Spoiler warning ahead for Gal Gohan and Hokkaido Gals Are Super Adorable! Anime only stans, beware…

I must confess something.

I am an overly emotional man. I get so caught up in a good narrative, I play right into the storyteller’s hands, incapable of keeping my heart in check whenever a particularly devastating moment occurs. I get it, that’s the whole point, but when one considers how often this applies in anime and manga, and one also considers how deeply engaged I am with these mediums, you can perhaps see my plight.

As of late, this seems to apply most distressingly when the ubiquitous theme known as harem is used. For those unfamiliar, it is not quite so scandalous as the name implies, and though titillation is often utilised to draw unsuspecting viewers in, it is not an outright requirement.

The reason it has garnered this saucy delineation is more literal than that; its narrative contains one male character who is wooed by (or at least flirtatious with) multiple women. In the case of a reverse harem, it’s the opposite, and there are further outliers such as those flavoured with a touch of yuri or yaoi. But the principle is mostly the same, particularly when there is a romantic subtext: there’s only so much MC to go around.

I once wrote about why this is so appealing, and the short-form version is the fact that each potential love interest is given their own time to shine, allowing you to grow attached and eager to see them succeed. Alas, the inverse of this is also true, and eventually the storyline is going to come to an end. If there’s gonna be a resolution, then only one will be left standing, and if it’s not your favourite one, then fuck, you have to watch your precious little bean get their heart ripped out.

I know that these characters are nothing more than a series of lines assembled in an alluring manner. But I’m a hopeless romantic, and a sucker for burgeoning love. As such, I feel downright deflated whenever my pick’s chances go up in flames, as if I too have suffered some kind of setback. They’re usually pretty brave about it, picking themselves back up and moving on with their lives, but I’m much pettier than that, subsequently treating the protagonist that shunned them with some form of antagonism.

Oh, they weren’t good enough for you, huh? Well maybe you ain’t really top shit yourself, Tsuuuuubasa!!

There is a simple way to increase your chance of victory, and it’s a fairly obvious one: go for whichever love interest was introduced first. If they’re on equal footing with the main character, then it’s probably a safe bet that they’ll be the one who comes out on top. Look, it’s just the most logical conclusion from a storytelling standpoint, and you only have yourself to blame when you backed the long shot introduced in chapter 16.

My problem is that I tend to gravitate towards a certain archetype: the withdrawn, tertiary option. They’re rarely the star of the show, because we need to shift those copies, baby, and the more cleavage that’s on display, the better. But their slow, earnest discovery of their true feelings always strikes me as much sweeter and more genuine.

Take Koharu Fujiwara from Gal Gohan (and yes, this is one of those particularly ribald examples). She is confronted and confused by her emotions, hiding them at first if not outright decrying them. The more she spends time in the company of her beloved, however, the more determination begins to stir within her.

Then, she gets rejected and all but yeeted from the entire manga forevermore. Fuck, my girl deserved better than that. We all deserved better than that.

Her issue — beyond the fact that she’s got the hots for her home ec teacher; I never said we were walking a distinguished path here — is that she ran into the dreaded gyaru. Those goddamned gals, so bubbly and hypnotic, are like kryptonite for our mild mannered competitors. The humble Koharu looks at the confidence and considerable assets of the prototypical gyaru, fearing that she can never hope to compare, only for those concerns to be completely justified.

This isn’t to say that I dislike the gyarus, don’t get me wrong. Quite the contrary, I usually want all of the characters to win, and Miku Okazaki is no exception. In fact, I even enjoy her antics more than the average gyaru. I just assign arbitrary percentages in my psyche, perhaps finding her a small fraction less compelling than the diminutive Koharu, which therefore makes Miku an antagonist of sorts.

So whenever we’re dealt with an Okazaki, or a Fuyuki, or even a Kashiwazaki, I’m bound to view them as a threat. Back off bitch, that eligible bachelor is MINE (by proxy).

Perhaps this is one of the reasons I so enjoyed The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, REALLY Love You, even going so far as to crown it as my top anime of 2023. It’s a harem story, sure, and could even be considered the grandmaster of all harems, working towards an eventual bounty of 100 titular girlfriends.

So we get that build up, we witness those backstories, we swoon over the sparks of affection, and then it happens: that absolute lad Rentaro hooks up with them in a daring display of polygyny. Whoever your favourite may be, you get to win too, and instead of the slow burn towards a crushing failure, you’ll get to instead bask in the sweet glow of a newly formed relationship. You’ll have to divide your time between the others (and make no mistake, Karane is the best one), but you’ll be spared the agony of rejection.

It may be harem’s version of Bart’s musical chairs, but fuck it, I need that sometimes. I already went through enough anguish when I watched Rentaro’s antithesis Keima Katsuragi; a man who seduced everyone and yet loved nobody at all. For the man who cut his teeth on a gaming franchise famous for its wealth of waifus, that was the ultimate form of narrative blueballing.

100 Girlfriends is my recovery anime, perfect for anyone who is smitten with the idea of being smitten. And with the growing preponderance of harem stories available for the eager ecchi enthusiast, I can always fall back on it whenever I’ve suffered through yet another proposal gone awry.

Because as difficult as it was to make my confession that getting wrapped up in harem stories is silly, I can only imagine how difficult these failed confessions were for these poor, innocent, and yet entirely fictional people.