What is the optimal number of girls should a harem have? I believe

>>151118845
negima was rad. didnt watch the anime. pretty sure all harems suck though

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>>151118845
5 if the MC is a beta.
7 if MC is alpha.
Multiple harem groups if MC has lasted more than one season.
3 or less if MC is a little bitch.

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>>151118845
As many as I want

SZS tells me that it's at least a dozen or so.
Go big or go home.

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>>151118845
A real man fucks as many girls (male and female) as he can.

>>151118845
five, hmm...
>Childhood Friend
>Exotic Brown Girl*
>Imouto*
>Delicious Cake
>Tsundere who secretly wants to be made submissive
>*one of these could be loli, but not required

Yep, five is enough, OP

What are you trying to optimize? I know that as the number of girls increases, the average quality becomes harder to sustain, and tends to decrease. If it were up to me, I'd want to maximize the average quality, and I don't give a shit about harem, so I'd just keep it at one girl to maximize the possibility of having a 10/10. But obviously you must have different criteria.

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>>151123800
>Exotic Brown Girl

Who'd want such uncultured savages?

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>>151123992
Every harem of significant size has a brown girl. If one is not present in any given harem, that harem has failed to reach significant size.
Brown girls are an indicator of how 'ripe' a harem is and whether it is ready for consumption.

>>151118845
At the very minimum 3 dictates a harem.
Then you have the sliding scale of characters/relationship strength and variety.

Low numbers yield more to stronger characters and stronger relations with the MC, but you have less variety.
Higher numbers give greater variety, but everyone's a cardboard cut-out that only talks to the MC.
Relationships between harem members sort of depends how much focus is given to the members of the harem vs. focus given to the MC.

Seems that 5 to 7 characters is the perfect number.

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>>151118845
the correct answer is one

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>>151124387
The estimates check out.

I hate it when harems go overboard, it just has most of the girls be meaningless backgrounds most of the time.

>>151124387
I would say with a higher number of girls, you tend to get the inner circle and outer circle of girls. One of the biggest things in harem is if there's a main girl or not. From there you have a number of girls that can actually be called competition and a bunch of girls that are pretty much zero competition. Less girls tends to make for fiercer competitions.

>>151125426
What series would you recommend that does the latter?

>>151125426
>Less girls tends to make for fiercer competitions.
and better girl on girl hatesex
The argument for small harems just keeps getting stronger.

Once you pass 7 it's hard to give all of each girl appropriate screen time, so you're going to have some who are just stuck not doing anything for long periods of time. I mean, look at Negima where 50 or more chapters would pass without given girls doing much of anything.

And once you get over 10 girls, I just don't think any author can handle that very well.

Honestly I think it's better to have 5 or 6 well developed girls than twice that many, but not give any of them a good focus.

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However many this is.

>>151124751
You get another issue with harems, which is the ever expanding harem, namely adding a new girl every book. The harem keeps expanding every volume until every girl becomes a stereotype or one off joke. DAL is one such which suffers heavily from this.

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>>151125883
Monster Musume is experiencing this, every chapter shows a new characters, but barely does anything for a long length of time.

>>151125650
OreShura is probably the most well known one, since everyone can see it's pretty much a battle between the two title characters. No one knows who will win. Fiercest competition yet.