Question Why do people rate harem stories low for being harem stories?

I dislike harem except imperial harem (which usually female mc going on king's harem which has a lot of cat fight, and scheme).tbh, this is the reason why (for me). *each person has different taste.

Spoiler: Im just being salty

I just dislike how conviniently the girl fall in love with mc, like ????
I just dislike how the girl is just there for props.
I just dislike the companion of mc is only girl, is there no male out there???
I just dislike why it isnt odd / an issue 1 guy with 10 girl going together for a journey / adventure, not explained if it is normal there
I just dislike how mc describing the girl, pervert, or doki doki everytime, and casually add them inside the harem.
I just dilike the harem girls messed up everything than helping
I just dislike how peaceful the harem is, no jealousy or something, or something??
I'm okay with everyone staying friend, but EVERY SINGLE GIRL LIKE MC, and MC treat them as friend, just?? why the girl not feel mc as friend too?!
I dislike pervert collecting harem slave
I just dislike lucky pervert accident, or drawn too ecchi-ish.
I just dislike girls is only for MC
I just dilike everything revolving around mc, like them (also the world) cannot live without mc.
No parent that get mad her girl fawning mc??
Just what the hell the mc charm?? there's even better guy out there ---> (other guy saved girl, ok thanks, mc save girl, omg i fell in love!!)
MC weak hearted toward girl, become punchbag
Girl weak toward mc, end up forgiving or okay with mc doing everything
Girls IQ become lower toward mc
All people mc saved is basically member that will end up as his harem, is there no guy in that world??? (2)
Basically harem filled /based with love.. like.. idk i just dislike it.
Idk too much things that irks me that i better not reading / avoid it all together.. but I cant remove this tag since imperial harem isnt that bad..
MC filter is too high, i wonder why no one dislike mc or something...

*case are different if it is tagged as smut, i wont mad, cause basically similar to /cough/

Meanwhile Imperial harem, the girls become concubine because of:
1. rule that made girls to be registered as concubine / family pressure of the girls
2. strategic, collab with other kingdom / strengthening household
3. king is rich so why not?
4. everyone want king because he is rich, powerful, ideal man, number 1 man, so it is logical why
5. not everyone fell in love with kind, there is many motives
6. chaotic, jealousy, work together, a couple of them maybe like jp mc peaceful to love king, but other has other agenda
7. there is other man!! not only king in there
8. the girl basically not all innoncent / brainless for king, some may brainless some is smart.

 

I think it maybe also added to personal preferences + avoiding, the typical harem always end up going to direction that they dont want, and mostly 90% of them do that, while I know not all of them bad, but it is like 90% chance you encounter what they dislike than they like. It is indeed not good way to judge literature, but when reading or experiencing people will tend to avoid it altogether, cause the bad harem is too much!

Like maybe yaoi manga, while it sometimes has good plot but it is only like 5% of them, meanwhile 95% about banging which some people dont want to see guy x guy having their time, rather than seeing chance guy x guy banging, they prefer ditch the tag, whatever, even with if 5% of them has plot and good story, I dont want to see guys banging, cause the chance seeing them having good time is higher than good plot.

I think people will avoid it until someone recommend it, this harem is different than crappy harem.

Or something like there is a good manga, it has good story, but at every page there is zoom in for boobs, I think it will annoy people who came for plot, if they cant handle it, they will ditch the story, while the story is good, the boob is too disturbing

While this one, need to hang on for story / drop it because you're too peeved struggle

 

I think that you're combining two different sources of criticism. The first is the principled stance: these are the people who don't like the concept of harem stories and will dislike them regardless of how well they're written. For them, the quality is irrelevant because the very subject is a turn off. While it may seem that such readers are unreasonable, I think that it's a very fair stance. You don't have to like every kind of story, and harem stories are inherently a divisive story concept. However, it should be noted that criticism from this stance isn't really criticism.

The other approach is to claim that the harem is bad and it makes the story worse. The idea is that a harem is bad enough to make a good book mediocre or an average book bad. However, from my experience this basically never happens. Every time I've ever encountered a bad harem, it's in a book that also has bad characterization and a host of other problems. In these cases, the harem doesn't do anything to worsen the novel because it was already terrible to begin with! I have come across a couple of cases where having a harem weakened the book, but those cases are very uncommon to begin with, and the books in question are still pretty good.

 

After people read more than ten harem novels, they tend to judge based on the tag. You pretty much know what to expect. For me personally, knowing there's a harem in the novel, means that harem management will slowly start taking priority over the action and adventure and I'll surely lose interest. And when the characters themselves are boring tropes, it doesn't raise the interest in reading about them.

There's this novel - Dimensional Sovereign, a Korean novel with a harem tag. Regardless of the ratings, I enjoyed the novel well enough for the plot. The harem happened all of a sudden at the end of the novel with women I couldn't care less about, but since it was at the end of the novel, that was fine with me, so I never changed my rating, lol. I already got to enjoy the novel and skipping over the last few chapters wasn't an issue.

 

I don't like harem genre, but I will not rate novels included in this genre badly. Because I just skip them and don't read (●´∀｀●)

 

Because they are usually uninspired trash written by a horny kid to whom the deepest part of a "relationship" is how much he wants to doink someone? Superficial, bland, one dimensional trash written exactly like the thousands of other stories that came before it, but with a palette swap.

Wish fulfillment for kids who just want to be gifted all their desires on a silver platter and have their trials and tribulations washed away in the tributaries of condensed, molten plot. It's no wonder why people who are out of middle school aren't the biggest fans of the genre.

 

LMAO, top-tier entertainment.

OP: Why do people hate the colour blue for being blue?
99% of responses: I hate blue because of this, that, these, those.

That... wasn't the question.

 

IDK what you mean, how are people supposed to explain why harems are so poorly rated if they can't explain... why they are so poorly rated? Unless OPs question was less "why do people rate them low" and more like "why are there drive-by 1 stars on harems more than anything else"?

If the latter, the answer would likely be "because it's a conditioned response, due to the responses in the thread and people venting their disappointment" or "there's a radical cabal of exclusively heterosexual readers out there on an open crusade to downvote all harems until people understand the true beauty of holding hands in the dark, in the missionary position, with your high school crush".

EDIT: word on the street is the heteros have allied with the tomboys

 

The thread is actually asking why people are so bad at criticism.

 

Oh no, I'm retarded.

 

Depends on how you rate things.

If I don't like something then I'm going to rate it low. Because the rating system rates how entertaining a novel was compared to other novels, not how entertaining it was compared to others novels in the same genre.

I'm not going to arbitrarily boost the rating of a novel because it was in a genre I don't like; I'm not going to rate a novel I did like with the same rating as a novel I didn't, regardless of the reason. Or else I'd have a load of bl and ntr novels rated at the same level as my favourite novels despite the fact that I dislike them.

I'm going to rate novels on how much I like them, not on how much I think the average person would like them. And then if everyone did that, we would be able to actually see how much the average person likes the novel.

 

People that dont like harem are pretentious people becos all people will enjoy sex, smut and BL. If they don't like harem in a fantasy setting, their IQ is honestly quite low because they are unrealistic people.

 

Because Harem itself is a sin!
...
But mainly because of preferences and most authors actually being unable to write something decent on that genre.

When you see Harem in the tags, you better assume it's a powertrip fantasy of a horny teenager that picks up girls left and right, doing nothing yet the woman fall in love at first sight type of story, yet still trying to tell themselves they're not actually doing that as the story descends to the pits of hell and starts digging.

And while the better stories of that genre have only one of these erroneous writing horrors, it's enough to destroy a novel.

 

I don't think there's anything wrong this, but it should be noted that some critiques have more value than others. And that the value of something like "this book is bad because it has a harem" and "the harem in this book is bad because of xyz" is enormously different.

This just sounds like you've never read any good harem novels before. I admit that these aren't easy to come across, but they nothing like what you're describing.

 

To be fair though, critique and rating isn't quite the same thing anyway, even if people like to combine them for "reviews".

 

I'm never going to say "this book is bad because it has harem". What I might say is "I don't like this book because it has harem", which is completely different. I don't think anyone has the ability to judge whether a novel is objectively good or bad, which is what I meant by the paragraph you quoted.

And I would say that "I don't like this book because it has harem" is just as valuable a criticism as "I don't like the harem in this book because xyz".

Because xyz are going to be just as arbitrary reasons to not like a book as the mere fact that it has harem in it. Some other person might like xyz, some person might not.

If I don't like harem under any circumstances, then I'm not going to lie and say I didn't like it because the harem wasn't well done, I'm going to say I didn't like it because it had a harem.

And if the harem is done badly as well, then that's even more of a reason to lower my rating of the novel. I can say both "I didn't like this book because it had harem" and "I especially disliked this harem because xyz", which would just bring down the rating even more than if the harem was done fairly competently

 

True, but both are sometimes equally useless.

The difference is that one statement says something about the book and the other one only says something about the reveiwer.

 

One rating says a lot about the reviewer. The collection of multiple reviews says a lot about the book. And imo more accurately than multiple "critiques".

 

In all harems I have seen, the protagonist is extremely boring. There is no redeeming quality but their kindness and that is more than enough to have all the interesting women flock to the male lead. The overused formula in a harem setting becomes repetitive that it becomes boringggggg!

 

I know what you mean. The reviewers hates harem and yet they are reading harems. Most of the remarks are low intelligence but the same people also have low intelligence for even reading harem stories that they do not like in the first place. You can tell that half of the people here that don't like harems are commenting why they don't like harems but they are obviously reading it:X haha.