My Life is Not a Manga, or maybe...

Harem Scarem: 012

What's better than being pursued by a single gorgeous girl? Why, being pursued by a whole crowd of them, of course!

Thus was born the harem sub-genre in manga. Harems show up all over the place, and in all sorts of genres (usually the ones that are focused on wish fulfillment; power fantasies, romance-oriented shounen or seinen stories, and the like); and the "reverse harem"—which is exactly what it sounds like—is decently represented, as well, for those who prefer a female lead.

Of course, I could be wrong about being stuck in a harem, but the fact that I'd run into no less than four different girls as soon as I left the house suggested strongly that I was headed for Harem-ville. After all, "coincidence" in manga is pronounced "plot device", and all of those interactions—with the possible exception of Jill—felt like introductory scenes. Exhausting introductory scenes, at that. I was really not looking forward to—

"Oh, there you are, Xavier," said my mom. I opened my eyes to discover her moving several of the bags currently occupying the bench with me to the floor prior to sitting down. "Where's your sister?"

"Vickie's in V-Mobile picking out a mobile phone."

"She's what?" Mom's eyes instantly sharpened. "Did your father—"

Uh oh. I'd been meaning to give Vickie some grief and maybe tease Mom, but I'd flipped her switch. Not good. "No, no, I mean Vickie is helping a—friend, I guess."

"Ah, good." Mom sat back and the look on her face relaxed into normality. "I just heard from Rachel, and she doesn't have anything else she needs, so she'll be joining us shortly. Do you need to pick anything else up?"

"Heck no! Let's go home!"

Mom eyed me but declined to comment on my eagerness to get as far from the mall as possible. "You've got your gym clothes, then?"

"Yep, I'm good to go."

A few minutes later, Rachel joined us, Mom extracted Vickie from V-Mobile, and I drove us all home.

# # #

As soon as we arrived, I shut myself in my room, threw my bag of new gym clothes under my desk, and started to pace.

A harem. A god damn, slice-of-life, romantic comedy harem. Just my luck to get stuck in one of my least favorite genres. I mean, I get why someone would want to be fawned over by beautiful women. Being propositioned by that nameless older woman or Paula had obvious appeal—no, stop it! Down that road lay insanity. Letting the author lead me around by my libido was a short road to hell, since ironically while harem protagonists may often end up in sexy situations, they never, ever get to consummate them in any way. Well, outside of hentai and more extreme ecchi series, I suppose, but those typically have some absurd reason that forces physical intimacy within the first few pages. I was cohabiting with a girl who I'd seen in her underwear. Yeah, this was way too clean for hentai.

In any case, a harem only functions so long as the protagonist is unable or unwilling to commit in any demonstrative way to a particular girl.

Which I guess meant that I had one easy way to try and wiggle out of this situation: I just had to try my hardest to get close to only one girl in my harem. Odds were good if I was able to get a single girl to commit to being my girlfriend, the manga would end and I'd be free to live my normal life.

One problem with that, though: I didn't want to date any of these girls. I wanted to date Emily, dammit, and fake-dating someone felt horrible. I guess if they were just characters in a story, I didn't have to care about their feelings—but no, down that road lay madness. I'd lived a normal life for almost sixteen years before I got stuck in this stupid manga and my life got infested with trope-driven coincidences. Presumably once the manga ended, I would go back to living a normal life, and everyone around me was just as much a victim of the manga as I was. If this experience made me into some conniving bastard, I'd have failed myself just as badly as if I gave up trying to influence my own life and tried to play a good little Gary Stu harem protagonist in hopes that the manga would end on its own.