the mid NUMBER_TOKENs when the idea had already been proven out luckily though as is so often the case when american industry fails its innovators japan was there to do it better and more so so much more technically speaking there are three adult comedy manga featuring harems that do predate archie's innovation but they're all conceptual prototypes at best osamu tezuka's NUMBER_TOKEN nice anthology fusuke for example featured a deposed nobleman and his many many wives but only in one chapter and then purely as a joke it would be years before manga writers began taking the harem concept as seriously as it so clearly deserves in NUMBER_TOKEN almost nice gona guys hanape bazooka gave its titular hero hanape a magic penis finger that makes any woman he points at want him in exchange for letting some demons live in his house and rail with mom and sister and NUMBER_TOKEN's oh tome ningen or oh invisible man plants its lonely teen lead in a house full of lovely ladies before giving him the power to turn invisible we are getting closer to the real deal now but both of those manga are less about romance than they are committing crimes it would take till NUMBER_TOKEN for all the prerequisites of a proper harem manga a hero surrounded by viable willing suitors a plot driven primarily by their relationships and of course a tsundere to come together in one place rumiko takahashi's run the half which ironically wasn't even conceived as a rom-com but rather an attempt to capitalize on the martial arts manga craze kick-started by dragon ball in building its story and humor around the bickering couple of ranma and akane and their various romantic pursuers takahashi was only playing to the same strengths that made mega hits out of urusayatsura and maison ikoku doing action comedy her way and with that shift in genre necessitating an increased focus on violence it only made sense to amplify the violent comedic chaos inherent to urusai yatsura's iconic love triangle so ranma and akane's dads arranged for them to get married but they kind of hate each other and she has a crush on dr tofu who in turn has caught dangerously debilitating feelings for her older sister kasumi and also she's being stalked by her rich senpai tatewaki kuno who also has a thing for ranma's girl half while kuno's even more insane gymnast sister is chasing his boy half also ranma accidentally got engaged to a chinese amazonian named shampoo by beating her in a fight and he's not at all accidentally engaged to ukiyo the daughter of an okonomiyaki chef to whom his deadbeat dad promised his hand in marriage in exchange for lunch and each of those characters has at least one of their own stock or suitors basically everyone's trying to PROFANITY_TOKEN and or fight everyone else all the time and it's very very funny still admittedly it's not quite everything one thinks of when i say harem anime the ultimate driving question behind the story is who will ranma end up with
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