Rinkoku kara Kita Yome ga Kawaisugite Doushiyou - Vol. 2 Ch. 9

[Ideon]

Theory: Sitoen was isekaied into this otome game. But the crown prince's new lady (Meiru/Miel) was also isekaied here into the same game and she is going for the reverse harem ending. You can see her reaction to Saryu in chapter 2 page 22: "Bear-san, you say?"

The "pu pu" sound effect next to that text bubble makes it seem like she's giggling at the name; making fun of his nickname, rather than recognizing him.

 

[PraetorDragoon]

Hmm. This is actually getting quite interesting.

Thanks for the translation.

 

[Amariithynar]

can I just say that calling it "reverse-harem" feels really silly? (I know you didn't coin the term, this isn't a callout to you).
But why is it when it's a girl character collecting dudes it's "reverse harem" and not just "harem". Because "reverse" makes me think it'd be a bunch of people collecting one person as their shared ....uh, person.

Yup. I hate the whole "reverse-" trend. "male harem" "female harem" THERE YA GO, SORTED PROPERLY FOR TAGS TOO WITHOUT BEING IDIOTIC.

 

[YamiRi]

I believe Sitoen can beat that assassin by herself but MC jumped up first

 

[nightnyx]

I was hoping he punches the assassin's face for once

 

[Kaito57]

I like the hypothesis floated here that she is a reincarnator, and the MC is a character she loves dearly who is doomed to die, and she's desperately trying to prevent it from happening but can't just come out and warn him for whatever reason.

Final Boss : WHY WON'T YOU DIE !?

MC : BECAUSE THAT WOULD MAKE MY WIFE SAD !!! (MEGATON BEAR PUNCH)

 

[_idiot]

Yup. I hate the whole "reverse-" trend. "male harem" "female harem" THERE YA GO, SORTED PROPERLY FOR TAGS TOO WITHOUT BEING IDIOTIC.

Inb4 the "new" trend of "reverse-female-harem" stories.

 

[UdenEmpati]

Inb4 the "new" trend of "reverse-female-harem" stories.

On that note would have subgenre tags
Yaoi Harem
Yuri Harem
Etc.

Adding "Reverse" when it's an FMC just feels weirdly skeevy to me, I dunno. Like it's somehow so "out of the ordinary" that a whole new term was needed instead of just using the same one because it's the same concept.

 

[illrigger]

On that note would have subgenre tags
Yaoi Harem
Yuri Harem
Etc.

Adding "Reverse" when it's an FMC just feels weirdly skeevy to me, I dunno. Like it's somehow so "out of the ordinary" that a whole new term was needed instead of just using the same one because it's the same concept.

It comes from the genre. Generally in male MC otome games, your goal is to woo the girls and in female MC ones, the goal is to make the guys woo you. In the former your role is mainly to find paths to aggressively pursue, but in the latter your job is generally to find paths that passively make yourself appealing.

I don't disagree that it's a crap term, but in the end, they tend to be very different games and a harem ending is usually very different from a reverse harem one.

 

[UdenEmpati]

It comes from the genre. Generally in male MC otome games, your goal is to woo the girls and in female MC ones, the goal is to make the guys woo you. In the former your role is mainly to find paths to aggressively pursue, but in the latter your job is generally to find paths that passively make yourself appealing.

I don't disagree that it's a crap term, but in the end, they tend to be very different games and a harem ending is usually very different from a reverse harem one.

That actually adds a ton of relevant context, thank you.

 

[jc9]

can I just say that calling it "reverse-harem" feels really silly? (I know you didn't coin the term, this isn't a callout to you).
But why is it when it's a girl character collecting dudes it's "reverse harem" and not just "harem". Because "reverse" makes me think it'd be a bunch of people collecting one person as their shared ....uh, person.

The word "harem" has actual origin, rather precise meaning and long history (arabic, women's wing of the house/female members of the family, and probably over a thousand years). In western world (and/or english language) it exists for few hundreds of years, and usually means a group of women (wives/concubines/slaves) of a single man, especially if we are not talking specifically about arab world.
We are not talking about arab world here, so we can safely ignore original meaning and just focus on western one, even if it's hundreds of years younger.

Then, we also need to take into account marriage standards across the world, even taking into account different cultures and times. We have monogamy, which wasn't always as prevalent as it's now (especially outside of broadly defined western world), and we have polygamy.
Lets focus on polygamy, you have 2 basic types - polygyny and polyandry.
Lets also take into account that theoretically man can have thousands of children (because he can impregnate multiple women at once), woman can have what, 20 at most (because she can be in only one pregnancy at a time). We are talking at least 2 orders of magnitude theoretically, 1 order of magnitude in practice (and rather common historically).

Polygyny - one man with multiple wives, which historically allow a successful man to have more offspring, bring no doubt who is the father of the kid (there's only one man and mother is always known for obvious reasons), and also gives the control over the group to the physically stronger man (so basically if women don't play together nice man can force them to if he wants - and has the ability to do so).
This is also model that probably naturally evolved in societies that were more aggressive (more war = more conquest = disproportion between men and women, because men die at war and women don't, also there are female captives from conquered regions, as often men were killed and women were taken captive, to be mothers of the next generation of warriors).
This was probably the most common model for thousands of years (occasional or regular polygyny).

Then, we have polyandry - one woman, multiple men. This model has no advantages from polygyny, and everything that was a benefit there is a problem here. The number of societies it was practiced in you could count on your fingers (Tibet being probably most known example here). And husbands usually were brothers or other close family members.
It had only one benefit - in situations where work of a single man was not enough to sustain a family, it allowed them to have a family at all. It was not a result of some matriarchal society, it was a result of extreme poverty, that you had no real ways to get out of.

So yes, regardless of more recent societal norms (give or take last hundred years), using harem for polygyny and reverse harem for polyandry has actually pretty good reasoning behind it.

Adding "Reverse" when it's an FMC just feels weirdly skeevy to me, I dunno. Like it's somehow so "out of the ordinary" that a whole new term was needed instead of just using the same one because it's the same concept.

It actually WAS so out of the ordinary. It was never the same concept, and even now it is not, even if we take into account the more recent changes in societal norms, that i don't really want to get into.
Thought experiment - imagine a uninhabited island, with enough resources to sustain a group of people in the hundreds indefinitely.
You drop 10 men and 100 women there - after few years (or few dozen years) you'll probably have somehow functioning, small society, which started with these 10 men and their harems.
You drop 100 men and 10 women - in months, and i'm being generous here you'll have a mountain of corpses, from men fighting over women, with a high chance of no women surviving it at all.

 

[UdenEmpati]

The word "harem" has actual origin, rather precise meaning and long history (arabic, women's wing of the house/female members of the family, and probably over a thousand years). In western world (and/or english language) it exists for few hundreds of years, and usually means a group of women (wives/concubines/slaves) of a single man, especially if we are not talking specifically about arab world.
We are not talking about arab world here, so we can safely ignore original meaning and just focus on western one, even if it's hundreds of years younger.

Then, we also need to take into account marriage standards across the world, even taking into account different cultures and times. We have monogamy, which wasn't always as prevalent as it's now (especially outside of broadly defined western world), and we have polygamy.
Lets focus on polygamy, you have 2 basic types - polygyny and polyandry.
Lets also take into account that theoretically man can have thousands of children (because he can impregnate multiple women at once), woman can have what, 20 at most (because she can be in only one pregnancy at a time). We are talking at least 2 orders of magnitude theoretically, 1 order of magnitude in practice (and rather common historically).

Polygyny - one man with multiple wives, which historically allow a successful man to have more offspring, bring no doubt who is the father of the kid (there's only one man and mother is always known for obvious reasons), and also gives the control over the group to the physically stronger man (so basically if women don't play together nice man can force them to if he wants - and has the ability to do so).
This is also model that probably naturally evolved in societies that were more aggressive (more war = more conquest = disproportion between men and women, because men die at war and women don't, also there are female captives from conquered regions, as often men were killed and women were taken captive, to be mothers of the next generation of warriors).
This was probably the most common model for thousands of years (occasional or regular polygyny).

Then, we have polyandry - one woman, multiple men. This model has no advantages from polygyny, and everything that was a benefit there is a problem here. The number of societies it was practiced in you could count on your fingers (Tibet being probably most known example here). And husbands usually were brothers or other close family members.
It had only one benefit - in situations where work of a single man was not enough to sustain a family, it allowed them to have a family at all. It was not a result of some matriarchal society, it was a result of extreme poverty, that you had no real ways to get out of.

So yes, regardless of more recent societal norms (give or take last hundred years), using harem for polygyny and reverse harem for polyandry has actually pretty good reasoning behind it.

It actually WAS so out of the ordinary. It was never the same concept, and even now it is not, even if we take into account the more recent changes in societal norms, that i don't really want to get into.
Thought experiment - imagine a uninhabited island, with enough resources to sustain a group of people in the hundreds indefinitely.
You drop 10 men and 100 women there - after few years (or few dozen years) you'll probably have somehow functioning, small society, which started with these 10 men and their harems.
You drop 100 men and 10 women - in months, and i'm being generous here you'll have a mountain of corpses, from men fighting over women, with a high chance of no women surviving it at all.

from a Prescriptivist standpoint your point is quite sound.

from a Descriptivist standpoint I do think that the term "harem" as it pertains to the specific genres of manga it exists within allows for it to be used interchangeably in this day and age, especially as more and more "FMC with lots of dudes" stories are written with the medium's scope expanding beyond a market geared toward young men and boys.

But historically yes, the precise definition of the term across centuries and cultures makes sense for one situation over the other.

 

[jc9]

from a Prescriptivist standpoint your point is quite sound.

from a Descriptivist standpoint I do think that the term "harem" as it pertains to the specific genres of manga it exists within allows for it to be used interchangeably in this day and age, especially as more and more "FMC with lots of dudes" stories are written with the medium's scope expanding beyond a market geared toward young men and boys.

But historically yes, the precise definition of the term across centuries and cultures makes sense for one situation over the other.

I don't mind if someone uses harem in a discussion about obviously reverse harem manga (and especially in threads dedicated to that specific manga). Then the conveyed message is ususally clear from context.

Definitions must be as precise as possible, it's the only way they actually work. And we like it or not, both harem and reverse harem are used as theme tags, and mean different things.
If we combine harem and reverse harem into one, why not do the same to yaoi/yuri or boys love/girls love? It's homosexual relations/sex, so it's basically the same. We can even find a nice, short japanese name for that.
Hell, lets combine loli and shota and see how it goes.

Harem and reverse harem are 2 very different things, intended for different audiences, with different storytelling, tropes, and so on. Not using reverse will just confuse more people. Reverse here isn't some dig at these stories. It's for the sake of precision, simply harem in it's original meaning was first (and way more common) for centuries.

 

[UdenEmpati]

If we combine harem and reverse harem into one, why not do the same to yaoi/yuri or boys love/girls love? It's homosexual relations/sex, so it's basically the same. We can even find a nice, short japanese name for that.

That's actually a compelling comparison. I agree with your stance on the matter in light of the fact that it snowballs into other tag changes that ostensibly do the same thing for very specific reasons.

You've convinced me.

 

[ZzombieNoel]

We've got suspicious men already
Where is this story headed?

 

[Ironclad]

Despite his restraint, after that display she's probably pregnant.

 

[Amariithynar]

It comes from the genre. Generally in male MC otome games, your goal is to woo the girls and in female MC ones, the goal is to make the guys woo you. In the former your role is mainly to find paths to aggressively pursue, but in the latter your job is generally to find paths that passively make yourself appealing.

I don't disagree that it's a crap term, but in the end, they tend to be very different games and a harem ending is usually very different from a reverse harem one.

Except none of that is true for where the term came from; that's post-hoc justification for the term. It came about because of image tagging primarily, in part because some people wanted more granular tags so they didn't ever have to see content of the other sort using just a single tag, but in the majority because it was following in the footsteps of "rape" and "reverse rape" tags used for images stemming from hentai games- in other words, it was a badly chosen name for an image content tag that was later co-opted as a content tag for written works, when it should just be "male harem" and "female harem" because the content of the given harem is what's important both for image/content tagging and for written context, not whether or not the harem is run by a man or a woman (the addition of "gay" and "straight" or equivalent suffices for that connection, if desired).

snip
So yes, regardless of more recent societal norms (give or take last hundred years), using harem for polygyny and reverse harem for polyandry has actually pretty good reasoning behind it.
snip

No it doesn't. See above.

 

[JaxunHero]

No one but herself can hurt her!?

 

[gearsky]

Why do some scan groups hate spread pages?

Spoiler: First

Spoiler: Second

Spoiler: Third

Takes less effort than slapping your watermark on the page...

I've been told that it's something you can actually submit a report for, though my previous reports for it have all been reject because I was never told that you need to provide the combined spread in the report for them (the MD staff) to replace the individual pages with.

 

[jc9]

No it doesn't. See above.

My argument was mainly against combining both harem and reverse harem into one common harem tag, if we talk renaming one/both tags (as long as they stay separate) i don't really have such a strong opinion on that (even if don't really agree), but'll bite.

Sure, might have started with tags - so lets look at how different sites use them (and tag count):
danbooru - harem 3.6k, 286.
mangadex - harem 113 pages, reverse harem 23.
anidb - harem 784, reverse harem 112.
novelupdates - harem 100 pages, reverse harem 29 (15 pages with both genre harem and tag reverse harem, and somehow also 100 with genre harem excluding reverse harem?)
vndb - this is interesting situation, because we have 2517x "harem ending", no reverse harem i could find, and tag description is about one male and several females. On the other hand, we have 6086 titles tagged as "otome game", and 38 of these also have "harem ending" tag. Won't bother digging deeper into that.
sadpanda uses male:harem and female:harem, but tagging system there is a bit different - almost every character tag will be either male or female. Also harem has a bit different meaning). Still - 14000 vs 4400.
Haven't bothered checking non-english sources here, as we are talking about english.

So we have a foreign word (and not even japanese), with it's original meaning, adapted into english, with very similar meaning to the original, known and understood in this definition by the whole society.
Coincidentally, if we focus only on japanese media, we can also see that this traditional meaning of harem consists of approximately 75% of harem/reverse harem combined.
Why the hell would we add female to it, if the implied context is a) right in huge majority of cases, b) also understood like that by society outside of our chinese cartoon circlejerk?

Sure, name it male harem, otome harem, whatever else - but i fail to see why would we replace harem with female harem. Just for equality? To not have harem as the "main" tag (which honestly it is, both from prevalence and historical reasons)?