Haremlit and Me

I’ve been on a bit of a haremlit kick lately. 

It all started with me wanting to use some of my Audible credits for something, and chancing to talk to an author who’d written a haremlit (and mostly gender-flipped) parody of The Wizard of Oz called The Warlock of Oom, where a rugged game warden, along with his truck and a dog he just rescued from a storm, ends up in a very adult-rated Oz-like country populated mostly by horny women, and had to drive his truck down the Blood Brick Road all the way to the Steel City to face the great Warlock of Oom, gaining three companions in the process… and when I learned that the Cowardly Lion stand-in was a sexy catgirl I just HAD to check the story out.

Story was pretty engaging. Not a masterpiece or anything, but I kinda liked how unashamed it was about being a parody, even name-dropping L. Frank Baum a number of times and speculating that he may have written the Oz books based on distorted visions he got from Oom. And there was some neat worldbuilding here, with backstories for all the characters and even some plot twist that played with my expectations. 

And of course the game warden ends up romancing and fucking the good Witch of Shallow Rivers, before leaving on the journey, and over the course of the journey he also ends up romancing and fucking the ditzy brainless farm girl, the emotionless android girl, and the cowardly cat girl, before confronting the warlock and at the end returning to the good witch with his three cured-of-their-ailments girlfriends (and the dog) in order to enter a polygamous relationship with the good witch so that they can all fuck happily ever after (um… except the dog). 

Since I still had a ton of credits, it drove me to check out more books in the haremlit genre… most of which had a fantasy flavour with witches or monster girls, and all of which had two narrators; a male narrator voicing all the male characters and a female narrator voicing all the female characters. 

It was around the fourth or fifth haremlit book (if we count the Goblin Girl Maid Service trilogy as three separate books) that I realized that… I LIKE haremlit fantasy stories.

Now, just so we’re all on the same page here: HaremLIT is not the same as what we call harem ANIME. 

See, in a harem ANIME we usually follow a hapless male protagonist who gets to know a whole lot of interesting, colourful and sexy female characters who all inexplicably end up attracted to him, and hijinks ensue as he has a tendency to get into compromising situations and accidentally walk in on them naked, and they alter between harassing him, beating him up, and pining for him, while he is either oblivious or has real problems picking which one he wants to be with before in the very final episode picking the main female character that everyone knew he was going to choose anyway.

In haremLIT, however, we usually follow a hapless male protagonist who gets to know a whole lot of interesting, colourful and sexy female characters who all inexplicably end up attracted to him, and he ends up fucking them all. The girls are far less likely to harass or beat him up and far more likely to willingly get naked in front of him, and he usually has some hang-ups and feels horribly guilty about wanting more than one girl, while the girls almost without exception are all “HELL NO, WE WANNA SHARE YOU, SHARING A MAN IS SO HOTTTT NOW GIVE US SOME MORE OF THAT COCK!!” 

Yeah, if harem anime is male wish fulfillment played for laughs, haremlit is male wish fulfillment played for sexiness. 

So why do I like it? It’s not because the genre is overflowing with masterpieces or anything… quite the opposite, really. I mean, if there’s one genre that’s really all about the fanservice, the male wish fulfillment and the “male gaze”, it has to be the haremlit genre. But, even though I’m absolutely not the target audience, there is something I find hot about it.

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve had this casual fantasy about being a harem girl. I mean, yeah, in real life being in a harem probably wouldn’t be very fun at all; I’ve read some memoirs of real-life harem girls and while their life wasn’t hell on earth or anything, it wasn’t exactly a giant party either. But as a fantasy, or a fiction… the idea turns me on quite a bit. I don’t really know why… but I find the thought of being one of many girls a lot more appealing than the classic monogamous “you are the only one for me and the centre of my world and I would die for you!” type romance… which I find a little overwhelming and offputting. And in stories I very quickly get bored with it.

Is it just my hynofetish taking a slightly different turn? Or am I just being a lazy submissive? Like “I will serve my Master, but I’d rather share the duties with other girls so I don’t have to serve 24/7”? Or is it just that I don’t feel comfortable by the thought of someone focusing all their love/lust on me and only me because that’s just too much pressure when I know I can’t feel the same for them? Or hell, maybe it’s just my bisexuality talking and I like the thought of having access to a cock and at the same time having other girls around for some hot, nekkid lesbian sex. If it’s that kind of harem, that is.

I really have no idea. The point is that the idea of a harem, or being in one (hypnotized or not), really turns me on, even if I don’t exactly know why.

…and now I kind of feel like Kim Catrall in that Porky’s movie, where she and Boyd Gaines enter a men’s locker room and she says that the smell of a men’s locker room always turn her on, before she proceeds to throw herself at him, and then just as they’re stripping each other she somewhat breathlessly confirms that that smell has always turned her on and she doesn’t know why. Yeah,  I kind of feel like a low-key version of that. Not in the sense that the thought of harems makes me lose all control and jump on whoever I’m around at the time, but more in the sense that the thought makes me feel horny even if I have no real idea why.

But with all this in mind it probably isn’t that big a surprise that I, once I got into the fanfiction scene, always felt a certain pull towards harem fics… despite the negative reputation they have in most fandoms, and despite the fact that nearly all of them (at least the ones I tried to read) were complete garbage that made me click the back button after only a few minutes.

You already know my feelings about the “the main character is just so extra super special and the only one who matters” narratives, and if the harem genre tends to push that sort of narrative hard, harem FANFICTION pushes it to the extreme. Especially if it’s Harry Potter harem fanfiction, because they turn Harry into even more of an author’s darling than he already is in canon, just throwing five lordships, unlimited money, unlimited power, and the right to include all the HOTTEST girls in his harem (while reducing the girls to little more than trophies instead of keeping them as interesting characters in their own right). And he doesn’t actually do anything to EARN any of this, he just gets it because he DESERVES it and he had a crappy childhood and Dumbledore stole his money or something.

 But I digress.

As I discovered, however, haremlit novels tend to avoid the biggest pitfalls that harem fanfiction jumps into without even caring. Yes, the male protagonist is generally extra super special in some way and gets all these women ready to throw themselves at them, but at least here the women are actual characters with personalities and goals/problems of their own, not just trophies that the protag collects to show how much of a STUD he is. 

There is, as I discovered, a difference between a story where everyone wants the main character, and a story where everyone exists only to want the main character.

And in all fairness, especially in the fantasy stories I have been reading, there’s usually an in-use explanation for this exaggerated interest in the male protag. Either he’s isekaied into a world where men are really rare, or at least he is one of very few men who (generally through no real effort of his own, but still) possessed some rare and highly desirable trait. And as such, there is an actual in-universe reason why all these women are so eager to drop their panties for him; a reason that doesn’t begin and end with “he is just so cool and powerful and sexy and desirable that every woman becomes his cheerleader and harem girl”.

As such, it’s a lot easier to buy, at least for me. It even makes it more plausible that polygamy would be the norm… just as I reasoned when I plotted out that Witching World fanfic; when men are that rare, monogamy becomes impractical. And if you have a culture that treats polygamy as the norm, the citizens there would just treat it as an everyday, unremarkable thing, and you’d raise more eyebrows if you said you only wanted one lover.

So yes. Bit of worldbuilding, just the tiniest bit of making sure that the world and setting doesn’t exist solely to appease the protagonist, and you can totally make it plausible. Maybe not very realistic, but plausible enough that I can accept it.

I will admit that it still gets kind of eye-rollingly stupid at times, mind, but that is usually more about the attitudes of the characters. It’s especially stupid when the male protagonist gets all hesitant and keeps going all “but but but monogamy I don’t want to hurt you or make you jealous!!” Even though the girls fall over themselves to tell him that no, they WANT him to fuck more girls, come ON.

I can understand a bit of reluctance, especially if the protag comes from a culture like ours, where monogamy is the norm. It has to be a huge culture shock, to go from “why don’t you marry a nice girl and settle down to raise 2.4 kids?” to “five girls at the same time! At least! Go on, fuck them all! Separate or together, who cares? That cock of yours is something to be shared!” Panic, feeling overwhelmed and pressured, probably performance anxiety, maybe even a genuine romantic conviction that TRUUUE LOOOOVE can only happen between two people… all perfectly understandable. But when the girls say for the fifth time that they WANT and EXPECT polygamy and the guy refuses to listen or accept that what they’re saying and just feels so BAD about hurting them by… doing the exact thing they keep telling him they want him to do… then it stops being cute.

There was an old Internet sci-fi story I read many years ago where an obvious self-insert dude was kinda romancing the main character and they met up to fuck in virtual reality settings but he wouldn’t fuck her in real life because that would count as cheating on his wife. After reeling from this bizarre loophole abuse, which the author didn’t seem to see anything wrong with, the story continued by finally having the dude feeling bad, confessing to his wife and asking for an open relationship… and the wife turned out to be from a planet where men were EXPECTED to take a lot of lovers and if a guy only had one wife he was seen as weak and the wife was seen as pathetic for not managing to get a STUD interested in her. HE’D been the one who insisted on monogamy, and she’d agreed even though this made her lose status in her people’s eyes. And now she was all “Yes! Finally! My husband will be fucking more women! I will no longer be seen as a failure!” 

And I just exploded. “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?! Isn’t this something you should have discussed BEFORE YOU GOT MARRIED IN THE FIRST PLACE?! Instead you trap yourselves in this monogamous marriage that YOU don’t want and HE doesn’t respect even though he was the one who insisted on it in the first place! And then he goes and cheats on you, using a whole lot of questionable loopholes and virtual reality to fuck someone else bewhind your back when it was all totally unnecessary because you actively wanted him to fuck other women all along!  YOU IDIOTS!”

I suppose it’s part of the male wish fulfillment fantasy, but in cases like this it’s just BLATANTY about wanting to have your cake and eat it too. “Look!” the author says. “The main guy isn’t a sleaze or a scumbag, see? He respects the women in his life! He cares about them and doesn’t want to be unfaithful to them! They’re the ones who push for the polygamy! They WANT it!! But he just doesn’t want to pressure them into anything, see, because he’s such a good guy!”

NO! At this point he isn’t being a good guy anymore! He’s being a selfish jerk who imposes his own morals on the women in his life and refuses to listen to them when they tell him what they want, because that’s not what he thinks they SHOULD want!

It’s usually not as extreme as in that internet story, mind, but even in the more recent stories I read, the male protagonist does tend to be extremely prone to forgetting that the girls he’s with don’t want monogamy. And spends a lot of time angsting and feeling bad and asking if they’re SURE it’s okay, while the girls all enthusiastically tell him to go for it while stroking his ego to a ridiculous degree, meaning that he gets all the benefits of polygamy but none of the actual responsibilities… because the women are the ones shouldering those. 

Which is kind of a strange thing, because other than in this particular area, the male protag of a haremlit story is LESS likely to be a selfish jerk than the main characters of a traditional cishet monogamous romance story. For all I find the exaggerated worship of the male harem protag undeserved, I will give him this: He tends to take a more active interest in people and their wellbeing — even people he doesn’t automatically want to fuck. 

I’ve written before about how angry I got with The Princess Bride when “the best reason of all” for waking Westley up from the mostly-dead was so he could be with his “true love” Buttercup and not, say, so that he could defeat an insane evil tyrant who oppressed and tortured people… but the harem protag tends to be slightly less selfish in that respect. At least he cares about more than one person.

And while the male protagonist usually isn’t the most interesting, and sometimes not even all that likeable, he tends to have a very strong supporting cast… which is not a given in a traditional romance. And you know my fondness for a good ensemble cast. I’m okay with a bland main character if the supporting cast get to shine. And more often than not, the haremlit girls do. Even outside the sex and their exaggerated adoration of the main character they get to have individual quirks and interests and areas of expertise.They’re active participants in their stories rather than just passive and useless fucktoy trophies that only exist so the guy can reaffirm his heterosexuality on a regular basis. 

And… okay, fine. I also like the porn. I mean, even haremlit stories vary in how much sex they contain and how explicit it gets, but I very much prefer the ones that aren’t afraid to get filthy. If a sex story is afraid to use the word “pussy” it just feels half-hearted… especially since some of these stories are happy enough to call a cock a cock but when it comes to pussies it suddenly goes all evasive and says things like “between her legs”. Why are we so scared to acknowledge and name the pussy? And it’s even worse when the narrative just goes all in on the euphemisms and starts going on about how “his manhood found its destined place between her legs” before “his essence filled her as their passion reached its crescendo”… Come on. They’re FUCKING, and he’s CUMMING IN HER CUNT. I want words like that. I want the story to EARN its adult rating.

(But then, if you’ve read some of my erotic writing, you probably already knew that.) 

Haremlit stories kind of vary in that respect. Some of them are perfectly fine with cunts and pussies and cum, others are kind of annoyingly skittish with the filthy language apart from the occasional “fuck” or “cock”. And then I end up listening to the audiobook and internally telling the narrators and characters: “Come on, say ‘pussy’! You know you want to!”

Aside from that little nag, though… I was pleasantly surprised with the worldbuilding and character work in some of these stories. And I realized that THIS was what I had been looking for when I kept checking out the harem fanfictions. Lots of hot, horny women who get nekkid and fuck a lot, but they are all characters who exist as people OUTSIDE the sex scenes.  And we get more than one girl in focus, and any romance is shared and split between characters, making the entire thing feel more varied and inclusive, and I don’t get bored as easily because more characters means more variety — not only can the girls have different approaches and wants in their relationship with the main dude, but also have varied and different relationship with each other, romantic or platonic or just sexual. And of course… there is an actual story with character development and interesting worldbuilding. 

So that is my recent journey with haremlit. It all started because I wanted to see what a gender-flipped Oz parody with a sexy catgirl Cowardly Lion would look like, and ended up with me realizing a lot of interesting things about romance literature and my approach to it, and how I end up resonating to what’s essentially male fantasies— just that my reasons for liking it is the opposite of what probably appeals to the male target audience. 

…and now I kind of want to write my own adult Oz story with an alternate adult version of the country and characters… just with a heavy LGBTQ-slant, lesbian Dorothy and transgender or even genderfluid Ozma. 

I’ll keep it in mind.