Why does everypony hate harems?

[SilverStarApple 849]

I get that people usually love polygamous relationships, threesomes, harems, Herds, whatever you want to call them, as long as they're between the mane six because friendship with magic benefits between the mane six is super cute... until an OC is introduced. The second an OC enters the mix, it's immediately a stupid harem show cliche-storm with a gary stu protagonist, straight out of the kind of stupid uninspired trash anime every real anime fan despises, because it means some corporate hack is funding a studio that's producing this kind of trash instead of Gurren Lagann 2: Spiral Harder.

 

Why do people hate Herds, when used in fanfics? While I hate harem "love at first sight" "Collect all the mares in order like they're six crystal shards of a magic door" "Dash punches him but loves him anyway and he loves her because pretty rainbow tail" "Spike either magically loses his crush on Rarity, dates Sweetie Belle, dates Raincloud, dates Cloud Kicker, or hates anon/OC forever" nonsense, I do like shipfics, and I feel harems/herds can be done right, much like OCs and fanfics in general. 

 

Plus, on a more emotional note, there's the fact that herds involve the characters getting together for an adorable loving snuggle-pile, and that's cute.

[Gamer_KM 90]

Because, from what I've read in shipfics, It brakes Character, usaly when you have 6 going for one someone is going to slip and get dating patterns wrong (IE. giving Dash a more fluttershy approach rather then a tsunadere approach)

[Evilshy 5,090]

I think it's more a general hatred of self inserts into shipfics. The majority are just somebody writing out their fantasies, rather than an actual romance story that makes sense.

[Megas 27,653]

It's usually just wish fulfillment. Lets be honest, who doesn't want to be surrounded by the hottest guys/gals in the world(in their minds at least)?

Edited February 20, 2016 by ChicksDigGiantRobots

[BastementSparkle 20,326]

It's usually just wish fulfillment. But that's not entirely a bad thing really.

 

 I don't really hate it. If the person writing it is aware of what it is and doesn't take it too seriously, having fun with it, it can be pretty entertaining. On the other hand, maybe they actually manage to make a compelling romance out of it, which happens on occasion, and those stories can be pretty good.

 

 So, it's like most kinds of stories. Majority sucks, but there's some good ones out there.

[SFyr 1,982]

Pretty much everyone else has beat me to the punch.

Self insertion, wish fulfillment... one of the worst things you can do with a fic is make it seem like the author's own private fantasy shared for others to upvote/praise. When you ship a bunch of canon characters together, it's pretty safe to assume you're taking liberties, having fun with things, or playing with an idea. There's little to no danger of the story aggrandizing the author indirectly through an OC.

WITH an OC being the center of attention... there's no such luxury. The reader will be left to question if it was really necessary, or in character for these mares/stallions to fall for the protagonist. It just... comes under greater scrutiny, so if it's not handled well, it'll probably get some nice flak for feeling like a self-insert or vicarious power trip. And, in all honesty, even single pairings (no herds or harems) come off at least a little awkwardly the vast majority of cases I've seen.

 

One of my favorite cases that I found it worked well in was Your Human and You, though the buildup to a relationship with Twilight occurred over about 450,000 words before the actual confession. There's others, but each time the story was pretty interesting for its own sake, fairly humble, and well written.

 

[duidamasterXD 9,627]

Another factor is the sheer volume of these stories. When it comes to pone fic, there are heaps of stories pairing characters up with (largely) poorly-written original characters, and finding the good ones (if they exist) is a matter of separating wheat from a mountain of chaff. While that statement is largely true for fanfic in general, it's especially true for stories that rely on us believing that six characters we've come to love all have a thing for the same person.

 

Also, writing a convincing and enjoyable romance between a blank slate character and a /single/ mane six character is a hard enough thing to do. Trying to do that for six at once runs a large risk of making the whole thing feel shallow.

 

-------

 

As for the harem genre in animu, it's lost favor among many because it often feels pointless. At the end, the main person almost always picks one of the cast to end up with, which ends up angering the large potion of the audience who preferred other characters.

[SilverStarApple 849]

Yeah. I saw my fair share of bad stories like this.

 

Still... In a fanfic I'm writing, there's a romance planned between my OC, Silver... and Twilight, Pinkie, and Rainbow. But it's more of a four-way love than a "Everyone loves dude number one and fights over him" thing. How can I write that without people calling it crappy wish fulfillment?

[simba86 1,541]

because they tend to not be that great when you throw in OCs, I don't even read stories that mix in a oc because they are usually just terrible