Harem Story Question 6/25/20

[John_Black]

Well, i'm having some trouble with the harem story i'm writing and i figured this is a good as question as any to ask here.

What are some good tropes (recurring themes) in harem stories you've read? I'm trying to think of come cute/sexy themes to break up the violence and I find myself coming up with not alot.

AND I'M TALKING ABOUT JAPANESE HAREM ANIME TROPES

 

[davion2308]

Violence?

Break up the violence?

I wasn't aware there was a lot of violence in a harem. I thought they were pleasure houses.

Skip the tropes. Try something different. Maybe take the view of the piano player in an old whore house in San Francisco in the early 1900s, a la "East of Eden." Or maybe take the spot of a bookkeeper who's trying to keep professional and the girls see him as an old maid and tempt and tease him because they know he won't do anything about it. How would that look?

I've never been to a harem, at least the type I would imagine in Arabian Nights, so the sky is the limit for you.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Tropes? Mydunno. I've been through the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul. The harem area struck me as an tastelessly overdecorated prison with smallish rooms and not a whole bunch of space or privacy. (That's of course seen through modern eyes and a different culture; it's possible that the women in there found it a step or three up from their lives on the outside.) Not having done any research, I would think that there would be a lot of boredom and a lot of petty jealousy - whom did the Sultan last visit? who has the nicest room? who gets sent new clothing and jewellery? The girls who got pregnant by the Sultan would have had beaucoup status, but I suspect that the mother of the sultan, who would also have been locked up there, would have been the boss cow and might have had the power to make life better or dramatically worse for those who pleased or annoyed. The place was apparently run by the eunuchs, which is another level of misery all round, I would think.

You are, of course, writing fiction and are free to imagine it any way you want.

One theme might be imagining what the girls said to each other about the Sultan when all alone.

 

[SimonDoom]

My recommendation is to skip thinking about "harem tropes." You're doing a story about a harem. What is it you want to say about a harem? Why are YOU interested in the first place about this? Answer that question first. What, exactly, is it about a harem story that is sexy to you? Figure that out, and it should point you in the right direction of the story. Think about who you want the story to be about. In a harem story, it's usually either (1) the man who has the harem, or (2) a woman who is or becomes part of the harem. Which character/story interests you? No one can answer that for you.

My philosophy of an erotic story is that you must figure out the erotic focus of the story, and build around that. Looking for tropes can't help you figure out what YOUR focus is.