[Triple_R]

Originally Posted by relentlessflame

I honestly don't understand why people keep suggesting that "relating to the protagonist" is terribly relevant for these sorts of shows.

This suggestion is popular because it plausibly explains why a lot of harem anime have uninteresting male leads (an observation posed in the very title of this thread). If harem anime writers are aiming for their male leads to be as relateable as possible, then it makes sense that sometimes (if not often) this may have the unfortunate effect of making the male lead dull and uninteresting (by aiming for relateable, it's easy to fall into the trap of "too normal").

Fearing that a strong male lead would overshadow the "true stars" makes no sense to me, since there's plenty of popular anime properties with strong male leads surrounded by very popular female characters (Clannad, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Steins;Gate, Kanon, Angel Beats!, etc...).

So I don't think that harem anime male leads are intended to be downright dull and boring to help ensure that the female characters remain the stars. No, I think that what happens is that harem anime writers tend to aim for the male lead to be a relateable placeholder character, and sometimes they do a good job of it, while other times they don't do a good job of it. Sometimes they overdo it, and the male lead ends up bland and uninteresting because of it.

In my experience, people who watch these sorts of shows pretty much never relate to the protagonist because they're almost always way more partisan than the indecisive lead is forced by the plot to be.

This in and of itself isn't a problem. The idea is that the viewer should want to imagine himself in the male lead's shoes, and hence to be able to make the decisions that the male lead inevitably has to make (i.e. to be in a position to act upon that partisanship). A good harem anime should get a lot of passionate shipping discussion going, actually.

It's generally helpful to give the male lead nice moments with each of the major girls, so the various shipping groups each have their own pieces of evidence to support their preferred shipping. The trick is to do this while making the harem lead's indecisiveness seem at least somewhat understandable (this is where jealous outbursts on the parts of one or more of the girls can be helpful, as you can see how it would make the male lead more leery of having to definitively turn down one or more of the girls.)

"Indecisive" and/or "clumsy" protagonists are favoured in order to keep the indecision and misunderstandings going for as long as possible.

I agree with you here. But "Indecisive" and/or "clumsy" does not need to lead to "uninteresting".

I think there's a difference between being envious of the sorts of situations that the protagonist gets him or herself into, and "living vicariously through the lead".

Who wants to feel envious? Is envy a pleasant feeling for most people?

But what can be a pleasant feeling is living vicariously through a character who gets to do fun and exciting things that you would like to do - The entire RPG genre of video gaming is rooted in this very concept, after all.

I don't think that the protagonist is truly supposed to be a representation or placeholder for the audience, except if it's a story where the audience is given choices (as in a visual novel). Otherwise, it's an exercise in frustration because the protagonist will often make decisions (or non-decisions) you don't agree with. So in the end, the audience goes along for the ride, at once envious of the protagonist and also frustrated by him or her. The reward/frustration balance is what prolongs the story. The engagement the audience has is with the "candidates", and the protagonist merely is the available conduit -- not typically someone to aspire to or to "live vicariously through".

Aspire to, no. But you don't have to aspire to be someone to live vicariously through him or her. Some parents live vicariously through their children (you can see this a lot at sporting competitions for kids and teens that are open to the general public). But those parents obviously don't aspire to be their own children.