be in, the fact of having multiple love interests is a problem every character agrees need to be resolved. And thankfully the anime did.

The fact someone ends up single in the end means they can have hope to go find love somewhere else, whereas harems treat its girls who doesn't get the protag like they're trash who failed at life because no other men on earth besides protag-kun has the dick to stick in them.

Harem girls fighting over the protag or protag stating he only want one girl does not count exactly because the story in this case clearly states that the audiences' wishes should not be the same as the characters' in this situation. It's apparent when the protag continuously stumbles into situation like falling into someone's boobs, where the protag got punched for it, but the audience doesn't.

The little debate you guys are having is reminding me again why I absolutely loathe Issei Hyoudo

Seems someone didn't actually watch nagiasu.

Wilfriback said:

Seems someone didn't actually watch nagiasu.

Thought we're behind this, but please, do elaborate.

Also can someone explain the logic behind Danbooru's method of rendering comments with even a single downvote invisible? I can understand if you want to render an utterly negative comment invisible, but a single downvote seems to prevent anyone from ever having any frictional conversations.

azurelorochi said:

Thought we're behind this, but please, do elaborate.

Also can someone explain the logic behind Danbooru's method of rendering comments with even a single downvote invisible? I can understand if you want to render an utterly negative comment invisible, but a single downvote seems to prevent anyone from ever having any frictional conversations.

From what NWSiaCB told me before, there are some on Danbooru who don't want to view anything controversial or negative in the slightest. However, you can install scripts like Danbooru EX and using a Tampermonkey browser extension which allows you to view comment ratings and see any comment up to a certain lowest setting (I just set it to -99999 so I can see all comments).

That said, I do agree all comments should be visible by default. Most people are not fragile enough to where their viewing experience is disrupted by someone's comment. It is kind of funny sometimes you can see a kind of group-think phenomenon happening where someone will have a relatively innocent comment like "I really love [character] because of [X]", someone disagrees and downvotes them, then over the next day the comment will collect a whole bunch of downvotes because I guess some people assume if someone is downvoted they must be wrong. Of course I do think it is fine to downvote someone you disagree with since the whole point of comment rating is to see the general perspective of users relative to that comment.

79248cm/s said:

stuffs

Ah yes, bless this world where images of rape, torture, adultery and child pornography are okay, but god forbid I say something that can slightly tip someone off.

Issue isn't that I want to see my own comments, issue is I want others to be able to see it, and not in an attention seeking way. I want to comment for the sake of generating rational conversations, and I don't see the rationale in "you said something I disagree with, now no one shall see your comment(unless they go out of their way to see it)".

I have strong opinions, I'll admit that. But I have my justifications and it's exactly why I want to see the justifications people from the people who disagree, but this method just stifles all of that.

I don't mind people downvoting my post if they disagree, even if it means they don't care to talk with me. But again, it cuts me from being able to converse with people who might actually want to. This is why internet debates can never have a nice ending.

azurelorochi said:

Stuff.

It's a system to hide undesirable comments (trolling or grossly inappropriate opinions) and there are bound to be collateral damage. I am positive though that people who do want to engage will go out of their way to click that "Show all comments" button. You can think of it like this: people that care enough to look at your hidden comments have a stronger desire to talk, which leads to richer communication going on and more content behind the opinions whether agreeing or disagreeing. People that don't even read past your first sentence even if you said the most controversial thing wouldn't even matter since your post being visible or not will not be a factor to if they contribute.

zaregoto said:

stuff

Again I know it's meant to be used against trolling or comments that are just really bad they are thought crimes, but again having a single downvote be the default threshold for that seems silly.

And in my experience on other platforms such as other forums or Youtube, even if you wrote the best opinion, the best idea, unless you could post that in the first few hours the vid/thread is up, during the time people are most likely going to see your comment, most people aren't going to bother digging down the comment section abyss just to talk to you, so I disagree and thinks that visibility is very important for the sake of engaging conversations.

azurelorochi said:

Again I know it's meant to be used against trolling or comments that are just really bad they are thought crimes, but again having a single downvote be the default threshold for that seems silly.

And in my experience on other platforms such as other forums or Youtube, even if you wrote the best opinion, the best idea, unless you could post that in the first few hours the vid/thread is up, during the time people are most likely going to see your comment, most people aren't going to bother digging down the comment section abyss just to talk to you, so I disagree and thinks that visibility is very important for the sake of engaging conversations.

On Imgur, where you can theoretically vote for your own comment (and do so by default), the threshold is -1, so unless you clear your own automatic upvote, it takes two downvotes to put the comment into the hidden section. I think that's a reasonable policy, and that Danbooru's system (where you can't self-upvote) should default to -1 (though people could still choose to increase it to 0 if they want).

Personally, I just default to clicking "show hidden comments" (on both Danbooru and Imgur), but I like to leave the threshold in place so I can see other what people think ought to be hidden (and counter-upvote the ones that I think shouldn't be).

From as far as I can figure, some people just downvote comments when they get past a certain length because they get annoyed by lengthy conversations they're not a part of. It doesn't even matter whether it was offensive or controversial. (Other than being 'offended' by the length of the post, I guess.)

It's also really only a problem because, without a visible score (unless you use a third-party plugin), almost nobody votes up a comment unless it was voted down, so there usually isn't any "buffer" before a vote down makes it disappear.

Since I'm already posting, though, to go back to the topic of harems,

NWSiaCB said:

stuffs

Good points. For being a system to discourage trolls, if someone is going to downvote and render someone else's post invisible only because they don't like the length, it seems like this system is way too vulnerable to become a tool for trolls itself.

azurelorochi said:

Good points. For being a system to discourage trolls, if someone is going to downvote and render someone else's post invisible only because they don't like the length, it seems like this system is way too vulnerable to become a tool for trolls itself.

Show

I haven't read Realist Hero, so I can't say how it stands as a story but from what I assess, I think it is forgivable as long as it not only treat its female characters, but other male characters as human beings.

If it is the "I'm marrying princesses/noblewomen from all these kingdoms" type of harems, I'd like to see one actually tackle the issues the historical harems born out of political marriages face.

Do the girls compete for the guy not for his love but for the sake of status to secure the well-being of their own kingdom? How do they react if the protag took a lowborn girl into his harem? Will the protag consider giving one of his girls to his generals to win over his favor? Or his enemy for the sake of maintaining peace? How do the girls react to the fact that another girl's child will be named the heir? Will this led them to try to assassinate the other girl and the kid? Or will they retreat to their kingdom and plot a rebellion? Or will they go to an enemy king instead? Or will they actually help raise and protect that child out of pure goodwill in their heart?

If they can do this story and do it seriously where the competition between girls are not treated as jokes, I think you can make a good story. I still wouldn't call it good romance, because surprise, political marriages are bad for romances, but it will be an intriguing watch nonetheless.

Go Game of Thrones on it is what I'm saying.

I think that it's better to think of it like Reddit post voting, where it's generally going to be more just an expression that someone disagrees than actually objects to content. I mean, people say "you're fine with rape art, but not this comment?" but people can also downvote images (if they have a high enough rank), it's just that, because images tend to get seen more frequently by people looking for that kind of content than not, images almost invariably wind up with positive scores unless they're truly awful (and negative scoring images are nearly universally deleted). People can downvote images for no reason at all, but if it already has a +40 score, you're just not going to notice. Likewise, a long-running webcomic on Danbooru will get like a +3 score per page, but a single image of porn gets +30 score. There's a lot of users that just go around +1ing any porn of their particular fetish, but people who stick around going through every page of a comic they like don't often upvote every single page.

It's just that actually hiding a post in its entirety isn't really the best way to handle the slightest amount of negative response to a post.

Incidentally, it used to be that you could just upvote your own comments, which I think was a better system, since it meant that if just one person was disagreeing, you'd be able to cancel them out, and it took two people to actually make a comment disappear. It's still basically the same as making a -2 score the default for making comments disappear, but it's better than just any random person making comments disappear until you press the "show all comments" button.

NWSiaCB said:

stuffs

Again, my point is simply "one downvote rendering a comment invisible is counterproductive to trying to create a community of people willing to understand each other".

Even as an anti-troll measure, I still find it massively ineffective because if you look at the typical troll comments, I doubt they even come back to check how people reacted. They're content enough by being able to plant the seeds and not having to reap it.

On one hand, many people came to this site just to jack off, so maybe it's not the best place to try to find an intellectual conversation to begin with, but neither is Youtube nor forums like MAL, and despite all of them having their own fair share of both trolls and people who simply operates on the logic of "you're bashing this thing I like, that means you're literally Hitler", including their own limitations in maintaining a conversational comment thread's visibility, I can also find people who's actually willing to talk logically much as I could find some here.

azurelorochi said:

Show

Again, haven't read Realist Hero so I'm not gonna pretend I can accurately gauge how good or bad it is, though from your summaries of course there are some parts that immediately tipped me off(tsun or imouto characters written just for the sake of having tsun or imouto character, how the plot still attempts to push attractive characters onto the protags despite his protest, etc).

I know the universe is different and that's its justification, and I even applaud the fact that the polygamous rule doesn't solely apply to the protag alone, but still I can't help but get big Gary Stu vibes from your summary, mostly because I can't tell the ratio of actual political plot struggles versus romcom, borderline ecchi hijinks just from your summaries alone.

I can say at least it should be Overlord level, a lot of Gary Stu, harem and other wish fulfillment tropes are clearly there, but the author at least took an extra level of efforts to not make it simply "I came to this world for no reason so now every attractive girls are obligated to fuck me because I'm the awesome audience surrogate".

So yeah, I won't pretend to know how good Realist Hero is just by reading someone's summary, and I'll just leave it as that.

A separate point that irks me though is how you state light novels and animes are formulaic because they have to appeal to mainstream.

If you look at the sales, things like Isekai Smartphone or Death March and most other Isekais actually are flops, so for one thing they certainly are not mainstream and certainly also are not good business investments.

Most ecchi series are bad business decisions because they're passionless projects made by studios not to make big bucks but actually just to keep the lights on. They know it won't sell well, they know making such project won't help their company grow, but they don't have other choices, especially if they are smaller companies without monetary power to buy rights to bigger titles, to buy the supposed "mainstream" titles.

On the other hands the LNs on markets are also formulaic not because they are trying to be the next Re:Zero, it is formulaic because it is like the paperback scifi in the west during the 40-60s, both the authors and publishers doesn't give a shit if they're pushing out low-effort stories that will never change anyone's life, that despite branding itself with "scifi" there isn't anything remotely scientifically accurate or intellectual about the story, they know they have their target audience(otakus) who's willing to pay for shit-grade writings just because. So as long as a "quantity over quality" business model isn't making them bankrupt, they see no reason to change.

Double this down by the Japanese stone-age era stubbornness to stick to the "good old ways" and curb anyone else daring to even suggest Shachou-sama is wrong, and you get an industry that will stick to its methods despite the sales being lower and lower every year, despite online novels stealing their customers, despite their other fellow publishers going out of business one after another, and despite the rest of the world looking down on light novels as nothing but cheap laughingstocks.

It's why the so called "safe investments" in formulaic stories are actually losing the industry's money, because all of them are way too much of a clone to each other, none of them were able to establish their own identity, none of them were able to remain memorable. All of them are just shallow husks that could only draw people in through the promise of some loli or big boobed girls, and when we live in a world where not only other light novels but tons of original animes, mangas, phone games and even goddamn Youtubers put all their bucks into that clickbait tactics, the "safe option" just turn into a "self destruct" button the industry can't seem to stop pressing.

If they are actually trying to imitate the mainstream successes such as Re:Zero, HeroAca, or even One Piece, they should have known that the key to success is to have deeper characters audiences wanted to stick to and continue experiencing, not disposable characters the audience will forget once they finished jacking off to.

NWSiaCB said:

Show

I'm not saying the formulaic ones are good ideas by any stretch, but that's why most light novels are made the way they are - to appeal to the over-saturated market of bodypillow-buying otaku looking for the same paint-by-numbers waifus over and over again. I remember reading an article on how any publisher trying to find their own niche in the market outright bans isekai. And even if the anime flops as an anime, a light novel that is adapted into an anime is a light novel that made its author and publisher a lot of royalties.

(Also, I can't speak to Smartphone or Death March because those are exactly the kinds of isekai stories I don't touch.)

Back to Realist Hero, though, I think I might have given a wrong impression on a couple things.

I say the main girl acts tsun early on then warms up to him, but she's not the stereotypical tsundere. (She's actually more the earlier, pre-formulizing, form of tsundere that shows character development, but I guess that's still a little misleading...) Rather than shouting "baka" and punching him, she's more the straight woman that is the "normal person from a magic world" to contrast against the "normal guy in another world" who clashes on things like values. I skipped over a lot of plot (and as per normal in a web novel, each chapter tends to be its own mini-plot, so there are a ton of rapid-fire events with only a vague story arc that covers several volumes) to focus on the romantic sub-plots, but most of the time, the main character is doing something like trying to build an education system, then using the conveniently-television-like Jewel Crystals (which can broadcast images and sound to major cities in the kingdom, and was only used for emergency announcements in the world before) to set up blatant knockoffs of Japanese television programs, like a Kamen Rider-style show (using actual magic for the special effects), while main girl is criticizing how there couldn't possibly be anything educational about a show like that.

Likewise, I mention the imouto character largely because, while she is basically an imouto-shaped plot device (she can talk to "animals", which includes a lot of monster-like "animals" in this world, so she's constantly out recruiting magical creatures that can solve some problem or another), she's not treated as the Token Loli who also gets into swimsuits for the audience to ogle. (Again, she's doing most of her work off-screen, and oddly enough, seems to spend more time with the Zhuge Liang guy as his protege than with the main character.)

So far as the main character's Gary Stu-ness goes, it is something of a gripe that I have that the main character flaws the main character has don't really apply much. The supposed flaw of being a "realist" rather than an "idealist" is rendered rather toothless by the author not having the guts to actually force him to kill anyone who isn't basically screaming "I am a rapist slaver scumbag!" at the top of their lungs. (Satoru Suzuki/Ainz Ooal Gown laughs at what a innocent flower-child this main character is.) The resultant most significant character flaws are that the supposed hero from another world that is regarded by other characters in rumors as a hero-king who slaughters all before him is actually a nerdy paper-pusher with no powers that are actually useful in combat who has to cling to his girlfriends' skirts in battle. (But then, that's been a standard Magical Girlfriend series gag since Tenchi Muyo.) Similarly, his other major flaw is being spineless in relationships to the point he won't hold hands unless one of the girls pushes him into it.

And again, a notable thing is how chaste the story generally is, with there being only one or two chapters a book that has any kind of fanservice (it just jumping straight to the deep end harem stuff when it does).

I mean, there's definitely things I wish this story would do better, like explore the relations between the secondary girls, or even just develop WHY the characters warm up to each other so much from being on somewhat rocky relations at first in the intervening time-skipped months, but it's still doing vastly better than the paint-by-numbers style of harem anime. The main character could DEFINITELY use more use of his being a "realist" being an actual character flaw by making him do things that aren't framed in a way that makes what he does the ONLY sane choice so that it's at least somewhat controversial. If anything, the knockoff Zhuge Liang is a better "realist (anti-)hero", since he's the one that actually goes Vulcan and pushes for the most efficient and rational solutions regardless of death toll.

Also, the story tries to set up a contrast between the main character as a "realist", while the head of the rival-ish Empire is the idealistic "Saint Maria", but the contrast tends to fall flat because the author wants to keep the main character sympathetic so he's nowhere near as cold as it would take to make that contrast apply. I.E. he only orders executions of people who are fomenting sedition and trying to kill him, and exactly ONE named character (in the war section), while going completely out of his way to spare anyone even remotely sympathetic. The main character then beats himself up for not being able to save literally everyone in a war. Again, that might be sympathetic or even reasonable for an actual 'ordinary guy', but it kind of kills the attempts to make him the callous realist taking cues from The Prince contrasting against a relatively naive idealist empress when he mopes that people die in wars that were foist upon him.

With all that said, I'd again say that the main reason to read the story is because you do like historical fiction with actual history woven into it. If you see a scene where a king is offered bundled rugs, and immediately think Antony and Cleopatra, too, you'll probably enjoy all the historical easter eggs. The story is 1/3rd historical fantasy epic trying to be Romance of the Three Kingdoms, 1/3rd Monty Python-style "this is why the past sucked" and showing modern Japanese culture as the fix to all history's problems (except for the part where they're a multi-cultural, multi-racial society thing...), and about 1/3rd anything to do with the relationships of the main character, so you'll probably not get through just looking for a romance (or well, harem romance) story. (It doesn't even BECOME a harem story until book 3.) Kind of like the aforementioned Overlord, you shouldn't read it just for the fanservice, even if there are obvious fanservice elements in there.

Ultimately, it's certainly not perfect, but it's different ENOUGH to be worth reading to me, and I do greatly enjoy the Romance of the Three Kingdoms parts of the story.

azurelorochi said:

Show

The issue I hate the most is how the lower level workers(animators, production assistants) are involved in this. Anime is not an industry someone goes in for the sake of money, so anyone who starts a career in the anime industry is doing it out of the love of their heart and is willing to work their ass off for a pay that can sometime be worse than working at McDonalds despite requiring 2 years of training in college(for animators).

Now they got in and are stuck with working their asses off animating shit tier writings they hate, that they know will not sell well, and still has to suffer garbage treatment from everyone above them in the hierarchy. It's no wonder most animators quit before 3 years.

Yet the higher ups and the authors, the people who create these zero effort works and gets the most money out of it can still act high and mighty, even when they continue to make worse and worse decisions that only damage the industry. It's exactly why I hate it when people say plotless fanservice shows are numerous because they "make money". No they don't. They are a cancer killing the business, morale, reputation and integrity of the industry, all because some old fossils can't accept they made bad business decisions.

Anyway back to Realist Hero. I edited my prior post to change the comparison from Overlord to GATE, since I realized there's more I see in common between Realist Hero and GATE than Overlord so maybe go back to read that a bit.

The "it's not harem until 3 books in" can sound good or bad to me. Like something such as Saekano, Oreshura or Haganai, they also began their first book with a fresh idea while trying to distance themselves from the harem cliches(Saekano even has a girl dedicated to bashing harem cliches), yet some books(or eps) in and all 3 just ended up shamelessly bashing their face hard into harem cliches. Maybe not to the extent of accidental groping but still something like the shameless girl who's willing to push her boobs on the protag, or a girl taking a photo of her and the protag in bed just to send it to the other harem mates to mock them, or the otaku girl spouting doujin cliches the protag will do to her, etc which still is just as cringeworthy.

So I'm not sure if the fact that Realist Hero was able to put off its harem for 3 books means the author actually want to use fanservice as a break from all the drama, tension and bloodshed surrounding the story, or did he simply run into a dead end and has to throw in harem scene either just to meet the deadline or just to keep the dumb otaku fans from walking away.

Overall I'm not sure. I actually don't think it distanced itself away from Isekai cliches(Gary Stuism, protagonist-centered morality, convenient romances) enough to fit my liking. Again like Overlord, I can see it is leaps and bounds above the average Isekai, but if the requirement for enjoyment is "you need to put yourself in this guy's shoes", I don't really like it.

I know I'm weird like that, but I always put "distinctiveness over relatability, always, always, always". Having a character with his own clearly defined wants and needs, strong motivation and preferences to achieve said wants and needs will always be better than the audience surrogate who has to constantly hold back to avoid "alienating" the audience. If you want a protag whose goal is to change the world, go Light Yagami, not some guy who says he wants to save everyone, yet has absolutely no plans on how to do just that and has to rely on plot contrivances to make sure he doesn't fail.

If not, I actually want to see an Isekai where the protag is sent to an absolute monarchy Utopia and his 21st century method is actually so incompatible to the point it caused the Utopia to collapse. Applying post-industrialization methods to pre-industrialization society and ending in a disaster also is "realistic", you know.

Honestly, I think you'd enjoy nodding along to these two arguments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IitWnB4VRW4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHGAgE19NFE

NWSiaCB said:

Honestly, I think you'd enjoy nodding along to these two arguments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IitWnB4VRW4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHGAgE19NFE

Show

I can't say Realist Hero is a perfect story by any stretch, I half praise and half berate it, but at the same time, like Overlord, it's something distinct and interesting enough to be disappointed in, and actually try thinking of ways it could have been better.

That really plays into your "distinctiveness over relatability" (although I honestly think "relatability" is the wrong word for it, since you can't relate to a lowest-common-denominator cypher) argument, both in terms of the character and the story. I like the story because it's distinct. This is, in fact, why I kind of applaud the use of an ACTUAL GODDAMN harem, because it's not just doing half-assed breastgrope fanservice nonsense with girls you know are never going to wind up with anybody, it's actually jumping feet-first into a controversial topic and spending at least SOME time treating it seriously and dealing with the issues such a system would suffer. I just wish the main character did more to be more distinct, and that's one of the biggest gripes I have.

In the scene in book 3 where the main character orders the execution of the nameless zako traitorous nobles, it uses them as a cop-out bait-and-switch execution target in order to spare the actually named characters that are at least somewhat sympathetic. Further, it portrays these nameless traitors as obviously out to destroy the kingdom and kill the main character for no particularly well-defined reason because that would take characterization. (Basically, the total opposite problem of Overlord, anyone who has characterization is guaranteed to live, but it critically undercuts the impact of death when you're only disposing of nameless zako, and that REALLY undercuts the Romance of the Three Kingdoms-style historical epic feeling this story wants when it's obviously too scared to spill any meaningful amount of blood. It TELLS you famine and death and plague and slavery involving rape and such, but it will never, ever SHOW you any because that'd make the story too dark, even if that sort of darkness is needed to make the stakes actually grounded. The story starts off with a famine and food crisis, but there's never anybody SHOWN as being hungry. They only SHOW you the slums after the famine is over, the district has been rebuilt, and they're setting up a sanitation system, and everything is happy and sunny.... And here you see where the frustration is.)

Anyway, the biggest problem I have is that it could have made a real, actual statement about the character, the statement that the story's FREAKIN' TITLE suggests it wants to make, which is that he is a "Realist Hero", by making him make some choice that is framed in a way that doesn't preserve his idealism. The story even goes so far as to set up the leader of the Gran Chaos Empire, the big, threatening rival that could crush the Kingdom if it became involved in the war, and sets off the political intrigue parts of the story as being "Saint Maria", an idealist empress who created a functional fantasy UN called the Mankind Declaration to fight back against the Demon King that's invading the world. (Oh yeah, there's a demon king. I didn't mention it because it's supposedly some big looming threat in the distance that everyone else is reacting to, but hasn't done jack squat itself in the story yet. I guess it's like The Lands Beyond The Wall, in that it exists to give some existential crisis everyone should be uniting against instead of squabbling, but where the main focus is on the petty squabbling because that's much more interesting than actual black-and-white morality.) This is set up as being some sort of contrast between the main character being the "Realist King" and the empress being the "Idealist Saint"... but the problem is the story doesn't do a good job on following through on distinctive differences in choices. The main character doesn't join the Mankind Declaration, but it's only because he knows of a loophole because our world's history again, and even after that loophole is revealed, the empress still has to stick with the Mankind Declaration because it would be disastrous if she didn't. It's not presented as a difference in ideologies, it's a difference in available information, which makes it uninteresting as a conflict.

So back to the traitors - the main character spends about 1/3rd of the book talking about Machiavelli and what he means by "cruelties" and how it keeps order. (Basically concluding that you have to be willing to punish the people "on your side" especially when they are opportunists, because letting someone run free until after they've become a problem is just going to bite you in the end.) He uses this conclusion as his justification for executing the people who had helped support sedition without actually getting their hands dirty and where he therefore had no evidence of their crimes. He then mopes about having to order an execution, sentences the named traitor's daughter girl (the one who was main girl's friend from the second book who was offered as a concubine that he turned down) to being a slave (apparently, no jails, so "convict slavery" is the form of punishment below execution) of the royal family in a way that functionally makes her main girl's maid. (This makes his supposed anti-slavery stance really dubious, but again, the book isn't willing to actually hold him to account for it.) He then tells that girl that if he ever becomes a true tyrant that she should kill him (even though the slave collar means it would kill her, too), because he can't trust that main girl would be willing to do it since main girl loves him.

Now, this would have some real weight and meaning to it IF they had actually framed this correctly. He's executing people and then ordering his soldiers to go search their homes for evidence of crimes after already carrying out the sentence. That sure smells like tyranny to me! That makes the subsequent order to suicide-kill him have some meaning, since he's reacting to hypothetically realizing how tyrannical his action really was. That sets the main character up as willing to get his hands seriously dirty because he was driven more by his fear that these people MIGHT rise up and harm his royal family over upholding the law, which is a real character flaw that makes the character actually interesting, as well as setting him up as an ACTUAL contrast against the idealist empress character who is willing to risk her empire to uphold her ideals.

Problem is, that's not how the story actually frames it. The traitor zako are framed as cackling supervillains overtly talking about their plans to overthrow the crown (which kind of IS a crime), which gets overheard by the royal intelligence network. That means they DID have evidence, although it's not treated as such in the story, but is pushed on the reader hard enough to make it not seem like a difficult choice in the least to have these guys executed. The Zhuge Liang knockoff then casually mentions that "the events are somewhat out of order, but I'm sure we'll find evidence" and NOBODY QUESTIONS THIS! The entire idea of due process is just treated as a total triviality, making any of the main character's angst seem utterly unfounded on this aspect of tyranny, since he isn't at all concerned about it. He's just moping because he could not save literally everybody. He's not a total pacifist (that would DEFINITELY make him more idealist than realist), and he says he feels no guilt over ordering people dead in the war because it was kill-or-be-killed, while he feels guilt over ordering the execution of these guys... but that's not relatable because they're overtly plotting to kill him, so it still IS kill-or-be-killed. Yeah, sure, maybe being a chief executive and having to write condolence letters to the widows would be a lot of stress and weight on a "normal guy"... but he never is SHOWN writing those letters, and the story doesn't just bend over backwards, it does quintuple backflips to say that there's absolutely nothing that could have prevented any further bloodshed, and that makes his "relatable" angst over his responsibilities seem about as justified as a child whining that he has to clean up his room. This also makes his request to kill him if he becomes a full tyrant seem to come from utterly nowhere, because the story has gone out of its way to try to say his actions were not at all tyrannical, and the only emotional impact is confusion as to where it comes from.

This problem would be solved if only they had made someone actually argue that there was SOME other valid option to take, making the main character's worries that there might be a better way in some way FOUNDED instead of meaningless. In that scene, the best choice would be to make the traitor's daughter girl (right as soon as her father was shown clemency and it was only her head on the line) actually give the main character a What The Hell Hero speech on how he was abusing the legal system in a way that actually stabs at his doubts (hence VALIDATING the fact that he harps on them all the time) and reveals some sort of self-serving motivations in his actions. It would also have made his decision to ask her, specifically to be the one to kill him make more sense, and it would have made his subsequent self-doubt much more reasonable. (Even main girl, who watched the whole event unfold, is perplexed why he's upset about executing the zako scum that were given zero redeeming qualities.) It would've also furthered the traitor's daughter girl own character development (since she'd been someone who'd berated the main character even while in chains in the previous book so it was already in-character for her), making her seem even more a badass for telling off the guy with the hand on the lever when her neck was in the guillotine.

But that doesn't happen because the author is too afraid of actually challenging his main character.

Which is REAAAALLY frustrating because this story does so much else RIGHT.

(Oh, and Main Character also explicitly states that he's never going to lay a hand on the traitor's daughter girl to her father after meeting him again, to which the father says he'd actually feel better if MC did because then he'd be sure that his daughter would be taken care of. This is prescient because the traitor's daughter girl basically gets treated as a butt monkey whenever she shows up at all from here on out.)

---

OK, so the other thing I wanted to mention was that the harem thing doesn't just 'happen' in book 3. It's just revealed that's actually where it's going for sure in book 3.

Dojyomaru mentions in the afterward of book 4 that he never would have gotten published if it wasn't for making it a web novel first, because a single story arc took four books. It's absolutely clear that basically all the major beats of the story were plotted out from the very beginning (at least, as far as book 4), and there were clear threads of foreshadowing for basically every major event even in the fourth and fifth books being set up in the first book.

That is to say, I didn't think they were serious at the time, but mentioning polygamy in book 1 was clearly set up to reveal it would actually happen in book 3.

This is to say, he's not changing the story mid-arc to appeal to fanboys who demand fanservice, he's just an author that clearly looooves the slow burn, and story arcs that would be broken up into separate 3-act story arcs per book in most light novels are instead a trickle of chapters that only form a story arc when you add up several books. (The "climax" of book 3 was that "executing the traitors from the war" scene. There was basically zero action in that whole book, while the second book was nearly all warfare.)

Also, having read more into book 5, he's spending a lot more time dealing with the relationships within the harem at this point, including directly dealing with topics like jealousy. (The story changes points of view constantly, especially between the main character and main girl and this is from Main Girl's point of view.) The dragon duchess lady drugs the main character to get him to talk truthfully about what he thinks of the harem and his kinks, which she then goes and tells the harem to give them ammunition for seducing him. Main Girl is jealous when hearing about the other girls, but she's told he'd already said his honest feelings to her, so there was nothing to say. She notably berates herself for this right after, because she's the First Queen, and it's her duty to maintain harmony in the household. But then the others are jealous of her, and it becomes one of these Teachable Moment things. It's a little on the corny side and there's still the problem of these girls becoming friends without us seeing why in particular, but it is at least directly addressing the obvious elephant in the room, which is what I really wanted to see out of any book trying to explore this topic. I just hope they spend more time exploring the relationships between the secondary queens.

This also ties into the "slow burn" thing, though. He's tied down a date to having the wedding, even if time is nebulous in terms of chapters when all of book two takes place in a few days while book one is six months. (All four girls share one wedding because "weddings are too large of a state event to do four in a row without busting the treasury".) He's CLEARLY putting down the paving stones for the characters to just freakin' get a room. Unlike a lot of authors that just keep things in stasis forever, it's a really, really SLOW process, but there's clear progress being made that comes in sometimes surprising lurches when you think it's not going anywhere. (Like not realizing he's serious about the harem until it suddenly is a fait accompli.)

Also, since I've gone ahead and ranted about this so much, I might as well link where you can find the stupid books:
https://j-novel.club/v/how-a-realist-hero-rebuilt-the-kingdom-volume-1
https://global.bookwalker.jp/de2fa19a3e-b8f7-46b8-bd4b-f652943b9d3d/

azurelorochi said:

Show

I know "relatability" isn't the best word since it's highly subjective and certainly as we can already attest, aren't "relatable" to the both of us.

Though you got my point, the fact that a character's personality has to be constantly held back from going into any extremes, it's the exact reason 99% of male protag these days are 15-17 years old with short black or brown hair and is academically below average because they're afraid the audience would not be able to relate to a character who doesn't look like them. The issue is how overused it is that it kills not only the character's own individuality but the story's as a whole as well.

Whereas I grew up worshipping Yugioh for a good deal of my elementary school life. I could give much less of a shit how a protagonist looks. I mean I think I can relate to goddamn Simba more than I could Kirito. So the "relatability" here refers less to how relatable it actually is to us, and more about the author's desire when designing the characters.

And yeah the execution mopey thing is the same issue I see in Overlord. The author is clearly trying to go for a different route, to tell that the protagonist isn't so black and white in morality, yet almost all of the opponents he faced are either "lolololol I rape kids every morning, drink blood of the elderly and I also stole your toilet paper for good measures, now you shall experience the HORROR" degree of cartoonish evil, or is so incompetent the story frames them for being complete idiots to even try to stand up against the protag and therefore deserves what's coming to them, or is subsequently turned onto the protagonist's side once defeated and saw how great he is.

These aren't characters with their own wants and needs, they're plot devices for the sake of invoking an emotion. And while it is okay to an extent to have these kind of character, when the emotion the author want to evoke is almost always "the protag is so awesome!" it's where the Gary Stuism made me wanna smash my head against the wall.

Having Hate Sink antagonists is an easy way to get the audience to root for your protag, but yeah it's also something I have gotten sick of throughout the years since they are the epitome of one dimensional characters.

Sure it's fine to have a disposable miniboss be a Hate Sink once or twice, but when it is either used as a major boss(SAO) or used as miniboss for almost every goddamn arcs(Overlord), it's just tiring.

It is frustrating like that when the story wants to tell you the protagonist is not your conventional hero, yet in the end it is not the protag but often plot conveniences such as one character being too stupid or too incompetent that allowed the protag to hold the moral/logical highground.

I also don't know how I think I should feel for the daughter girl you talk about. On one hand I think it's nice that she has the guts to stay to her conviction, yet yeah, at the same time despite being told "hey you can kill me if I turn evil" while being constantly treated as a joke all the way afterward? That's kinda toothless.

I wanna say how I prefer the protag to act, but again going by summaries alone I can't gauge him well enough to judge his entire character. And I know the Japanese male herbivore attitude is treated as a running joke, but I also feel that may be used as an excuse for him not to just have sex with the girls and get it over with. I mean if he's a "realist" who already knew there were someone aiming for his life, wanting to leave an heir to entrust his kingdom to in the event he actually doesn't survive should also be very important right? The girls are willing, the history he apparently worships also supports of such decision, so there shouldn't be anything to stop him other than the tease cliche of the harem.

Honestly, when I heard this part of Terrible Writing Advice on Grimdark ("In the Grim Darkness of the far present of fiction writing, there are only CLICHES!") I immediately thought of Overlord's extreme swings between (doomed) amoral psychopaths and (doomed) naive innocent flower children.

Anyway,

NWSiaCB said:

Honestly, when I heard this part of Terrible Writing Advice on Grimdark ("In the Grim Darkness of the far present of fiction writing, there are only CLICHES!") I immediately thought of Overlord's extreme swings between (doomed) amoral psychopaths and (doomed) naive innocent flower children.

Anyway,

Show

Realist Hero is actually pretty timid on portraying people as really evil. The opposite of Overlord in some respects, it just seems too terrified of having a tone consistently dark/realistic enough to actually ground its very realistic plot complications. Again, the initial crisis is a famine, but actually SHOWING people who are starving would be too bleak for the author, so it's basically just an excuse to have a comedic chapter where a modern Japanese-style cooking show demonstrating how people can eat the local just-legally-distinct-enough-from-a-Dragon-Quest slime monster as an alternate food source until the land reforms kick in. The thing is, the realistic land reforms and such just beg for actual realistic consequences. There is some mention of there not being enough food, but no mention of how hungry the people are, or anything like starvation, just that people are 'upset' by high food prices. This goes double for the enemy nation, which they wind up partially occupying during the war sequence, and then retreating from, or the refugees from the lands conquered by the Demon Lord, talking about how people are 'upset' when they go without food and 'happy' to get relief aid, but never any actual consequence of that hunger, because that would seemingly be too dark for what clearly wants to be a realistic take on a historical fantasy epic, but also is too gun-shy about actually showing anybody suffering. (The horrors of slavery are mentioned in some passing detail, as well, although it's honestly far more understandable that they don't actually show sex slaves or people being worked literally to death in the coal mines, even if the fact that he's willing to show a "happy slave" in comedic situations with nothing but some lip service to the fact that real slavery was nothing like this a bit disturbingly tone-deaf.)

The result is that, outside the war arc, there are basically no named characters who are villains that get killed, and any other character is either given a name and given some redemption arc, or else is nameless and serves as the token (unsympathetic so as not to be depressing, yet dramatically flat) foils to the ones who get the redemption arc.

---

So far as the traitor's-daughter-turned-slave-dragon-maid goes, she's basically the buttmonkey because she's assigned under the Head Maid, who is openly described as a sadist that enjoys "buwwying" proud girls (presumably, "いじわる"). The book itself explicitly says "Yes, "buwwying", not bullying - she likes to "buwwy" proud girls." The head maid has extreme karma houdini powers that lets her torment her supposed boss, the princess and main girl, much less the helpless slave dragon maid. This manifests itself in constantly making Slave Dragon Maid have to butt into Main Girl's romantic life just to embarrass both of them, as well as making Slave Dragon Maid wear embarrassing costumes for all the pseudo-television shows. This is one of the few fanservicey bits outside the harem itself, as she is forced into being scantily dressed to play the villainess in a Power Rangers knockoff.

Also, bizarrely, the head maid is one of the few female characters that gets a romantic pairing outside the main character that wasn't telegraphed from her very introduction; She winds up with the fat guy gourmet guy that's the odd man out of the initial five "talented people" who responded to the main character's call. She's apparently tamable with food, so he avoids her sadistic tendencies himself by keeping her satiated with the Japanese-inspired dishes he makes to copy the Main Character's tastes.... Yeah, everything about this character is pretty weird.

---

And, for what it's worth, I've read far enough ahead to hit the part where Main Character actually has a change of heart and bangs the Main Girl. Again, it's kind of comes a bit out of left field, even though there was some pretty clear telegraphing it was coming, as you'd expect it to be put off further into the story, and the events immediately before don't naturally lead into the plot development.

In one sense, it's actually a bit refreshing, because it's treated as a character development moment where he sees two contrasting characters and ideologies and decides he should be more like one than the other, and changes his behavior in an act of clear character development. He decides to get over his hangups and actually push ahead with his relationships by taking bold moves to further those relationships. Bravo.

The PROBLEM, however, is he acts upon this by basically just throwing his arm around Main Girl, and telling everyone else to clear out so they can do it. It's treated not as a culmination of the romantic arcs leading up to that, but that it was a given Main Girl was just waiting for Main Character to grow up enough to finally give her what she wanted, and as soon as he does, they just j-j-jam it in with ZERO fucking romantic buildup, making this an anti-climax, at least if you thought that the relationship arc should have a literary climax with the, you know, other kind of climax. (To be fair, the confession scene that came in book 4 was treated a bit more as a climax. However, any attempt to say that this is placing an emphasis on spiritual connection over physical desire is undermined by the fact that there was a lot of dramatic buildup, even if it was treated comedically, in the "bridal training course" chapters that came between the love confession and the physical consummation parts. This WAS the payoff to several earlier chapters of dramatic buildup, but it gets shoved in as nearly an aside halfway through an entirely different story arc involving religion and political intrigue.)

Also, in case you had ANY doubt that the writer was male, the scene basically goes "they jumped in bed, the girl blushed and was flustered, the lights went out, they woke up the next morning, and she was embarrassed to be seen naked in the light." Also, it immediately cuts to a comedic tone again by having the traitor's daughter-come-slave dragon maid and Main Girl's BFF have to come in and clean up the bed right as soon as the Main Character leaves and has to walks in on the still-naked and highly flustered Main Girl at the Head Maid's behest so that he can go back to scheming against the other nation with the Zhuge Liang guy in the international politics plot this interrupted, saying "it's best to let sleeping sadists lie" because he's a classy guy that way.

The plus side of this is, however, that the whole "Japanese herbivore" sub-plot disappears after this, and, again, it shows actual character growth that sticks, giving me at least some hope that, while I have some real gripes about the author's handling of pacing and dramatic stakes, at least shows that the author isn't scared of showing a relationship that actually develops out of the "first date" stage and into actually having characters get married and grow used to one another.

All-in-all, even if you don't want to read it, I'd suggest at least watching this author, as he talked in the afterwards about his inability to win "new author" awards (implying, you know, BEING a new author) and needing to 'publish' as a web novel to give his story arcs the room to be as expansive as he wanted. He has a willingness and capacity to create complex plots with interesting themes, but fails to stick the landing by making the structural mistakes of an amateur, which is something that can be cured with more experience.

Plus, again, it's at least something interesting enough to be worth following even as it fails, which means it can at least be entertaining on the meta level even if it fails on the textual level.

-----

Also, since we're on the topic of relationships, I'll throw a total curveball, and mention a manga whose treatment of stable relationships was also fairly unique and which I generally loved with fewer caveats (mostly in the earlier volumes): Narue no Sekai.

Don't watch the anime (it diverges from the manga really early and has no overarching plot), and the official release was cut short, so you have to get a scanlation.

However, aside from going from a set of throwaway gags to afterwards having to retcon in some kind of sanity to the world's science fiction until it accidentally becomes one of the more fully-realized and well-thought out takes on scientific principles that start becoming surprisingly hard sci-fi for what started as a gag manga, it also has one of the more surprisingly mature set of relationships.

The main character falls in love with the main girl Narue in chapter one, he asks her out, and they're dating from chapter 2 onwards. The main characters are middle schoolers, so there's no sex or marriage talk, but they're just plain in a relationship from then on, and it's just established as the basis of their relationships, with much of the drama coming from their respective families or the space political drama Narue's very existence as a half-"alien" is caught up in. There's like one chapter where the main character's temporarily led astray by actual mind control rays, but there's functionally zero love triangles (unless you count Narue being upset about the main character's love of a particular in-universe anime about anthropomorphized tank-musume) or anything resembling a harem, and the story's focus upon the main character mostly as he tries to grow up to be the sort of person Narue needs. Also, the major best friend characters are a major recurring side couple with their own plot arc, as does a deserter warship's gynoid avatar, who falls in love with and marries another adult character, and has a running plot thread about her sorrow that, as a synthetic being, she can't have children to start her own family. (Which gets solved by them adopting another "child" gynoid.)

It's interesting both for being (at least, eventually) quite a mature coming-of-age story, but also as an evolutionary process of the author, himself. (Also, I personally love the expressiveness of the somewhat rough artwork.)

I guess they decided to open a Pokémon Day Care for the trainers...

JHDX said:

I guess they decided to open a Pokémon Day Care for the trainers...

I boggled until I remembered how different Pokemon Day Care is from real Day Care.

@azurelorochi

azurelorochi said:

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Well I guess when the basis of the Isekai genre is you escaping from the mundanity of the real world to a wonderful world of magic, you also wouldn't wanna fully acknowledge the ugliness that world may actually have.

Much like our world where we acknowledge starvation, diseases and war may be happening somewhere right now, that someone out there is experiencing a living hell, yet we don't wanna see it.

Though of course when you are making a story about someone who wants to fix that problem, someone who will dip their hands into the river of filth to save the people inside, it may be better to look straight ahead instead of looking away and going "ew, ew, ew, ew!"

I actually want an "Isekai" story like that, where instead of being transported into another world, the protag is transported to modern day Africa, and told to save those people from the constant poverty and warfare they are facing. He can even be given some superpower for the task.

azurelorochi said:

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On the issue of the main girl, well it's a harem so again I will never ever expect good romance to come out of it. The only thing that could convince me to support romance in a harem story is the practicality of a relationship(mutual benefits to the houses, making babies, maybe sharing magic power, whatever).

It's surprising that a series called "Realist Hero" seems to avoid touching on those points. And again it just rings the bell of fearing to distance the readers who thinks "romance that actually entails responsibility!? Me no like me only want boobies".

I like anime romances, and I like being able to ship characters together, and I don't even see the issue in wanting romantic interests who's blonde and has K cup boobs or is hotter than Chris Evans and Hemsworth doing a fusion dance, the problem is when the love interest is treated merely as an object.

This means both the usual objectification in harems where the characters does not have any personal wants or needs outside of the protag's dick, but it also includes the shoujo cliche where Mr. Perfect Kaichou Senpai richer than Bruce Wayne is the only goal the protagonist has in life and exists only as an objective.

I like a story where the couple faces trouble together and solves it together as a couple, not the "will they won't they?" kind, I like a story where it's obvious from very early on THEY WILL but they will have to work together to overcome other conflicts the world throw at them. Good romance is a result of teamwork.

The conflict doesn't even have to focus on the lovers, it can be war, financial issues, striving for one's dreams, fighting a conspiracy organization, etc.

To be honest, I thought that is supposed to be the "model relationship" all writers strive for since it can appeal to both male and female audiences equally, yet as you know it's still very much an extreme rarity because 99% of writers think romance means satisfying their dick/vaj and nothing else.

They obsess too much into their "male/female aimed demographics" they made their works utterly repugnant to the other sex. Even thinking from a business standpoint, why would you cut away the 50% of the world's population from being your potential audience?

NWSiaCB said:

@azurelorochi

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While it's definitely true that you can make something like a fantasy world as light and fluffy in tone as you want, the problem with that in this particular instance is that the entire premise of this story is that the actual problems facing kingdoms aren't things that can be solved by some musclebound idiot swinging a sword around really hard, and that a nation's problems are best solved through good governance. That is to say, it's a story with a grounded, realistic take on how a fantasy world would operate (if you ignore the whole "wyverns are just like airplanes" and "nobody uses guns because magic missile spells are better than flintlocks, so nobody bothered to develop gunpowder further" way magic-technology works here), and the problems they face, such as famine, poor sanitation, etc. are all realistic problems. Hence, it demands a tone that is suited to the type of story he's trying to tell.

Additionally, it's just a matter of whether or not the dramatic stakes in the story create any sort of tension for the hero to resolve. The "food crisis" is described as "bad", but then it "gets better" in the hero's country. In the enemy country, it's "worse", and that causes people to "complain", but it's never treated as anything more than a threat to a politician's approval ratings and an excuse for the cooking show. If it were just a plot about having a cooking show, that would be forgivable to have a non-issue resolved with a silly sideshow, but it's constantly brought up as something supposedly serious, but without any real stakes.

It's like how a superhero has to wait until after the criminals actually start robbing the bank before he can bust in and stop them - he can't crash through the wall when they're sitting in a bar complaining that they need to do a gig for some sort of pre-crime, because it's not exciting if there isn't some sort of actual threat the hero is thwarting.

By comparison, the war arc has several of the characters in direct mortal danger, the foreign enemy army besieges a city, and in order to evacuate the civilians along the path of the enemy army, the hero uses his doll-manipulating magic to send some "monsters" and set fires in the countryside to drive civilians away. There are basically no "on-screen" deaths, and only one named character (the enemy king) actually dies because, again, this story is kind of toothless, but there's an actual threat to people, and you can feel the stakes are real. (And as always, there's a mention that some nameless people died off-screen, but never on-screen.)

All it would take to make this a much better story is to have a series of asides where a "normal villager" (who never meets the king directly) character's daily life is described, so that you can see how their daily life changes as the king's policy changes are implemented at the ground level. Because as the story stands, it's describing what are real life-or-death issues from a very cold and remote standpoint of the king and princess who don't actually suffer the problems they're supposed to be solving.

There IS a mention all the way out at book 4 where a freed slave says 'thanks' to the king and that 'if the food crisis went on, it would have been us slaves that starved first', which implies it wasn't quite at starvation yet, but it's not until several months/three whole books after the food crisis is already over that we get the first description of what sort of threat this 'crisis' actually posed.

Again, this would be akin to a hero disarming a ticking time bomb where you never see the clock face, there is only one wire, and 20 minutes later into the movie when the plot has gone on to some totally different crisis, someone else comes by and mentions that the time bomb still had 13 hours left before it exploded. Woo. Nail-biting tension, there!

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I think you're jumping too far into your own assumptions, here.

Just because it isn't romantic doesn't mean it's because it's being overly sexy. This story pretty much manages neither. (Even the parts where Main Character's fiancees try to use the knowledge of his fetishes plied out of him through drugging, they basically just bumble and fail at it for a cheap laugh.)

Again, I think this is more a problem of inexperience in writing romance more than "fanservice ruins EVERYTHING", because it's another case where it's structurally basically sound, and I can see just having a few minor additions would repair the problems. The main character having his change of heart and suddenly having a growth moment is good drama. It comes at the right point in the story, after a couple chapters of dramatic buildup regarding getting him to just do it already. The problem is the author just plain doesn't seem to realize the scene isn't as romantic as he thinks it is, which is more a novice writer (especially male novice writer) mistake. If the main character had just said "OK, I just realized this character development moment, now let's have dinner alone over candlelight and uncork some of the fine wine and then get to the foreplay" rather than just jump straight to bed, it would have been fine. (Well, OK, no, it would have been better if he didn't start a whole new plotline, then jam the climax to the last plot right between act 1 and act 2 of the next plot arc, so that you didn't feel whiplash from the rate at which the plot changes subjects, and you could actually remember the tension in this plotline that's supposed to be at its crescendo.)

Hell, I could see this being perfectly fine if, after the jump straight to sex, Main Girl was miffed that Main Character was seeing this more as a duty he's finally getting over his blockage to fulfill rather than as romance, thus creating another conflict for more dramatic tension in the romance plot, and creating room for another character growth scene later on.

In fact, if anything, the problem is that the characters don't seem to want the protag's dick all that much. The second princess in particular almost treats the whole thing as a business partnership, and they explicitly plot out the order in which the wives are supposed to get pregnant in order to keep the line of succession as simplified as possible. (Oooh, how fanservicy!) It even mentions in the chapter after the first sex scene that Main Girl complains that the other girls are badgering her to get pregnant already so they can have their turn. They talk about consummating their marriage with all the romantic passion of children arguing whose turn it is to ride shotgun in the car.

Back in the third book, it even basically describes the harem relationship as such; Main Character goes shopping with his adopted little sister character, and in a store speaking to the clerk (who is an underling of Second Princess, whom he hasn't met yet), he's lectured on how he needs to treat each wife equally or else give up on romance all together, and treat it all as politics. (Main Character buys each of the fiances a separate gift.)

From what I've read up on actual historic harems (specifically, Muslim ones), the harem would be run by the man of the household's mother, if she were still alive, or first wife if the mother-in-law were dead. (The "haram" portion of the house included all women of the household, not just wives, including any unmarried sisters or daughters.) This meant that a wife that could get her son to inherit would be set for life, while wives that had no sons who inherited anything would be left destitute (unless she were young enough to convince her husband's inheriting son to marry her, as well). This created extreme incentives for competing over who would produce heirs among the wives, and harems of sultans were said to be snake's dens of politics.

In this story, however, Second Princess just doesn't care about what her child will inherit, saying it wouldn't matter if she were at an effective concubine rank, because she's fine being a merchant... you know, like she's only talking about her own rank, and not the well-being of her future children. The third wife actually does accept concubine-like status (meaning her children are invalid for succession) even though she could easily receive adoption into nobility (which would make her valid as a full wife/queen) just because she basically just "doesn't want to be a bother", again, totally ignoring the fact she's denying a ton of opportunities to her children before they're even born. It's kind of just giving up on a large amount of potential drama for no good reason to leave them just docilely accepting fourth place.

If there's any theme to it, it's that such a setup really isn't romantic or sexy, although I think I'm reading more into it than the author actually intended, since he doesn't seem to realize it's not all that romantic.

Check post later when I am not drugged.

Riko is definitely in one of those wombs, and I really hope it's Serena's

So this whole discussion started because one guy thinks that harems in a FICTIONAL world are unrealistic?