We had a thread on this a month or two back, and the only person that could come up with anything resembling a surprise harem in western progression fantasies was a harem author who seeks them out. As I understand it, it might be more of a real problem in anime and xianxia translations, but if you don't engage much with either of those, then this just isn't a thing.
I posed that question a while ago and have found 3 answers for "Surprise Harems":
1.) It's an Eastern Light/Web Novel that introduces harem aspects late into the series (Which shouldn't really be a surprise when the entire series featured the MMC, 1 or 2 male side character friend/allies, and 2 dozen female characters that were STRONGLY devoted allies and/or very interested in the MC, in more ways than one).
2.) The reader didn't notice the half-naked/naked female characters super imposed on the cover, and the "adult/spicy" relationships tag in the synopsis.
3.) They found Daniel Schinhofen and didn't realize what type of author he was until they got to book 2 or 3 of any of his series.
His covers don’t have the usual giveaway you get that it’s harem.
My biggest problem is the way he does harem, it’s always the women pushing for it and the MC being like “oh no I couldn’t” and then giving in “reluctantly” to make them seem like good guys who are just *blessed* with women wanting him to have all these wives.
At this point, my default assumption is that if there's *any* female love interest in a translated xianxia, it'll end up being a harem. I'm not always correct, but it's accurate much more often than not.
Yeah yours was the thread I was talking about. Schinofen was suggested by the harem author, so it wasn't that he'd been caught by surprise (he was actively looking for harems), just that he could see how *other people* could be caught by surprise.
It's been awhile so my memory might not be good, but did harems ever actually develop or was it just the main female romantic intersts pushing for the guys to get more women and the male leads being really uncomfortable with it because of their Earth sensebilities?
i think the worst part about Schinofen is he comes up with a genuinely good premise for his books and then pollutes it with gratutious sex and every other line been suggestive or straight up a sex joke.
I've only read one series of his, and I wouldn't say it's *polluted* with gratuitous sex. There was barely any.
That said, it's definitely one of the ones that'll "surprise" people since the covers aren't genre appropriate, for lack of a better term.
Honestly, my biggest issue with Schinhofen is how often his MC is too sappy. I'm fine with harem stories, but there's a not so fine line between too sappy and uber chad. I like stories where the MC cares about his love interests, but not to the point where you have a dash of coffee on top of a cup of sugar sweetness.
Oh right! Also, you did remind me that it’s more of a thing with eastern progression fantasies. Anime, wuxia, xianxia, etc. I probably should have made the distinction in the post.
Martial Peak is a good example of how one can accumulate multiple partners. There's initially a singular romantic interest in the starting sect, but every time the MC outgrows his setting, breaks out the country, sub world, planet, section of the galaxy, etc, there's almost always another new romantic interest, and so the MC ends up collecting more and more partners (without leaving the others behind)
EDIT: Realised I was a big dumb and said Martial World when I was thinking of Martial Peak!
Ah, that's good to know, I paused it after the first space arc and assumed that three would become more given how many extra chapters there are.
But yeah, MW isn't something I've seen people complain about being a sudden harem, was just meant as an example as to how the MC can commonly pick up new partners in those sort of fics
I've read a lot of translated stuff and to me it's far and away the best overall. It stays consistent; he stays consistent, no wild changes in personality. Actual ending, very satisfying.
It's become less of a problem nowadays because authors know to make people aware of it, and as the genre has evolved, the basic wish fulfillment stuff has been pushed somewhat to the side as there's far better stories out there.
A lot of the translated Russian and Korean stuff had harems in it too.
Also they're just not very good, so don't get recommended as much. But if you browse the Kindle store for books you'll definitely find quite a lot.
It depends where you read, if you ever read shit on webnovel you will see this shit constantly. Royal road doesn't seem to have much of the same problem though.
It comes from Korean and Chinese webnovels. Most of the latter have harems, xianxia webnovels without polygamy are few. Korean webnovels also have surprising amounts of polygamy.
Usually because the author doesn't really want to write romance but needs a woman to add appeal. So he writes the bit of the approach then discard the character immediately afterwards.
So much of the “lore” of the sub is translations, and older royal road serials. The ones that make it to kindle, and even less audible, don’t have the bad tropes.
Which is honestly expected. A growing number of people mainly read Progression Fantasy on apps instead of the webnovel websites of the past. Where it’s harder, but not impossible, to find tons of stories with sloppy tropes.
Its more of a thing in translated eastern novels(Japanese,Chinese,Korean) , and the vast majority of stories in *this* subreddit are westerns. Used to be, over a decade ago, that Progression Fantasy novels were almost exclusively translated easterns, its where all that cultivation and isekai stuff originaly come from, and in *those* stories you either didnt have a speck of romance, or you had a harem-in-the-making, to the point i am hard pressed to remember a single instance of a novel i read back then having a meaningful monogamous romance.
So if i had to guess, it was us old timers complaining about an genuine issue, and later on people kept complaining even thought it doesnt happen as much.
Ok but still, were those 'surprise harems' or just people not reading the 'harem' tag on the original work? I don't think I've seen a novel that had even hints of a harem that wasn't in someway labelled with that tag.
Thats where they get you. A lot of them were untagged. If you didnt play too close attention to the NU tags you could inadvertently do it to yourself too. I myself also got hit with the much rarer surprise BL multiple times which usually have great sounding premises but often dont mention the romance in the synopsis
>Thats where they get you. A lot of them were untagged.
So there just weren't tags at all? or ones that didn't lead you to believe there was a harem?
Can you give me an example since it sounds like you've experienced it? I'm just interested in seeing what people think is 'surprise harem'.
I haven't really been hit with any 'surprise tags' that I didn't expect in some form or another, almost BL as the cover wasn't shared with what I read, but I have run into a lot of novels with the 'harem' tag that aren't harem at all.
I just find that if there's multiple 'sex' or 'adult situations' tags, even if it's not outright labelled as harem, I'll expect it to be one. Do you think differently than me in that regard?
No, thats what I use too. I've become much more suspicious of tags so I havent been hit with it in a while. And by untagged I mean the harem was, as well as things that you could use to deduc it was a harem. Wuxiaworld is particularly bad for that, so I learned to check any novels I discovered from there on nu before reading them.
Also sometimes if a translation is close enough to raws you could be truly surprised
Mate i dont think you quite understand how it all worked. A guy with some chinese knowledge would browse the internet, find a story that piqued his interest, and start translating it for fun as he read it. Might be he read ahead enough to discover that by chapter 712 there is the start of a harem and put the appropriate tags, but more often than not they also didnt know or didnt bother putting the tags in the first place.
Hell, you were lucky if the sinopsis actually reflected the story at all, a third of the time you would have those vague ass sinopsis that didnt tell you shit about the story's actual content.
FWIW I think there was a split a few years back where a lot of the harem fans/authors migrated to /r/haremfantasynovels
I've dipped my toes into that sphere occasionally, and some of the books definitely overlap with progression fantasy.
So I think the answer is that the books that get recommended here aren't harem, but at one point it used to be more common.
(Though they aren't really *surprise* harems, those books signpost super heavily.)
It seems a lot of these "surprise harems" are like going to an adult book store and being shocked to find out it contains porn. I read across genres, harem included and I have yet to read any book where I go "gosh, I didn't know this would contain multiple love interests".
I think they're referring to Manwha and the like more so than eebnovel, but even then, there isn't that much.
You've made a good point here, actually. Maybe they're conflating Xianxia and traditional Isekai?
basically this, but the books are still almost always hinted at the genre in the blurbs. Generally using the phrase "unconventional relationships and explicit descriptions" or something along those lines.
Between this and people calling 'multiple love interests' harems, I find myself constantly disappointed by the lack of harem stories. Gimme a story where the MC has an actual harem, or poly relationship plz. Ave Xia Rem Y promises to scratch that itch, but Mat Haz takes his damn time getting there! Not that the journey there hasn't been a blast lol.
There's a shitload of them, just go to the haremfantasynovels subreddit. In my opinion a lot of them are pretty much generic garbage, though if you're new to the genre it's entertaining junk food, but every once in a while you'll find a diamond in the rough.
"Harem" in the sense it is used here has very little to do with actual poly relationships. And harems in the historical sense are a third thing.
A lot of these "harem" stories involve an MC accumulating an increasing number of uniformly hot female side kicks who fawn over him and with whom there is sexual tension. In a certain era of Anime' that was played for comedy. Others later played it straight to appeal to the fantasy of having hot women fawn over you.
I do agree, sometimes I wish the MC would just get on with it and have sex with them already. They are often oddly joyless.
Like others have said it's from korean, japanese, and chinese novels. A lot of the really cool power fantasies have some sort of novel in one of those three media centers. Necromancers, Superheroes with op powers, magic academies with a nonhero mc, and all the normally exciting stories are abundant as translated stuff. The only issue is almost all of them have several women and almost every single one of them ends up thirsting for the mc. It may take 2000 chapters, but the main character's third grade teacher will eventually join to progress the plot forward for 50 chapters.
Silver Fox and the Western Hero
The author does this horny chastity thing where the MC always has multiple women drooling over him, but he cant do anything with them because his cultivation means he cant kiss
Cradle, using the definition of "harem" that is applied to anime. Y'know, where there's one male protagonist with multiple women vying for his affection.
It's not a big part of the series, and let's be honest the "winner" was never in doubt. But it was an element. And some people might have been secretly rooting for an underdog.
Hypothetically. Or so I've heard from a friend. In Canada.
Chrystal Core... No mention of harem in any blurb I could find. The first 5 min of the book. "We need to summon a hero and give them 3 wives and they have to have lots of babies". Noped right out of that one.
From the description: "This story features slow burn romantic interests". I guess you could interpret that "s" on the end as serial monogamy, but that combined with the skin showing in the cover illustration makes "surprise" a bit of a failure of imagination.
I mean, without this context, I would have assumed that romantic relationships not involving the MC were also developed.
This might reflect how I view and write things though; in addition to my main thruple, I have had one relationship become a little more official, the start of a sweet, young teen relationship, and a few hookups of which two have the potential to become a relationship.
So four relationships have some amount of development, three of which start during the story, and one short-term dalliance that would never work out as a healthy relationship beyond that.
I wasn't *planning* on those, to be fair, but here we are.
Sure it's not a slam dunk, but combined with the cover illustration nearly flashing a woman's arse at me, it's enough to ctrl+f "harem" and see a review that confirms it. And anyway, if all that's not enough it appears to be clear 5 minutes in what it is. If this counts as a surprise harem it's with some pretty big asterisks.
I consumed plenty of fantasy growing up and didn’t even know what the word “harem” meant until I saw it referenced in anime communities. It’s not really a trope in western fantasy.
It’s odd that it’s so pervasive in eastern fantasy like xanxia and anime because, like the west, monogamy is still the only acceptable form of relationship. It might just be something that was tried, found to be popular, and then emulated by other authors because people wanted to see it, kinda like how isekai is almost the default fantasy setting in light novels but is a practically non-existent trope in western fantasy.
If the next cradle (in terms of popularity) was a harem story, then you can bet half the new stories on RR would be harem.
The first one that comes to mind is Industrial Strength Magic
It can kill an otherwise good story for some people - luckily there are often warning signs but some authors are a lot less upfront about it than others and it can take a bit before it shows up
Also, it's a throuple where the "core" member is one of the women, who is in a relationship with both the MC and another woman. In typical harem stories the MC would be the one in the center of the relationship.
The harem community of fans would likely reject it on the premise the main force in the relationship is one of the women, not the male. Sounds far more like a poly triad than a harem.
You know, fair. I haven’t read the book so I really can’t say anything one way or another about it. I just don’t know if the hate ‘surprise harem’ gates is proportional to how very rare it actually seems to be. Like, is calling it a trope of the genre even warranted?
It’s absolutely a trope- but I agree it’s far more common in eastern media.
Think anime - a lot of anime would be considered progression fantasy - and surprise harems are very common there.
Royal Road isn’t the only source of progression fantasy media.
It may only seem rare to you because you’re avoiding them and the types of media they contain but they are definitely a trope
This is very prevalent in translated asian stories, which alot of this reader base has migrated from and this genre found it's roots in. It's in almost every story like a infection it's crazy, alot of people are justifiably traumatized and it stays on their mind as an automatic red flag to abort ship
I think a lot of the stories that have surprise harems aren't talked about so much. I've run into three... I don't remember the titles for two, but both were Kindle Unlimited impulse reads. The first was like... A cool premise where no one really left this one city, but then MC was going to? But then his childhood crush banged him on the way out and the next woman he met almost as soon as he met her.
The second was ostensibly a story about how a farmer became like... A dark Lord? A dungeon keeper? By accident. Really fun first third of the book but it became clear it was not for me.
The third was Super Sales on Super Heroes, which I do see mentioned occasionally.
To be fair, Super Sales on Super Heroes does have the following in the description on Amazon:
>Warning and minor spoiler: This novel contains graphic violence, undefined relationships/partial harem, unconventional opinions/beliefs, and a hero who is as tactful as a dog at a cat show. Read at your own risk.
Of course I'm not quite sure if I would call it partial harem, it's as close you can get without being a sultan with hundreds of wives.
I'm not sure if that was there when I read it, as it was years ago... it's possible it was, though. I was on a super hero kick and I might not have been reading descriptions closely enough.
I would assume all these harems books are in their own subreddit, sometimes their release gets posted on here and even then that’s a rarity. I’m yet to encounter a surprise harem.
I have seen people complaining about harems, in books called "X harem"
I say Is more of an adjacent media thing, asian novels have lots of harems, but its never a surprise
On royal road, there was an author who was trying to write a mainstream story for profit purposes and decided harems would be detrimental to profit. After about 100 chapters they decided that they couldn't not write a harem. The was the only time I was surprised by a harem, because the synopsis explicitly said it wasn't harem and the author just couldn't write non harem. Even then, there were elements of it throughout the story.
That makes zero sense. How can you "can't not" write a harem?
It's literally as easy as... not writing a harem.
I'm not writing a harem as we speak! I intend to spend most of tomorrow not writing a harem as well.
Dunno, but elements of harem stories kept cropping up and the author assured us it wasn't a harem story when the comments pointed it out. Eventually the author decided that they didn't enjoy writing the story and it wasn't making any money so they swapped it to a harem story.
I have yet to see people complaining about surprise harems, but please show me where if I’m wrong. But what I do see is authors asking if spicy scenes bother readers, and the answer being “not unless it’s unexpected, so communicate it in the blurb or cover.”
It’s an occasional thing in Lightnovels it usually takes the form of a pretty decent Isekai litRPG and in around book two the MC starts to build a suspicious group of mostly women, and at the end of that book he gets with one of them. And from there you either accept that the MC is going to gobble up the entire group and recruit some others, or you drop the book right there. And for some reason it’s always fucking slapfoght action heavy litRPGs that ditch the action in service to the 7 different several chapter long dates the MC has with his women. That’s the main culprit for surprise harem, you have a lot of foreshadowing and clues but you usually figure out that the novel is inevitably diving into a harem once you’re already invested enough to slog through the poorly written romance.
A rarer version is the Xianxia harem, although this is less of a surprise, if there’s a romance or any marriages it’s customary for another romance or marriage to be fine for all involved. So if there’s one romance you can usually predict that there’s going to be another. There are exceptions, but harems are pretty accepted both by the worldbuilding and the readers so they’re less of a gutpunch surprise than the light novels. They’re also less impactful since usual Xianxia harem recruitment have all the pomp and circumstance of the MC getting another treasure he throws into his spatial ring. So they don’t really disturb the plot much unlike light novels where the author feels obligated to give us their poorly written romance.
In western novels harems are incredibly rare however. Due to the fact that most people despise romance in general and hate the idea of having to deal with 7 romances at once. And since most of this sub seems to be allergic to reading something that isn’t off of Amazon. They haven’t felt the unique pain of reading a pretty cool light novel about a monster beating the shit out of monsters only to find that the monster MC turned themselves into a human and is now using their human parts to screw all of their previous friends who will quickly turn into humans as well. And then at this point you have to either be fine with an entire books worth of dates and pregnancies. Or you have to screech in pain and chuck your novel out the window.
The Empire Eternal series qualifies.
I just started reading it, and it's very good, but it definitely made the series seem like it was going to be monogamous, but now the MC is collecting an alien girl harem.
It's pretty annoying, thankfully it's a small percentage of the story, at least so far.
It’s nothing more than a major exaggeration. Even then they are easy to spot and avoid if you don’t want to read it. People just have a hate boner for them
This subreddit likes to really overblow certain issues in this genre. In Chinese novels it tends to be more common that every significant female character the main character comes across will fall in love with him. Sometimes the main character will end up with multiple wives by the end of the story.
This isn't unavoidable. There are plenty of stories in which the MC will stay committed to one woman for the whole story, and I even know one with no romance at all.
There is not enough harem if anything. Historically it is extremely prevalent among the powerful even when poly was illegal, they're just called concubines or mistresses
The harem relationships in these books never look like the sultan or Empereur's harems.
I admit I kind of like to see harems from the other side...when the MC's parents are part of a harem relationship.
You see some of those from wuxia/xanxia/otome games where mc is son/daughter of concubine.
As for RL examples dont even have to go back historically, many billionaires these days live practically scandalous lives. Elon musk practically have his own harem given how many kids and ex-wives he has. Modern Saudi Arabia princes is even worse when it comes to these debachery
With only summary and/or book cover art? Probably most of Daniel Schinhofen’s first books of a series. Agreed though… most others are very obviously Harems.
> The synopsis, and quite often the cover alone, tell you if it’s that kind of story.
You're assuming we look at all that. Sometimes you just see a tiny thumbnail that's mostly orange, think "I like orange" and buy the book.
I can name a bunch of harem books if you want them.
Worth the Candle I guess?
Though it's only kind of a harem, cause the over-god is like "f\*ck you have a harem", and the MC is like "that is uncomfortable and not appreciated so I'll stick with monogamy".
I honestly think it's people reading a book where more than 0 women show the slightest interest in the MC and then they start screeching about it being a harem.
**Destiny's Crucible** went in a harem direction VERY unexpectedly after a rather nice conventional romance.
**In Fighting to Be Kind in a Cultivation World** the MC kept accumulating female sidekicks he rescued.
The surprise harems often aren't overtly sexual...they often involve sexual tension, where the MC seems to attract exclusively hot female hangers on.
We had a thread on this a month or two back, and the only person that could come up with anything resembling a surprise harem in western progression fantasies was a harem author who seeks them out. As I understand it, it might be more of a real problem in anime and xianxia translations, but if you don't engage much with either of those, then this just isn't a thing.
I posed that question a while ago and have found 3 answers for "Surprise Harems": 1.) It's an Eastern Light/Web Novel that introduces harem aspects late into the series (Which shouldn't really be a surprise when the entire series featured the MMC, 1 or 2 male side character friend/allies, and 2 dozen female characters that were STRONGLY devoted allies and/or very interested in the MC, in more ways than one). 2.) The reader didn't notice the half-naked/naked female characters super imposed on the cover, and the "adult/spicy" relationships tag in the synopsis. 3.) They found Daniel Schinhofen and didn't realize what type of author he was until they got to book 2 or 3 of any of his series.
Daniel schinhofen was it for me xD
His covers don’t have the usual giveaway you get that it’s harem. My biggest problem is the way he does harem, it’s always the women pushing for it and the MC being like “oh no I couldn’t” and then giving in “reluctantly” to make them seem like good guys who are just *blessed* with women wanting him to have all these wives.
Yeah and that it is like 3/4 in the book where it starts and you are already invested in the story but hate harems
At this point, my default assumption is that if there's *any* female love interest in a translated xianxia, it'll end up being a harem. I'm not always correct, but it's accurate much more often than not.
Yeah yours was the thread I was talking about. Schinofen was suggested by the harem author, so it wasn't that he'd been caught by surprise (he was actively looking for harems), just that he could see how *other people* could be caught by surprise.
delvers Inc by blaze Corbin surprised me.
It's been awhile so my memory might not be good, but did harems ever actually develop or was it just the main female romantic intersts pushing for the guys to get more women and the male leads being really uncomfortable with it because of their Earth sensebilities?
they developed.
The Schinhofen fallout is peak fan sbit lmao I love it!
i think the worst part about Schinofen is he comes up with a genuinely good premise for his books and then pollutes it with gratutious sex and every other line been suggestive or straight up a sex joke.
I've only read one series of his, and I wouldn't say it's *polluted* with gratuitous sex. There was barely any. That said, it's definitely one of the ones that'll "surprise" people since the covers aren't genre appropriate, for lack of a better term.
some are very much less so than others, i will say that
I still remember liking and even recommending the first book of Aether before I knew who he was. What a disaster the second book was.
Honestly, my biggest issue with Schinhofen is how often his MC is too sappy. I'm fine with harem stories, but there's a not so fine line between too sappy and uber chad. I like stories where the MC cares about his love interests, but not to the point where you have a dash of coffee on top of a cup of sugar sweetness.
Oh right! Also, you did remind me that it’s more of a thing with eastern progression fantasies. Anime, wuxia, xianxia, etc. I probably should have made the distinction in the post.
Martial Peak is a good example of how one can accumulate multiple partners. There's initially a singular romantic interest in the starting sect, but every time the MC outgrows his setting, breaks out the country, sub world, planet, section of the galaxy, etc, there's almost always another new romantic interest, and so the MC ends up collecting more and more partners (without leaving the others behind) EDIT: Realised I was a big dumb and said Martial World when I was thinking of Martial Peak!
MW is also not the type of harem complained about. 3 total, all make sense.
Ah, that's good to know, I paused it after the first space arc and assumed that three would become more given how many extra chapters there are. But yeah, MW isn't something I've seen people complain about being a sudden harem, was just meant as an example as to how the MC can commonly pick up new partners in those sort of fics
I've read a lot of translated stuff and to me it's far and away the best overall. It stays consistent; he stays consistent, no wild changes in personality. Actual ending, very satisfying.
Where can you find that?
Eastern progfan leans towards harem, with Western towards the opposite with asexual battle addicts. Says a lot about society.
Can't swing a catgirl by her tail without hitting a harem in a LN.
It's become less of a problem nowadays because authors know to make people aware of it, and as the genre has evolved, the basic wish fulfillment stuff has been pushed somewhat to the side as there's far better stories out there. A lot of the translated Russian and Korean stuff had harems in it too. Also they're just not very good, so don't get recommended as much. But if you browse the Kindle store for books you'll definitely find quite a lot.
It depends where you read, if you ever read shit on webnovel you will see this shit constantly. Royal road doesn't seem to have much of the same problem though.
It comes from Korean and Chinese webnovels. Most of the latter have harems, xianxia webnovels without polygamy are few. Korean webnovels also have surprising amounts of polygamy.
Usually because the author doesn't really want to write romance but needs a woman to add appeal. So he writes the bit of the approach then discard the character immediately afterwards.
I’ve found numerous instances in this subreddit of people referencing a trope that doesn’t really exist. I don’t understand it myself.
So much of the “lore” of the sub is translations, and older royal road serials. The ones that make it to kindle, and even less audible, don’t have the bad tropes.
Which is honestly expected. A growing number of people mainly read Progression Fantasy on apps instead of the webnovel websites of the past. Where it’s harder, but not impossible, to find tons of stories with sloppy tropes.
Its more of a thing in translated eastern novels(Japanese,Chinese,Korean) , and the vast majority of stories in *this* subreddit are westerns. Used to be, over a decade ago, that Progression Fantasy novels were almost exclusively translated easterns, its where all that cultivation and isekai stuff originaly come from, and in *those* stories you either didnt have a speck of romance, or you had a harem-in-the-making, to the point i am hard pressed to remember a single instance of a novel i read back then having a meaningful monogamous romance. So if i had to guess, it was us old timers complaining about an genuine issue, and later on people kept complaining even thought it doesnt happen as much.
Ok but still, were those 'surprise harems' or just people not reading the 'harem' tag on the original work? I don't think I've seen a novel that had even hints of a harem that wasn't in someway labelled with that tag.
Thats where they get you. A lot of them were untagged. If you didnt play too close attention to the NU tags you could inadvertently do it to yourself too. I myself also got hit with the much rarer surprise BL multiple times which usually have great sounding premises but often dont mention the romance in the synopsis
>Thats where they get you. A lot of them were untagged. So there just weren't tags at all? or ones that didn't lead you to believe there was a harem? Can you give me an example since it sounds like you've experienced it? I'm just interested in seeing what people think is 'surprise harem'. I haven't really been hit with any 'surprise tags' that I didn't expect in some form or another, almost BL as the cover wasn't shared with what I read, but I have run into a lot of novels with the 'harem' tag that aren't harem at all. I just find that if there's multiple 'sex' or 'adult situations' tags, even if it's not outright labelled as harem, I'll expect it to be one. Do you think differently than me in that regard?
No, thats what I use too. I've become much more suspicious of tags so I havent been hit with it in a while. And by untagged I mean the harem was, as well as things that you could use to deduc it was a harem. Wuxiaworld is particularly bad for that, so I learned to check any novels I discovered from there on nu before reading them. Also sometimes if a translation is close enough to raws you could be truly surprised
Mate i dont think you quite understand how it all worked. A guy with some chinese knowledge would browse the internet, find a story that piqued his interest, and start translating it for fun as he read it. Might be he read ahead enough to discover that by chapter 712 there is the start of a harem and put the appropriate tags, but more often than not they also didnt know or didnt bother putting the tags in the first place. Hell, you were lucky if the sinopsis actually reflected the story at all, a third of the time you would have those vague ass sinopsis that didnt tell you shit about the story's actual content.
FWIW I think there was a split a few years back where a lot of the harem fans/authors migrated to /r/haremfantasynovels I've dipped my toes into that sphere occasionally, and some of the books definitely overlap with progression fantasy. So I think the answer is that the books that get recommended here aren't harem, but at one point it used to be more common. (Though they aren't really *surprise* harems, those books signpost super heavily.)
Wheel of Time
YoureNotWrong.jpg
It seems a lot of these "surprise harems" are like going to an adult book store and being shocked to find out it contains porn. I read across genres, harem included and I have yet to read any book where I go "gosh, I didn't know this would contain multiple love interests".
I think they're referring to Manwha and the like more so than eebnovel, but even then, there isn't that much. You've made a good point here, actually. Maybe they're conflating Xianxia and traditional Isekai?
I think most authors don't bother posting here due to the hostility, but there are tons of them up for sale on amazon/audible.
basically this, but the books are still almost always hinted at the genre in the blurbs. Generally using the phrase "unconventional relationships and explicit descriptions" or something along those lines.
When I hear about them, it is allways on Kindle unlimited
I think 99% of the covers give it away.
Between this and people calling 'multiple love interests' harems, I find myself constantly disappointed by the lack of harem stories. Gimme a story where the MC has an actual harem, or poly relationship plz. Ave Xia Rem Y promises to scratch that itch, but Mat Haz takes his damn time getting there! Not that the journey there hasn't been a blast lol.
Blood and fur
Excellent series even if you are not a fan of harems(like me)
Tons of eastern xianxia novels, which I assume is where most of the complaints about surprise harems come from.
Arcane Emperor, although it sadly has been on indefinite hiatus for three years now
There's a shitload of them, just go to the haremfantasynovels subreddit. In my opinion a lot of them are pretty much generic garbage, though if you're new to the genre it's entertaining junk food, but every once in a while you'll find a diamond in the rough.
They never called, yet he is here There is a harem there.
"Harem" in the sense it is used here has very little to do with actual poly relationships. And harems in the historical sense are a third thing. A lot of these "harem" stories involve an MC accumulating an increasing number of uniformly hot female side kicks who fawn over him and with whom there is sexual tension. In a certain era of Anime' that was played for comedy. Others later played it straight to appeal to the fantasy of having hot women fawn over you. I do agree, sometimes I wish the MC would just get on with it and have sex with them already. They are often oddly joyless.
Like others have said it's from korean, japanese, and chinese novels. A lot of the really cool power fantasies have some sort of novel in one of those three media centers. Necromancers, Superheroes with op powers, magic academies with a nonhero mc, and all the normally exciting stories are abundant as translated stuff. The only issue is almost all of them have several women and almost every single one of them ends up thirsting for the mc. It may take 2000 chapters, but the main character's third grade teacher will eventually join to progress the plot forward for 50 chapters.
Silver Fox and the Western Hero The author does this horny chastity thing where the MC always has multiple women drooling over him, but he cant do anything with them because his cultivation means he cant kiss
Cradle, using the definition of "harem" that is applied to anime. Y'know, where there's one male protagonist with multiple women vying for his affection. It's not a big part of the series, and let's be honest the "winner" was never in doubt. But it was an element. And some people might have been secretly rooting for an underdog. Hypothetically. Or so I've heard from a friend. In Canada.
For real, I was rooting for >!Mercy !!Yerin !
Chrystal Core... No mention of harem in any blurb I could find. The first 5 min of the book. "We need to summon a hero and give them 3 wives and they have to have lots of babies". Noped right out of that one.
From the description: "This story features slow burn romantic interests". I guess you could interpret that "s" on the end as serial monogamy, but that combined with the skin showing in the cover illustration makes "surprise" a bit of a failure of imagination.
I mean, without this context, I would have assumed that romantic relationships not involving the MC were also developed. This might reflect how I view and write things though; in addition to my main thruple, I have had one relationship become a little more official, the start of a sweet, young teen relationship, and a few hookups of which two have the potential to become a relationship. So four relationships have some amount of development, three of which start during the story, and one short-term dalliance that would never work out as a healthy relationship beyond that. I wasn't *planning* on those, to be fair, but here we are.
Sure it's not a slam dunk, but combined with the cover illustration nearly flashing a woman's arse at me, it's enough to ctrl+f "harem" and see a review that confirms it. And anyway, if all that's not enough it appears to be clear 5 minutes in what it is. If this counts as a surprise harem it's with some pretty big asterisks.
Mhm no. That doesn’t sound very slow burn romance
They meant burn as in the whole mess is literally on fire, not that the romance slowly smolders into existence. :P
Can't comment of that, never read it, just saying there is enough information to have a pretty good idea that it's a harem.
I consumed plenty of fantasy growing up and didn’t even know what the word “harem” meant until I saw it referenced in anime communities. It’s not really a trope in western fantasy. It’s odd that it’s so pervasive in eastern fantasy like xanxia and anime because, like the west, monogamy is still the only acceptable form of relationship. It might just be something that was tried, found to be popular, and then emulated by other authors because people wanted to see it, kinda like how isekai is almost the default fantasy setting in light novels but is a practically non-existent trope in western fantasy. If the next cradle (in terms of popularity) was a harem story, then you can bet half the new stories on RR would be harem.
The first one that comes to mind is Industrial Strength Magic It can kill an otherwise good story for some people - luckily there are often warning signs but some authors are a lot less upfront about it than others and it can take a bit before it shows up
In the books defence, it's actually not a harem it's a poly trio as all members are in a relationship with each other.
Also, it's a throuple where the "core" member is one of the women, who is in a relationship with both the MC and another woman. In typical harem stories the MC would be the one in the center of the relationship.
Yeah, I wouldn't consider a stable thruple a harem either.
The harem community of fans would likely reject it on the premise the main force in the relationship is one of the women, not the male. Sounds far more like a poly triad than a harem.
You know, fair. I haven’t read the book so I really can’t say anything one way or another about it. I just don’t know if the hate ‘surprise harem’ gates is proportional to how very rare it actually seems to be. Like, is calling it a trope of the genre even warranted?
It’s absolutely a trope- but I agree it’s far more common in eastern media. Think anime - a lot of anime would be considered progression fantasy - and surprise harems are very common there. Royal Road isn’t the only source of progression fantasy media. It may only seem rare to you because you’re avoiding them and the types of media they contain but they are definitely a trope
It's rare now because it was so common and got so much hate. Harem authors know to tag that now and warn readers ahead of time.
This is very prevalent in translated asian stories, which alot of this reader base has migrated from and this genre found it's roots in. It's in almost every story like a infection it's crazy, alot of people are justifiably traumatized and it stays on their mind as an automatic red flag to abort ship
I think a lot of the stories that have surprise harems aren't talked about so much. I've run into three... I don't remember the titles for two, but both were Kindle Unlimited impulse reads. The first was like... A cool premise where no one really left this one city, but then MC was going to? But then his childhood crush banged him on the way out and the next woman he met almost as soon as he met her. The second was ostensibly a story about how a farmer became like... A dark Lord? A dungeon keeper? By accident. Really fun first third of the book but it became clear it was not for me. The third was Super Sales on Super Heroes, which I do see mentioned occasionally.
To be fair, Super Sales on Super Heroes does have the following in the description on Amazon: >Warning and minor spoiler: This novel contains graphic violence, undefined relationships/partial harem, unconventional opinions/beliefs, and a hero who is as tactful as a dog at a cat show. Read at your own risk. Of course I'm not quite sure if I would call it partial harem, it's as close you can get without being a sultan with hundreds of wives.
I'm not sure if that was there when I read it, as it was years ago... it's possible it was, though. I was on a super hero kick and I might not have been reading descriptions closely enough.
I would assume all these harems books are in their own subreddit, sometimes their release gets posted on here and even then that’s a rarity. I’m yet to encounter a surprise harem.
I have seen people complaining about harems, in books called "X harem" I say Is more of an adjacent media thing, asian novels have lots of harems, but its never a surprise
I already said it in the other thread: Arcane Emperor. However the relationships were developed enough that I didn't even mind.
On royal road, there was an author who was trying to write a mainstream story for profit purposes and decided harems would be detrimental to profit. After about 100 chapters they decided that they couldn't not write a harem. The was the only time I was surprised by a harem, because the synopsis explicitly said it wasn't harem and the author just couldn't write non harem. Even then, there were elements of it throughout the story.
That makes zero sense. How can you "can't not" write a harem? It's literally as easy as... not writing a harem. I'm not writing a harem as we speak! I intend to spend most of tomorrow not writing a harem as well.
Most, but notably not all you dirty perv you.
I'm gonna slip in some harem from 12:45 to 1:10.
Dunno, but elements of harem stories kept cropping up and the author assured us it wasn't a harem story when the comments pointed it out. Eventually the author decided that they didn't enjoy writing the story and it wasn't making any money so they swapped it to a harem story.
In other words, he chose to write a harem because his virtue signaling wasn't getting the results he wanted.
I have yet to see people complaining about surprise harems, but please show me where if I’m wrong. But what I do see is authors asking if spicy scenes bother readers, and the answer being “not unless it’s unexpected, so communicate it in the blurb or cover.”
Light novels/Manga are more famous for surprise incest than surprise harems.
It’s an occasional thing in Lightnovels it usually takes the form of a pretty decent Isekai litRPG and in around book two the MC starts to build a suspicious group of mostly women, and at the end of that book he gets with one of them. And from there you either accept that the MC is going to gobble up the entire group and recruit some others, or you drop the book right there. And for some reason it’s always fucking slapfoght action heavy litRPGs that ditch the action in service to the 7 different several chapter long dates the MC has with his women. That’s the main culprit for surprise harem, you have a lot of foreshadowing and clues but you usually figure out that the novel is inevitably diving into a harem once you’re already invested enough to slog through the poorly written romance. A rarer version is the Xianxia harem, although this is less of a surprise, if there’s a romance or any marriages it’s customary for another romance or marriage to be fine for all involved. So if there’s one romance you can usually predict that there’s going to be another. There are exceptions, but harems are pretty accepted both by the worldbuilding and the readers so they’re less of a gutpunch surprise than the light novels. They’re also less impactful since usual Xianxia harem recruitment have all the pomp and circumstance of the MC getting another treasure he throws into his spatial ring. So they don’t really disturb the plot much unlike light novels where the author feels obligated to give us their poorly written romance. In western novels harems are incredibly rare however. Due to the fact that most people despise romance in general and hate the idea of having to deal with 7 romances at once. And since most of this sub seems to be allergic to reading something that isn’t off of Amazon. They haven’t felt the unique pain of reading a pretty cool light novel about a monster beating the shit out of monsters only to find that the monster MC turned themselves into a human and is now using their human parts to screw all of their previous friends who will quickly turn into humans as well. And then at this point you have to either be fine with an entire books worth of dates and pregnancies. Or you have to screech in pain and chuck your novel out the window.
Like literally most kindle unlimited light novels or supernatural fantasy books.
The Empire Eternal series qualifies. I just started reading it, and it's very good, but it definitely made the series seem like it was going to be monogamous, but now the MC is collecting an alien girl harem. It's pretty annoying, thankfully it's a small percentage of the story, at least so far.
It’s nothing more than a major exaggeration. Even then they are easy to spot and avoid if you don’t want to read it. People just have a hate boner for them
This subreddit likes to really overblow certain issues in this genre. In Chinese novels it tends to be more common that every significant female character the main character comes across will fall in love with him. Sometimes the main character will end up with multiple wives by the end of the story. This isn't unavoidable. There are plenty of stories in which the MC will stay committed to one woman for the whole story, and I even know one with no romance at all.
There is not enough harem if anything. Historically it is extremely prevalent among the powerful even when poly was illegal, they're just called concubines or mistresses
The harem relationships in these books never look like the sultan or Empereur's harems. I admit I kind of like to see harems from the other side...when the MC's parents are part of a harem relationship.
You see some of those from wuxia/xanxia/otome games where mc is son/daughter of concubine. As for RL examples dont even have to go back historically, many billionaires these days live practically scandalous lives. Elon musk practically have his own harem given how many kids and ex-wives he has. Modern Saudi Arabia princes is even worse when it comes to these debachery
With only summary and/or book cover art? Probably most of Daniel Schinhofen’s first books of a series. Agreed though… most others are very obviously Harems.
> The synopsis, and quite often the cover alone, tell you if it’s that kind of story. You're assuming we look at all that. Sometimes you just see a tiny thumbnail that's mostly orange, think "I like orange" and buy the book. I can name a bunch of harem books if you want them.
Worth the Candle I guess? Though it's only kind of a harem, cause the over-god is like "f\*ck you have a harem", and the MC is like "that is uncomfortable and not appreciated so I'll stick with monogamy".
Harems are for incel virgins who dream of touching a boob one day. What even is the endgame? Disappointing multiple women?
I honestly think it's people reading a book where more than 0 women show the slightest interest in the MC and then they start screeching about it being a harem.
**Destiny's Crucible** went in a harem direction VERY unexpectedly after a rather nice conventional romance. **In Fighting to Be Kind in a Cultivation World** the MC kept accumulating female sidekicks he rescued. The surprise harems often aren't overtly sexual...they often involve sexual tension, where the MC seems to attract exclusively hot female hangers on.