Why harems are hard to do well · 1:03am Apr 11th, 2017
There are 3 types of harem stories.
1. Porn -> This is done for exotic scenarios. The goal is to be erotic, not deep story telling.
2. Wish fulfillment/Mary Sue -> Everyone loves my character! Everyone I fantasize about will mary him/her! And get along, even with wildly different and clashing personalities!
3. Attempting to write a romance.
This article is about #3. Trying to write a serious romance.
Why are almost no harem stories good romance stories?
Well, first off, writing a good normal romance story between two people is hard. You have to convincingly develop a relationship between 1 pair of people. Let's say that's a difficulty of 2. A-> B, B->A.
The smallest sized harem, a harem of three people would be a difficulty of 6. A -> B, A ->C, B->A, B-> C, C->A, C->B
A group of 4 people would be 12.
Oh, and that's underestimating the difficulty. Writing from experience does help, and while a 1 on 1 relationship is something most people have experienced a harem is not.
So yeah, exponential difficulty increases in writing with each new harem member.
So while I have read a couple stories with good 3 person harems ... I have never read a story with 4 person harem that was good.
It all boils down to honing the most important skill any author can develop. Deciding WHICH scenes are important and critical and actually NEED to be written to get the story too the ending that it deserves.
If you write a harem story there should be an ending where the reader says to himself that the story actually needed to have ALL of those romantic partners to reach the conclusion that it eventually did. If you can remove a character completely from any story and not significantly alter the ending then in all likelihood that character was either a background character or completely superfluous and unnecessary or both.
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Yeah. God, so many times the non-protagnist members of the harem are cardboard cutouts and have 0 effect on each other and the end of the story. That really annoys me when an author throws in a harem where they all only care about the protagonist... and are completely dead to the world and each other... only the protagonist matters. BLEHCH!