Actually a Stardew Valley/Harvest Moon inspired Harem LitRPG sounds pretty damn fun. Heather pouted at me from the bed, but didn't say anything as she didn't want to wake Lavender up. Taking one last look at the ladies, I grabbed my hoe and headed out the door to tend the turnips. The Fertility Festival was in two days, and the damned things weren't going to farm themselves.
Now I really Crap! Now you've got me thinking about how to do a Pitfall-based LitRPG. You just totally ruined my productivity for the day
You could totally do it and make it super awesome. Not even kidding. I think you set it in the far future where people can upload their consciousnesses to the network. Then, you have somebody get suckered into a wake-up-in-an-ice-bath-with-your-kidney-missing sort of situation from an electronic perspective. Bam, they've got to make it through Pitfall to get the rest of themselves back from the evil AI or person who scammed them. You could even get really deep with questions of identity and consciousness.
What really soured me on the Anita Blake "harem" is how something like 25% of each book is her feeling guilty (again) because another hot guy wants to have hot sex with her, another 25% is Anita and the harem explaining poly (again) to someone, and the rest is a plot that almost always feels rushed through... because the ardeur needs to be fed (again)...
Not to totally derail, but pretty much. Zero issue with her being poly (although it always feels more like harem to me since Anita is in total control of anyone doing anything the minute they're allowed into her magical groin). It's just the same old rehashed preaching over and over and over, sprinkled with the same paragraphs describing the current hottie eye-humping her until the actual humping starts. I miss her old books. Her first 8-9 books were actually pretty good. Not amazing, but nice solid and enjoyable books! And then she got the Magical Groin™ and suddenly it's all about dicks, her guilt, and her moaning because "amg, ANOTHER hot man wants to looooveee me and it's sooooo hard on me." So boring.
That's true. Can't forget to make sure to mention the impressive size of her lovers' pants and the fact that Anita Blake's Super-Powered Steel Vahoohoo is the only one that can take those packages as well. On a side note, what is with her not just using some word for genitalia? Like she writes some pretty wild stuff and yet won't just say them! That's not really a complaint so much as me being really confused because it's a really noticeable oddity in her work. She'll describe everything else in long, flowery detail but won't just say penis or vagina.
this makes me sad. I actually liked the first few books in the series because at the time it felt like it was supernatural colliding with pulp mystery detective novels. Then it all went so so wrong. Originally it reminded me of the Diana Tregarde series by Mercedes Lackey which I enjoyed.
You could say that it's exactly what happened to the LitRPG writers that turned that way. They're writing what their audience demands. Erotica schlock with a light LitRPG coating.
Anita Blake? Sure, back in the day. I love those kind of "noirish" supernatural books. I'm a big fan of the Dresden books; they aren't perfect, but they're good reads! Nowadays? I occasionally grab one to snark-read. It's like watching a bad horror movie. It's just so awful it's kind of entertaining to crack up to just how terrible it is.
So, here's a question I'm pondering that's related since I'm wading through Amazon to try and find a few new books on KU. Most of the ones I'm finding in search are...surprise, harems! Although the reviews tend to be really divided. It's either 4-5 star or 1-star, often on the same book! So, what would make a good LitRPG erotica/harem book? What would make you actually want to read one and enjoy it? For me personally, I'd say love interests with good character development and personality. They need to be their own people, not just a 'hot babe/dude'. That's the big thing. The other is half-decent sex scenes. I mean, if I'm reading erotica, I want some erotic in there. So it needs to be better than an awkward scene that reminds me of 13-year-olds in Skype trying to write the deed. Or better than "and then they totally did it", which was basically how the Tamer books went for the most part. And, of course, there needs to be some kind of plot that's more than "the MC roams around and omg, hot people just flock to them!".
I'd rather keep it to a constant cranking of tension instead of just having the MC fall penis-first into bed with every woman he meets. Also, for authors to realize that harems are not about your obvious self-insert fantasywank MC. A good harem is about the members of the harem, not the person who has the harem. That's actually one thing that MSE did right with his Tamer series; he made the girls each their own individual and highlighted them, rather than treating them solely as a wang-sheath for the blank canvas OP MC. I suspect that's a series that was ghostwritten, though, as none of his other harem garbage is up to the same standards of character development. Compare and contrast with the Wild Wastes series by Randy Darren, where the harem pretty much exists solely to worship at the penis of the MC, for his benefit and his alone. The girls don't get anything out of the relationship except for pregnant, which is basically just another way of showing how awesome the MC is and how pointless the harem is. Super Sales on Super Heroes is better, although the MC is still the main focus, at least there is an attempt at developing the character of his harem. Also, bloody hell, people. Learn to write a sex scene - I saw better erotica back in the days of AOL cybersex chat rooms. Leave something to the imagination; I guarantee you, absolutely guaran-damn-tee you that you cannot describe a sex scene better than the people reading your book can imagine it. Readers don't need a constant accounting of what each individual limb is doing in every bloody scene, just describe the action in broad strokes and let your readers' imaginations fill in the gaps. Edit to add: and keep the sex scenes to a minimum. One or two per book is plenty, three is pushing it, four (or more) is just wasting pages that you could use for character development instead.
I am pretty burnt on harems as they are generally so low quality but if someone was writing one that would interest me I would want better characters and an actual good reason why all the females want to get with the MC. In the case of litrpg maybe something like a character class like maybe an actual sultan or coven leader or something to explain it and actual benefits as well. In the Daniel Black series the advantages and reasons for such are at least fairly well explained for example.
I had a good think about this last night and came to a very different conclusion as Cheshire - not saying I disagree with him, I don't - but my interpretation came at the problem from the exact opposite direction (both of which are valid, I think). If the MC is going to be something more than wish fulfillment or an excuse to tie together a bunch of girls who are the real interest, then what's important isn't so much the girls but what they bring out in the MC. Their role should be to challenge his perception of himself (he thinks of himself as kind, but something about her situation pushes him to choose between kindness and selfishness, or he thinks of himself as coldly rational, but something about her forces him to get in touch with his emotions). There should be conflict there, which of course is vital for plot, and an element of choice, built-in suspense and a chance to surprise the reader. I'm getting the feeling - and stop me if I'm wrong because by my own admission I don't read or watch much in this subgenre - but a lot of these harem LitRPGs seem to be based on harem anime, manga and games. And there the draw of the girls is almost entirely visual, with some behaviors - like, here's the quiet, reserved, serene traditional girl for the guys who like that, here's the shouty, aggressive, athletic girl for guys who like that, here's the "exotic" mysterious girl for guys who like that, here's the catgirl for the furries, here's the girl who's actually 800 years old but looks like she's 8 for the guys who should probably be put in an electric chair and so on. But books can't fall back on these visual tropes as easily, and are left with just the extremely shallow personalities. Hence why a lot of these harem books are so ungratifying - both the MC and the girls are cardboard, without the visuals to distract from the flimsy writing.
