"Two girlfriends will only end up fighting with each other, but twenty girlfriends will become competitive, and the target of their rage will be directed toward each other, not me. Always works for me."
— Shuichi Kuze, ef - a fairy tale of the two.
Some people think you can't have too much of a good thing, and that this extends to romantic and/or sexual partners. If one is good, then two is twice as good, and five is better still! The harem seeker is a character who is openly trying to date and/or marry multiple Love Interests as part of a scheme to have lots of attractive partners all to the themself. The seeker has a different goal from the Casanova Wannabe, who aspires to become The Casanova by sleeping with a lot of different people with no commitment, and are also different from a cheater, who is in a nominally exclusive relationship but actually sleeps around without their partner's consent. The harem seeker's goal is to keep multiple partners in the long term, and have them explicitly agree to share. The seeker will typically be characterized as a Lovable Sex Maniac or a Chivalrous Pervert. This character can be female, but is more likely to be male; the assumption is that All Men Are Perverts, and that this character will reflect the desires of a male audience.
A harem seeker can be portrayed either positively or negatively, depending on whether having a harem is depicted as a worthy goal, and depending on whether this character has a realistic chance of success. If having multiple partners is depicted as desirable, a harem seeker with the skill to succeed might get involved in Polyamory or even achieve a Marry Them All ending. This can be Wish-Fulfillment for audience members who fantasize about having a harem but consider it unattainable to them in real life, and who get to live vicariously through the fictional harem seeker. In contrast, an unsuccessful harem seeker is likely to be depicted as a comedic loser who doesn't know their own limitations. If the work depicts getting a harem as an immature or unrealistic goal, then giving up on it and deciding to focus on getting just one partner may be a sign of Character Development. A harem seeker who isn't the protagonist may be relegated to the role of comic relief in a manner similar to the Casanova Wannabe.
The Harem seeker can be used as the protagonist of a Harem Genre work or a Romance Game that has a Marry Them All route, since it gives the seeker an obvious motivation to interact with the different love interests and get into the kinds of risque situations that the audience wants to see. On the other hand there's a certain fear by creators that such a character might come across as crass or unrelatable to the audience, and a harem seeker protagonist who's poorly written or given no characterization beyond this trait will just become flat or annoying. Nevertheless, any harem seeker protagonist who manages to have some depth or whose escapades prove fun to watch can seem like a refreshing change from the somewhat worn-out formula of setting up a decent guy with an Unwanted Harem of pushy girls so that all sorts of contrived Accidental Pervert situations ensue.
Polyamory is a related concept, but there are some differences. Not everyone who ends up in a polyamorous relationship is necessarily a harem seeker to begin with, and a harem seeker might initially care more about the sexual than romantic aspects of having multiple partners, though this can change with character development. A harem also tends to be defined as a bunch of concubines or spouses gathered around one central figure to whom all the others are bonded, while the term polyamory is broad enough to include relationships that are more evenly balanced and in which any member, and not just the central figure, is allowed to form romantic bonds with more than one person.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Variation: Hachibe from Ai Kora is only this because the traits he's seeking are spread out over several girls.
- Bastard!! (1988): Back when the dark wizard Dark Schneider was trying to take over the world, he had a Royal Harem, much to the chagrin of his lover Arshes Nei. When he is killed and reborn, he becomes a Nominal Hero, but still wants to gather every beautiful girl he can find and recreate his harem, much to the chagrin of his current love interest Tia Noto Yoko and Arshes Nei when she finds out he is alive.
- Iono the Fanatics provides a female version with Iono, who has succeeded to the tens of thousands of haremettes level. That's an order of magnitude more than Solomon. It's strongly implied her country has been reduced to a Ruritania mainly due to the cost of supporting so many free-loading lesbian love-slaves, to say nothing of all the women she's removed from her own populace to serve her as haremettes. And she has a place in her heart for each one of them, including the women she made promise with years ago.
- Maken-ki!:
- Takeru enrolled at Tenbi Academy because it used to be an all-girl school. But since it's turned Co-Ed, the student body is predominantly female; making it his dream come true. So he's signed up for all the eye candy and as much female attention as he can get.
- Jigoku secretly aspired to attain godhood so he could use his power to make all women of his choosing submit to him; including Haruko and Love Espada. But Yan-Min kills him during the climax of chapter 97, before he gets the chance.
- Eruna Ichinomiya, the main character of Mikagura School Suite very openly express her desire to have a harem of cute girls. her attempt are results in mitigated success, while she can easely make friends both male and female, with a ocasional bit of Les Yay, but not more.
- Phantom Quest Corp.: Ayaka accuses Bosco of being one when she realizes his tea shop specifically caters to late teen-early 20's female clientele only. Which he explains isn't the case at all. The reason he caters to that particular age group is because older women are less likely to be virgins; adding that it'd become increasingly difficult for vampires to find any in the modern era.
- Lord Papacha of Photon has hundreds of wives and is always looking to add more, particularly beautiful and prestigious girls.
- In the novel continuity of Queen's Blade, this trait is given to the much sluttier Nanael, who wants to bang every guy she can get, including little boys like Rana, despite her being an angel — and, more importantly, despite her being openly bigoted against humans in that continuity.
- In Seitokai Yakuindomo, Shino thinks all guys who enters Ousai academy, a former All-girls' school that has been changed to co-ed and still has a gender ratio of 28:524, are these. While Takatoshi, the main protagonist, isn't, it seems Shino's guess is true for a large part of the remaining 27 guys.
- Sekirei has this as a semi-common set up with the Sekirei Plan. With a hundred and eight (mostly) Action Girl Human Aliens running around, having more than one per 'team' is ideal where possible. Protagonist Minato only 'seeks' girls who either come to him of their own free will, or who appear in his dreams establishing a connection between the two of them first, though there are others whose methods are broader in reach and more forceful in approach.
- You probably wouldn't expect this trope to pop up in To Love Ru of all places, primarily because Rito is about as far from being The Casanova as you can get. And you'd be right; it's Momo who inverts this trope by acknowledging that she's unlikely to win Rito away from the lead females and instead starts plotting for a polyamorous relationship between Rito and nearly every named female in the series, including Saki (who is in "love" with Zastin) and Mikan.
- Ataru of Urusei Yatsura fame makes this actually older than the harem anime genre. It's ultimately Defied, though, as he gave his goal up upon seeing a possible future where he succeeded and discovered that obtaining this harem would mean that Lum would leave him. He then physically destroyed that future.
Fan Works
- Kingdom Hearts: The Antipode: Discussed for laughs during the fourth installment's Olympus arc. Zeus sees Hercules with Aqua and assumes that the former is having an affair, resulting in this exchange:
Hercules: [Groan] Father, I'm not two-timing!
Zeus: Of course not! No son of mine only settles for two! - In the Lucifer (2016) fic "City of Sin
", as part of Lucifer's plan to make Chloe his queen, he encourages her to form her own harem. To date, Chloe's harem includes Mazikeen and Eve as an extension of their prior loyalty to Lucifer, Ella and Beatrice/Trixie (Chloe's childhood friend instead of her daughter) as Chloe's close friends turned lovers, Charlotte Richards as a slave to atone for unintentionally arranging for Chloe to be shot by a corrupt cop, and Azrael as part of Azrael's attempts to get close to Ella again.
- The Night Unfurls: Anders Bleu, and presumably many other mercenaries or new recruits of the Black Dogs, count as a negative portrayal of this trope, given that they want to gain as many partners as possible by force if necessary. One of the motivations behind supporting Vault and his cause to build a Sex Empire. The narration below explains Anders's motive for joining the Black Dogs' cause.
"Anders Bleu was a Black Dog recruit. Hell yeah he was. If he could take any bitch he pleased then there was no other point in life. He wanted to be a part of the Black Dogs' Sex Empire. He wanted to live like a king. He'd show those bitches just what he was made of."
- Iris is the one who plays this role among the protagonists in Pokémon Reset Bloodlines. Unusually for this trope, it's mostly due to her being raised by a family of Dragon Pokémon, so she doesn't know (at first) that monogamy is the norm for humans, and even after learning it, it doesn't dissuade her one bit. It's first shown when she asks Misty directly if she's attracted to Ash, and makes it clear she's more than willing to share him. She's later shown trying to get Anabel on board with her idea, and while she's reluctant at first, by the time the Indigo League rolls both her and Misty are willing to let one another have dates with Ash without feeling jealous, and seem ready to accept Serena into the fold when she inevitably joins their group.
- The Power of Seven focuses on Harry having to become this during his sixth year after he learns about his status as a horcrux, as Hermione finds a ritual that will purge the horcrux from him if he forms a soul bond with seven witches. In the course of the fic, he bonds with Ginny, Hermione, Luna, Demelza Robbins, Susan Bones, Katie Bell and Fleur Delacour in that order.
- Surprisingly, Rito Yuki in the To Love Ru fic Rito and the Harem Project goes from falling in love with just Haruna to actually developing feelings for the other girls in his life too, and building a harem because he wants to honor their love for him and make them all happy. This includes Lala, Run, Risa, Kyouko, Nemesis, Rin, Mea, Yami, Nana, Yui and Momo.
- Sougo/Ohma Zi-O is one of the more justified examples in Temporal Anomaly. Not only is he trying to Take Over the World, he's also trying to save it from the Flower that each of the Intoners hold within themselves and will eventually grow big enough to destroy everything if allowed to feaster long enough in each sister. So, by seducing each Intoner and bringing them into his harem, Sougo is then able to get them to give up their piece of the Flower that he is then able to destroy one piece at a time.
- In the Naruto Fanfic Yet again, with a little extra help, Ino briefly considers this during the third part of the Chunin Exams. She ultimately discards the idea and enters a happy relationship with Chouji.
Literature
- Anita Blake: In the later novels, the main force driving the plot is Anita's need to add more men to her harem.
- In The Bible, King Solomon has 700 wives and 300 concubines.
- A Certain Magical Index: When Kuroko hears rumors that her beloved "onee-sama" Mikoto has clones running around, she gleefully fantasizes about constructing a harem of 108 Mikotos. Note that there are actually around ten thousand of the clones (exactly 9,969 clones who are biologically the same age as the original Mikoto, 1 who's younger, and an uncertain number who are biologically older), a fact that might literally blow Kuroko's mind if she learned of it. Mikoto, for her part, has quite wisely kept their existence hidden from Kuroko. And the issue is only aggravated when Kuroko met Mikoto's mother.
- Class Teni De Ore Dake Haburaretara invokes this. The main character, Kirishima Ran, is pushed into a situation where he must win over most, if not all, of his female classmates, to survive a coming battle with a devil king, due to the fact that he got thrown out of his class and the training grounds because he was granted a [Sexual Lunatic] skill which prompted fears that he would exploit his female classmates.
- Date A Live plays with this. Shido Itsuka learns that he has the power to drain a Spirit's powers into himself, rendering them harmless, but they have to fall in love with him and share True Love's Kiss with him for it to work. While a bit uncomfortable with this, he wants to keep the world safe. Thus, he has to work hard to get all of them to fall in love with him and keep them all happy, since they get their powers back and tend to go on rampages when they get upset. Complicating matters is the fact that many of them get jealous of the other harem members.
- Wei Xiaobao of the Jin Yong novel The Deer and the Cauldron.
- Durarara!!:
- Walker might qualify. In one scene, he rescues a girl from some thugs that kidnapped her. He sets the thugs on fire while rambling about being an anime hero and wanting a harem ending.
- Introduced later on in the series is Rokujou Chikage, a man who's actually reasonably successful in his goal of having multiple girlfriends at once. He owes his success to being open and polite about it, putting entirely too much effort into making women happy regardless of whether he expects to sleep with them, and packing something special below the belt.
- And Masaomi is always gushing about polygamy, and at the very least he had a crush on Anri while still being hung up on Saki.
- Played with in Goddess Creation System. Xiaxi first seduces one brother, then another and then moves on from both to the crown prince while still stringing the first two along when they finally find her again, but her reasons are entirely practical in nature and she doesn't love any of them.
- High School D×D:
- The series messes with this. The reason Issei is so quick to adjust after his First-Episode Resurrection is that Rias tells him he can get his own harem. He then somehow manages to miss the fact that most of the girls he interacts with fall for him. Then we figure out that the reason he doesn't realize is that being killed by his first girlfriend (long story) left him with huge self-esteem issues. Issei also defies the usual attitude of a Harem Seeker. His perverted self-indulgent babbling is starkly at odds with the vast respect he actually has for any woman he meets, and when Issei does meet a successful devil with a harem of his own, the way he so callously treats the women around him makes Issei furious.
- Issei's father is Happily Married, but admits that he's a little jealous of his son, because he tried and failed to get a harem when he was Issei's age.
- Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?: Bell's original goal was to, well, pick up girls in a dungeon. He gives up on this goal at the start of the series after falling head over heels in love with Aiz Wallenstein. Predictably, several girls start falling for him after this and he's none the wiser.
- Journey to Chaos: Eric teases Kasile about wanting a "knight harem" when he hears about her backstory with Siron and Culmus. She was hoping they would become Bash Brothers instead of falling to Cockfighting.
- There's a dark variant in The Lunacy Of Duke Venomania has the titular duke, Sateriasis Venomania, who seeks out multiple love interests and adds them to his harem via mind-control powers. This includes already taken women and girls fundamentally unattracted to him as well, not like he cares.
- In Magika Swordsman and Summoner, Kazuki Hayashizaki needs a harem to grow stronger. His summon diva Leme gains power from the harem members' summoned creatures. According to Leme, Kazuki needs a massive harem to gain enough power to save the world from something that's coming.
- Cuuko from Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! develops into this. At first she's a Psycho Lesbian Stalker with a Crush for Nyarko, and plays Shipper with an Agenda to get Mahiro (the guy Nyarko actually loves) out of the way. She gradually warms to Mahiro thanks to his being a genuinely nice person, and by the time of the second season, Cuuko's plan has changed to "I bear Nyarko's child, the boy bears mine". She later tells him "My party system supports up to four people."
- Oresuki: Joro intentionally tries to invoke this at first by playing the part of an Oblivious to Love Nice Guy harem anime protagonist, so that Cosmos and Himawari will be his harem. Although he stops making active efforts to acquire a harem after the first arc, he still has hopes of making one happen, as he ends up making more girls fall for him. When he tries this at the end of the competition with Hose, all the girls get upset at him. Tsubaki figures out he purposely did this to avoid them breaking up their friendship due to him dating Pansy.
- The Rising of the Shield Hero: This is one of Motoyasu's defining traits, and a major, personal reason why he fails so hard as a hero. His main concern is getting with every cute girl he can, to the point of only doing the bare minimum of his duties as a Hero. He's even willing to ignore the full context of situations just to justify to himself that he's "doing the right thing" like when he forcibly tries to separate Raphtalia and Filo from Naofumi, and doesn't even bother to hide his true intentions when he does so. It doesn't help that this also resulted in several gold diggers (one of whom is Malty) being on his team solely for their looks, and having no problem just sitting on the sidelines and letting him do all the work while only tossing in a spell or two as "contribution". It really shouldn't be surprising than Naofumi and his party wind up defeating Motoyasu's in a Curb-Stomp Battle he once again forced the former into, or that the latter's party ultimately abandons him when things look dire (the Spirit Turtle incident).
- Ken from Student Council's Discretion is pretty much the poster child of this genre. His stated objective from the beginning is that he is building a harem from the student council.note
- The Tale of Genji: Prince Genji is always in the market for an addition to his (long) list of lovers.
- Oddly enough, Charlotte B. Lord, the school principal in Unlimited Fafnir, is a Dirty Old Woman who wants Yuu, the main hero, to join in on her escapades in peeking at the girls while they're having a physical exam. Made more hilarious because she looks like a ten year old girl, and she is usually kept in check by her assistant Micah.
Live-Action TV
- Mel from Flight of the Conchords is a Loony Fan of both Jemaine and Bret, and has made it very clear that she wants to sleep with both of them, although it's a Running Gag that she prefers Bret. She's also married, and doesn't appear to regard that as an obstacle.
Mel: Well, the fish were beautiful. They were breeding. It's mating season, and I saw fish make love.Mel: No, it's really interesting, actually. You know, quite a few species of fish require...two or more sexual partners.Jemaine: We have to go now, Mel.
- Frasier: This happened twice here. The first time it was Frasier himself, as he managed to get three different women's numbers at the same benefit party he hosted at his place. He scheduled each date one evening after the other and deliberately tried to date them all at more or less the same time, but this was when his father Martin was knee-deep into his relationship with Sherry, whose gabby tendencies torpedoed at least the first two dates. The second time, Martin tried juggling two different women and saw nothing wrong with it, at least until one of them called his cell phone and the other answered since Martin was unavailable. Frasier and Niles were forced to help him maintain appearances because one of the two girlfriends had the potential to help the duo save their childhood school from closing down as long as she was in a good mood.
- The League of Gentlemen's Papa Lazarou.
Music
- The Lunacy of Duke Venomania by mothy.
- The music video for Object of my Desire depicts a woman chasing after 4 different men with the help of a Humongous Mecha.
Theatre
- Launcelot Gobbo from The Merchant of Venice. "...here's a small trifle of wives; alas, fifteen wives is nothing! A 'leven widows and nine maids is a simple coming-in for one man..."
Video Games
- Any game that gives you a choice of Romance Sidequests and lets you pursue them all at the same time. Especially if there are cumulative tangible bonuses to keeping each relationship active.
- BlazBlue: Near the end of BlazBlue: Central Fiction, Ragna jokes to Rachel about having a harem once he defeats Terumi and saves Noel. Which acts as a something of a nod to the Blazblue community.
- Tink in the Tink ending of Disgaea 2. Being the Butt-Monkey he is, he gets the crap beat out of him.
- In the Awakening DLC for Dragon Age: Origins, Anders says all he wants from life is a few simple things, including a girlfriend. The Warden can tell him that he could stand to aim a little higher, in which case he decides he wants a harem instead.
- Taiga in Duel Savior Destiny basically accepts the role of trying to be the world's savior because he thinks it will make him even more popular with girls. The final route even has him pursuing this rather successfully.
- Fate/Grand Order: During "Da Vinci and the 7 Counterfeit Heroic Spirits", Jeanne Alter ends up using rather handsome male Servants to fight on her behalf. Archer, having starred in a visual novel with multiple romance arcs in the past, accuses her of trying to become an otome game protagonist.
- The unnamed protagonist of Helltaker entered Hell just so he could get a harem of demon girls.
- DLC character Red from Hyperdimension Neptunia wants a lot of wifeys. IF becomes her first one (much to her surprise) and she's downright giddy when she learns the party is all-females.
- Mass Effect 2 has a dark example in Ronald Taylor, Jacob's father. His crew crash-landed on a planet where the fauna caused brain damage and after the ensuing power struggle he ended up using said fauna to keep the women docile as his personal harem while enforcing his authority through his control of the security mechs. Upon finally confronting him both Shepard and Taylor treat him with complete disgust for attempting to live in a "juvenile fantasy".
- The player character (if male) can flirt with Elanee, Neeshka, and Shandra all at once in Neverwinter Nights 2. And then end up settling down with Safiya at the end of the expansion.
- Make a team of all females as the male main character in Persona 3 Portable and Yukari will accuse you of being this.
- Deconstructed in Persona 5 Strikers with Alice Hiiragi. She uses EMMA and her Jail to make every man in Shibuya fall in love with her, whether they are single or already with another woman. She could care less that she is using them to stoke her ego and she isn't even using them for sex. She just wants to show up every other woman in Shibuya due to her paranoid belief that these women are out for her blood.
- Rance isn't happy til he has...pretty much every beautiful woman in existence, only making exceptions to things that could kill him instantly (and that doesn't always stop him). The (current) harem he has is too large to list.
- Geralt in the third part of The Witcher have sex with both romantic interests. As a result, he gets a threesome promise later in the game, but ends chained to a bed and left alone, ending with none of them.
Visual Novels
- Double Homework:
- Dennis is woefully inept at getting girls, but he tries all the same to bed the ones in his summer school class.
Dennis: Soon, all the girls in our class, and Tamara too, will be filled up with my seed.
- Dr. Mosely/Zeta tries to exploit this trope. As per Dennis’s explanation, she only gets her grant money if the protagonist sleeps with Lauren, Morgan, Amy, and Rachel.
- Dennis is woefully inept at getting girls, but he tries all the same to bed the ones in his summer school class.
Webcomics
- Rose from Brother Complex is a variation of this as she's actually one of the love interests and is okay with having this for Jack. Her reason for this is that she doesn't want him to leave her behind again, and thought if she gathered girls like her (i.e. turned Mimi and Eclaire into tall busty studs like herself) that he would stay.
- Rod from Out There is rarely seen not hitting on Miriam, Araceli, Sherry, or some other nameless female who works in his office. He's successful far more often than he deserves to be.
Western Animation
- Beavis And Butthead's Casanova Wannabe behavior often ventures into this. In the episode "Impotence," Beavis asks "Which of these lucky girls will be fit to join my harem?" in a faux Arabic accent, while Butt-head imagines himself in a parody of The Brady Bunch where he lives with three women in the episode "Dream On."
Real Life
- Some practitioners of Polyamory. (Not all, and in fact most people in the lifestyle look down on this sort of attitude.)
- The mating habits of polygynous animals are basically like this; males will seek to mate with as many females as they can, with the strongest, most virile male often getting the most females. This ensures to the females that their offspring will be strong enough to survive to adulthood. Examples of animals that have this mating behavior include seals, certain birds and even prehistoric pterosaurs. The opposite extreme, polyandry, also exists, though it's rarer in nature. Phalaropes (a type of bird that is basically nature's answer to the Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy trope) are an example of polyandry.
- Humans are, according to Jared Diamond's book The Third Chimpanzee, a "mildly polygynous species", which is suggested by our type of sexual dimorphism. To put us in perspective, gibbons are one of the most monogamous primate species. They often mate for life, and adultery is rare among those who do. Because there isn't much need to physically fight or compete for mates, male and female Gibbons are so alike in size and appearance that it's difficult to tell them apart. On the other end of the scale, elephant seal males are much larger than the females, and the dominant males are the ones that round up the lion's share of the females into their harems and keep other males away through superior strength. It's a winner-take-all system, because having the strongest males hog all of the females means that most males in a given generation don't get to mate or pass on their genes. Human men are, on average, just a little bit bigger and more sturdily built than women for the sake of male-male competition. This suggests we are not quite as monogamous as gibbons, but still much more so than gorillas or elephant seals whose sexual dimorphism is far more extreme. In a hunter-gatherer band there may have been at least one man who was strong or charismatic enough to obtain more than one mate, but there was a practical limit on this because human babies require so much parental care, and because any harem-building that went to the extent of depriving other males of access to females would cause them to gang up against him. The creation of hierarchical societies based on agriculture is what later allowed kings or rich men to start building really large harems.
- There can also be economic incentives for polygamy, such as in 19th century Commanche bands where buffalo robes were produced as a surplus commodity to sell, and the necessary process of scraping the animal hides was considered women's work. A man could increase his income by getting more wives to do the work for him. As the buffalo herds were destroyed and the Commanche were driven off their lands, the practice of polygamy went into decline because it had turned into an economic liability rather than a benefit.
- Ottoman sultans and Chinese emperors are just two examples of historical rulers who used their wealth and power to maintain large numbers of concubines. This was not just for pleasure, but also to increase the chance that the ruler would have at least one male heir who survived to adulthood. The royal harem of the sultan of the Ottoman Empire was the Trope Namer, although in reality the harem was not so much a sexual playground for the sultan as it was a protective environment for the sultan's concubines and all of his female relatives, including his mother. A sultan would typically stop having relations with a concubine after she gave birth to a male child, in order to make her focus her attention on grooming that one boy for power.
