Quote: “How long does it take Ikuro from Airantou to realize that he’d probably die from lack of blood before anything else?”
Images of a harem usually conjure up images of females outnumbering the male characters by a at least 10:1 ratio, with polygamy being the order of that day. However, let’s be rational(?) and logical(?) for a second. A harem usually means having one lone guy (aka with the XY chromosome) surrounded by at least n+2 girls (aka, those with the XX chromosome and usually with a hormone mix so complex it makes Google’s mapreduce algorithm look like my first SQL query). The setting has traditionally been varied, ranging from schools to houses to bathhouses to islands, and everything else in between. For the purposes of this (pseudo) study, we will focus on the school environment.
Now the guy is the lucky one, having more choices of girls than the number of soup brands at Woolies. He usually has one girl set in mine usually, which is typically the childhood sweetheart/friend, the one who found him, the one who fell in love with him at first sight, or just pain lucky enough to lead a group which conveniently is mostly made out of girls. And with a few rare exceptions, they don’t mind him!!!!!!!!!!!!! Never mind if he’s loud, rude, brash incompetent or just plain stupid. Or anemic. The girls will find some reason to fall in love with him. Usually because he is lucky enough to look good, look like one of the sempai’s the girl once had, or just plain lucky enough that fate somehow blessed him to be able to choose between 2 V-E-R-Y hot chicks, never mind if one of them can’t cook better than me.
Now a harem, having a large sample size, must have a diversity of characters. Well, if they were all stoic, it wouldn’t be called a harem would it? Besides, in this day of multi-cultureism, diversity is the order of the day. So inevitably, there’s always the childhood sweetheart who somehow has managed to like him since………..usually, 7. Then there’s genetic-makeup-is-XXY-girl whose sole aim in life is to kill the male lead. Apparently, that’s her definition of “I’m interested in you”. We’re just lucky she never does any programming. (Defining parameters are a nightmare) Then there’s the imouto-san who apparently must be no older than 12, looks like a loli, totally moé and with a cuteness and sweetness that would make me a type 1 diabetic. On the other side, we present obligatory the sister-of-the-sister, usually either stabbing her other for the love of the male lead or just for the apparent kick of it (Reference: Ayane v. Machi, 2007). Harems were never made to make sense.
No harem can exist on this earth without a studious, reading type. She usually has round glasses with lenses which seem to be modeled with a calculus equation of x^2 + y^2 = y^2, freckles, and for some reason her glasses are tinted so heavily, that it’d violate all JPJ rules, and then some. In other words, her lenses reflect all sunlight, and all you see of her eyes are glaring whiteness. Yet, despite all this, she doesn’t look all that bad, despite all the reading and philosophical mumblings of “how weak a woman is in front of a man”. And get this: only the male lead is ever allowed to see her without glasses!
Other characters include the athletic type, who somehow manages to look good despite all the intense training, sweat, hard work and workout. Come to think about it, maybe the reason she looks good is from all that exercise. People have been known to fall in love with her just at the sight of her running. Despite all the hard workout, she is actually very delicate (Karen, 2005) and her hair has me banging on the table.
A wise man once said Music is life, and nowhere is this more true in a harem, where (no-so) occasionally you do get a musically inclined girl entertaining and bringing life into the harem. And how can I forget the obligatory blonde character, who seems to be hit on by every guy in a 1 KM radius.
Moving on, we have the mental girl who, thanks to mutation somehow in her hormone glands which causes the production of a hormone concentration so thick, concentrated and toxic, her only coherent(?) thought is “I want him in me! M-E!” And to top things off, a harem must have a outsider. A foreigner. Usually a Chinese Ah Lian. Who thinks and dresses like its still 1930’s Shanghai.
Now with the harem properly described and populated, they have to do something in real life. Kinda. Somebody has to do the shopping. The laundry. The housekeeping. And of course, in this age of compulsory education, they must go to school. Which as any student can testify, means waking up early. Which means having to eat breakfast early. But no matter sun, rain, hail, storm, wind, alien-invasion, the childhood sweetheart/inouto-san/submissive one will wake up without fail to make breakfast, so when the male lead character wakes up (or is awaken by her), all he has to do is to eat, pick up bag and walk to school with her, dodging any would-be ninja’s along the way. Or people like me who can’t stand the fact that he’s in a harem and want to kill him. Despite the peril of threats on the road while walking to school, the probability of him arriving at school unharmed is 1.
The next most important thing of the day is food. Specifically, lunch break. Unlike me, the main male lead doesn’t need to prepare lunch the previous day. Nor does he have to put up with last nights leftovers. (okay…maybe a little..). Childhood sweetheart/imouto-san/submissive one would have made a nice fresh lunch for him that morning, all nicely packed. All he needs to do is unwrap it. Heck, sometimes he doesn’t even need to do such menial tasks. Sweetheart does it for him, both of them dying from heart attacks when their hands meet. How sweet.
Despite this however, other members of the (harem) class will present to male lead a bento box. And another. And another. You can classify the girls into their cooking categories: the good chef, the “ouch-its-for-sempai”, the “I’ll just cook something”, the minimalist, the convi and the indecisive one.
The good chef is self explanatory. Her cooking skills are comparable, or even beyond those of childhood sweetheart. She usually lives in a family run restaurant, through studies have found that this is not a mandatory prerequisite. Usually her portions are enough to feed the whole of Africa and still leave some for me. Other guys in the class will kill just to get a taste of her cooking, and would shed tears of joy if they ever did. One interviewee reportedly said “if I get a taste of her cooking, I’d die happy on the spot”. However, main male lead just eats it like any other dish at a food court, much to the chagrin of the rest of the class male population.
The “ouch-its-for-sempai” usually has her first kitchen experience when she realizes her face flushes up and her heart goes all doki-doki for “sempai”. Cut, bruises and scars on her hand when presenting the lunch box to the main character is not a must, it is a necessity. So “sempai” can hold her hand (how romantic) and ask ‘what happened?”, which for 99% of the world would be a rhetorical question. Her cooking skills are worst than mine, but her passion, if there was ever a meter for measuring it, would break any measurement device. However, in the interest of health and safety, I must warn of “ouch-its-for-sempai”s cooking. One has a 0.6 probability of getting food poisoning (95% interval confidence)
The “I’ll-cook-something” girl can be seen running between home and the local bookshop, and never getting tired at all, simply because she wants to cook something that is only served in Paris and costs $80 a spoonful. With luck, perseverance and hard work, the final outcome can be as good as Childhood sweetheart/imouto-san/submissive one and good chef. However, statistically speaking, there is a 0.3 probability that the final dish doesn’t come out as expected (99% confidence interval). But its still perfectly edible, as opposed to “ouch-its-for-sempai”. The love of “I’ll-cook-something” that she puts into her cooking is purer than reverse osmosis and distilled water combined. Memo to girl: “If he rejects you, I’m always here!!!!!!!”
The minimalist prepares something simple, usually ongiri, under the theory “making this with all my heart, my love will get to him!” Surprisingly, the ongiri is quite edible and quite nice. Just add salt. And some seaweed. Whether it scores any points with him is another thing,.,.,.,.,.,……..and debatable.
The convi usually grabs something from the vending machine/convenience store en route to school as lunch. Saves time, considering that the convi usually cant wake up early and would sleep through WW3 (hold on, that’s me …………….). The prepackaged food in plastic is usually her lunch, but seeing everyone else giving her beloved food, it’s the only thing she can do and offers her lunch. The final outcome of this girl-type has never been independently verified.
And finally, we have the indecisive one, who seemingly always can’t decide between potato stew and curry, apparently, “sempai” only eats these two things. However, there is substantial evidence to indicate this problem of indecisiveness is also the guys fault. (Reference: tenma v. ooji, (2005))
Food only gets one so far. The girls of the harem are not exempted. Other ways of getting close to the main character include: clapping dusters, cleaning classrooms, sport days, shopping, visiting his house, being (conveniently) trapped in a life with him, or even simply cooking for him in his kitchen. However, there are outside the scope of this study and will not be pursued further.
It has been observed should the main character pass out from lack of blood, drowning, a blow to the head, or just simply for no logical medical reason, CPR is not necessary. Sure, the girls all jostle to revive him (how nice. When I pass out all people will do is call a boring ambulance), but the subsequent noise, dust, and vibrations stirred up by the girls fighting is enough to wake the dead. Little wonder then he wakes up. NHS take note: waiting lists could be reduced by 20% if this is implemented in hospitals. (Lim, 2007). And if you think the characters in Rurouni Kenshin has 10 liters of blood in them, the male lead of a harem needs AT LEAST 90 liters of blood to be even able to have a chance of remotely surviving.
Finally, at the end of the day, after all that hard and laborious work, it is time to wash away the grime and dirt with a nice bath. However, individual showers are either banned or do not exist in a harem. Full communal shower settings with a hot spring (even if it’s in the middle of the city) are the order of the day. They’re just lucky they’re not in Brisbane with
Level 5 water restrictions and
Target 140.
In this day and age of gender equality, it is politically incorrect and plain unfair that the girls have to crowd around together in a limited, confined space, while the (lucky) guy gets a whole pond to himself. To alleviate the overcrowding, one girl would usually go over to the “other” side. And another. And another. Before long, there whole harem would have recreated what they were trying ton solve. Only this time, there is a guy in the middle of all this.
What happens next has never been accurately documented, as the steam and humidity makes it hard to see what’s happening. However, it is safe to say that the final outcome isn’t good. Especially when you throw in the “I-have-to-kill-him” girl into the mix. And jealousy over sweetheart/inouto-san/submissive one tends to boil over along with tonights dinner.
After all that, one would guess a good nights sleep is all that is left. However, when the pang of jealousy reaches dy/dx = 0, war breaks out with an intensity that makes all the wars of history, from Mesopotamia to modern day, look like a pillow fight. However, the occurrence of war can be modeled by f(x) = x + b(x - x0) + c(x - x0)2 which sees the occurrence of war happening on average, once a week.
ConclusionDespite the perils of a harem however, a survey done by the Ewww foundation found 90% of anti-social geeks would “very much like” to be in a harem. 90% replied that the benefits “outweigh the pitfalls”. However, pessimism was the order of the day, with only 1.2% believing that being in a harem was possible for them. Shockingly, only 0.1% of those polled knew the origin of the word harem.
The margin of error was 2.1 percentage points, with an undefined number of people randomly polled.
