I am 100% confident harem leads in anime get the least action of any men in all of anime. Its a trick. I've watched different harem anime for comedy purposes. High School DxD, everyone wants to fuck, willing to share fucking duties, protag never fucks a single time. To Luv Ru, surrounded by hot women who want to fuck, never fucks ever. I just CANNOT watch Harem anime anymore. If you've got a harem by episode 6 and you aren't getting laid by episode 7, you have something wrong with you. I'm done with tired, sex-less waifu wars and shit that just show pointless anime tiddy. Movies and shows have done fade to black since 1965 you don't need to be explicit. Just show a physical relationship. They can show people getting chopped in half, mutated, brutally murdered, dissolved into pieces, but you can't show kissing and fade to black in bed. Or basically just constantly unrealistically cock block them so it never ever happens. Like I said, the exceptions to this are 'Love is War' which is basically holding out as long as possible as to admit they actually love each other, which is kind of funny.
It's sad, because my first was
Tenchi Muyo and I enjoyed that one but future harem make you notice all the issues that you bring up here and it makes me look back and enjoy it a little bit less. At least Tenchi had the excuse that his harem was made up of some of the most powerful beings in the universe.
Love is War is great, and different, since the real issue is their own pride, not getting cock blocked or being asexual losers. They want the physical relationship, but neither of their egos could handle the rejection, thus the song and dance.
That's why I like In/Spectre with an actual defloration joke instead of everyone being perma virgins, Arifureta: From Commonplace to World's Strongest who basically outright states 'she's my lover, fuck all the rest of you. You can try, but nope.' There's a couple of others, like Chivalry of a Failed Knight where they get it on in like the second to last episode and shit. Cross Ange: Rondo of Angel and Dragon (which I fucking love, highly underrated anime).
But I've RARELY seen harem protagonists do anything and they really don't behave like men. Even if all the women go, "Ok, you can love all of us, just give us equal attention." NOPE the men act like they're five years old. Naked girl wants to get into a bath with him? "WHATS WRONG PUT SOME CLOTHES ON PLEASE OMG". The only exception is really Val x Date where the protagonist has a serious phobia about human contact and doesn't want anything to do with it.
I think that's the part that bugs me the most. In reality, the women would have moved on at some point. They wouldn't just take the constant rejection they'd move on to greener pastures. If they were all so obsessed they couldn't, they'd all just physically gang up on the main character and
Misery him. It's not like most harem leads are physically impressive either.
Macross is more emotional for it because the leads have sex, because they have this physical connection. I've also noticed, the older the anime, the less of a problem this turns out to be.
Older anime and anime made by that older set of creators does seem more grounded. I don't know if it's just those older types have more normal backgrounds to pull from or if they're not as beholden to the current crowd of Otaku that demand these sackless leads.
My favorite
Macross relationship is Max and Milia, since it's the only one that's constantly, if subtly, looked back on. You get to watch it from their first date/knife fight/marriage proposal beginnings through to their issues in
Macross 7 to the subtle nod of them still being together in
Macross Delta, fifty some years later. Also seven biological daughters. I honestly think Max is Catholic, there are some subtle indicators of it.
But its really the biggest anime trope that gets on my fucking nerves. So if you want any sort of physical contact that means something, you generally, ironically, have to avoid harem anime because they stretch that shit out forever with no payoff because the audience is too busy deciding 'best girl'. Another cliche that bugs me is you have these super confident, observant heroes but they can't seem to take the most obvious hints when a girl wants them, to the level that even people on the autism spectrum can tell. The exception really is 'Black Clover' where I think Asta is legitimately autistic and can't tell and just wants a nun who literally cannot be in a relationship and has been telling him no for a decade. I mean the dude wants to be Wizard King and he can't use magic, so he's kinda not all there to begin with.
Or another thing is that the anime waits until the very last POSSIBLE second for characters to form relationships so there's no possible development or drama with them. Half the fun of having characters be in relationships is to see how much you can fuck with them with it. So sexless, loveless anime just kills the genre for me. Like come on Japan, people fuck. This is why you have a low birth rate.
I sometimes wonder if that isn't something that directly contributes to the Japanese not fucking. If so much of your pop culture is focused on being clueless, or delaying relationships, or avoiding sexuality entirely, it has to have some kind of effect even beyond Otaku.
I'm sort of torn on the subject of sex in fiction. I think that to some extent it's a problem with cliches.
It does get a little annoying when a story just has to shoehorn in a romance plot that has zero impact on the story except to prove the protagonist isn't gay. On the other hand, it's a little strange when you have a bunch of characters and nobody has a serious relationship.
Sometimes thwarted sex is funnier than sex, sometimes the story wants a slow burn where it looks like there's going to be a relationship but it never quite happens. It is interesting how hard it seems to be to hit something that feels credible, where some characters are in a solid relationship and others are having personal drama.
I agree Macross seemed to hit the sweet spot.
I think
Macross just takes the time to establish and build the relationships. The original establishes the Hikaru/Minmei/Misa triangle from the first episode and then builds on it until the last. It doesn't just delay it, everything in it is built from one episode to the next so there's a feel of actual progress so when Hikaru picks Misa in the end it makes sense, after all we've seen their relationship build for 36 episodes. It's the same thing in
Frontier, Alto and Sheryl build from episode 5. I know the series ends a bit inconclusively, but that's only because Kawamori was convinced by his staff to end that way.
Frontier is, in Macross terms, a love song to the original so it rhymes with it, and Sheryl is the Misa.
I think that's what a lot of anime and manga lack in terms of relationship building. These harems or pairings just happen, or they're established and never go anywhere. It's weird too. I referenced Fllay and Jesus Yamato in
Gundam SEED, which is hated by fans, yet to me it felt like it made more logical sense than the pairing the show ended up with. Even if it was just Fllay banging him to keep him killing the people that killed her father.
