Progression of Plot

[Killteam]

I'm quite curious and was wondering if a anime/manga veteran could help me out. I was wondering what typical plot lines and arcs follow a Harem anime after all the love interests have been introduced. Do most the episodes/issues deal with the love interests fighting between each other, or maybe they assist the main character with some general problem. Seeing as how there's often no permanent antagonist for a season, i'm curious as to the ideas writers use to keep the story intresting.

[omo]

hm, maybe i can help.

the way I see it, is that harem is a label fans attach to shows. writers generally don't go "hey let's make a harem story!" and write one. Usually what happens in a manga is that you begin with a core group of characters, usually just 1 or 2. Slowly you add in more characters, so after some time it feels like a harem. And often times the way characters interact (esp. new fan faves and the like) is determined by a serialized manga's feedback from the readers, so if the readers like girls x and y and q, those characters will get more spotlighting.

for a lot of so-called harem anime, they are adaptation of eroge. in those games, you actually don't get a "harem" too often. usually you play them by going through the story one time for each girl, and each story is different. for anime though, they can't really reboot the plot for each character's story, so the result is that the combined product of a part of the story for every girl in the game feels like a harem. of course a fair share of these eroge do have a story you can choose that will end up with a real harem of sorts, but ironically we don't see this as often in an anime adaptation.

and then there are the stories where it goes by a simple formula, like negima which is if you have a shonen manga where everybody is a girl. or in tenchi muyo or hand maid may, where it is just a plain romance polygon and the hanger-ons are dressing and not serious contenders.

Maybe this is a generalization but I believe Japanese stories focuses more on character development and inter-character relationship to drive the narrative, where as western stories focuses more on external forces to drive the narrative. For example, a more typical western narrative goes like, things happen, people react to it, new/more things happen, etc. A Japanese narrative is more like things happen, people change, different things happen/don't happen.

[Killteam]

Why thank you, I can understand it a bit more now. I did have a bit more of a misconception about how the harem-like story came to be. Sometimes I did kind-of feel like the writer created the story with the multiple romance angles already in mind, but I didn't tend to think that it was something that developed throughout the plot, and wasn't sure the reader response had a effect on the development of the character him/herself other than just the ending. You also helped me put in a new perspective of how Japanese narratives progress.

I thank you again, for clearing some things up for me.

[omo]

glad i can help.

there are a lot of stuff about anime that's really different than how we do things in the west, so if we understand some of the more technical or business end of things it helps a lot to get why things happen the way they are.

i think that's true about understanding anime too. a lot of anime are adaptations from games and manga, but we usually don't get the source material here until the anime comes over first, so we have a backwards perspective.