Boys, boys, boys – Tall boys, cute boys, brooding boys, bad boys.
Reverse harems anime are for anime fans that are willing to enjoy a boilerplate, low effort shoujo heroine who is surrounded by the most beautiful array of diverse personalitied boys around every turn for any number of reasons.
The reverse harem might turn into a romance, as you can’t have a harem without at least some form of admiration present, but even if it doesn’t, you still have the eye candy. No one can take that from you.
If you are looking for an eclectic collection of boys all penned up together in a reverse harem, we have anime recommendations for that.
Best Reverse Harem Anime
Ouran High School Host Club
While Ouran High School Host Club is more on the comedy side than the romance side of the rom-com spectrum at first, it grows into it, injecting romance while never becomes overwhelmingly about romance either.
In Ouran High School Host Club, the main character is forced to join a secret host club held in the school in which handsome male students pamper visiting female students, treating them like princesses. The heroine, mistaken for a man due to her short hair and wearing a male uniform for comfort, is roped into being a host in the club to pay back a debt.
As these things go, you watch her not only help many of the dazzlingly handsome and wealthy men in the club address their problems, but she also starts a tidy little love affair when romantic feelings begins to bloom.
Amnesia
It can be said that heroines are not the stars of the show in reverse harems. They are merely placeholders that you can slip into as a self-insert. That is particularly noticeable in Amnesia where the heroine doesn’t even have a name and has amnesia be the excuse for where the rest of any personality went.
Based off an otome game, Amnesia follows a girl with amnesia due to the a spirit accidentally crossing paths with her. The spirit helps make things right as they gather her memories that will ultimately help her remember who she is and how she knows four devastatingly handsome men, each more brooding and mysterious than the last.
While Amnesia presents a compact harem of color-coded bishounen men, it is a series that makes up for its self-insert protagonist with storytelling. You don’t get to see the romantic conclusions for each boy like you would in the otome game, but it is legitimately interesting to see the pieces of the amnesia puzzle put together over the course of the story.
Kamigami no Asobi
Kamigami no Asobi has a simple, but surprisingly unique premise about a human girl being transported to the realm of the gods and told by Zeus to educate young male deities on how to empathize and care about humanity, who they will eventually have to be the shepherds of.
Each episode you enjoy watching the heroine trying to teach a dazzling array of heavenly bodies how to do and enjoy human things, an endeavor that often ends comically. Of course, the star of the show is not so much the plot, but the array of beautiful deities, each carved from flawless marvel and plastered with an enjoyable archetypal personality.
Brothers Conflict
What is important to you when it comes to your man stable? Do you want quality or do you want quantity?
If you are going for sheer volume of beautiful boys, and also don’t mind it if the anime you are watching is low effort in every other area, then you must be search for Brothers Conflict.
In Brothers Conflict, a girl learns that her single father is remarrying, and she now is welcomed into the family by her 13 new step-brothers.
Running the gamut in everything from age group to anime boy archetype, Brothers Conflict has a flavor of boy for everyone. Unfortunately, the main issue that quantity enjoyers need to come to terms with is that not every boy gets a lot of spotlight. Rather, several boys in Brothers Conflict do drive portions of the character drama-driven plot, but so many other brothers sadly fall to the wayside.
Hakuouki
If in the mood for a fictionalized period drama absolutely stuffed to the bursting with Meiji era samurai, then Hakuouki is the reverse harem you are looking for.
In Hakuouki, a girl heads to Kyoto to search for her father, a doctor, who has gone missing. There, she witnesses the Shinsengumi murdering a man, and then is taken captive by them. Upon clearing up a misunderstanding and mentioning her father, it turns out that they are looking for him too.
While Hakuouki has an intricate plot to unravel, perhaps the biggest thing this series has going for it is sheer length. Hakuouki is a large franchise of prequels, sequels, OVAs, and movies that you can absolutely get lost in – and that’s not even counting the visual novel it is based on.
Kiss Him, Not Me
In terms of message, Kiss Him, Not Me doesn’t sport the best one, initially.
It follows a chubby fujoshi who enters a depression and sheds a lot of weight when her favorite fictional character dies. After emerging from her goon cocoon an absolute hottie, all the handsome classmates that platonically endured her otaku weebery suddenly develop feelings.
While the initial message of ‘just lose a bunch of weight and get hot if you want to be liked’ is not great, the series does take the romance in the right direction of loving someone who loves you as you are.
The ‘joke’ of this particular series is, however, that instead of enjoying their new affections, the heroine likes to ship these boys together in a fanciful yaoi-addled brain. So, the romance has its own special roadblock.
Uta no Prince-sama
If you are in the market for a bevy of brilliant anime boys, idol anime actually is not a bad place to look. Although, many male idol anime often just the follow the lives of male idols and don’t always embrace the “harem” aspect where they all have a heroine to fall in love with.
Uta no Prince is both an idol anime and a reverse harem as it follows a girl, who wants to be a composer, enrolling at performing arts school where she discovers that everyone is either an idol or a composer themselves.
The Wallflower
Not unlike Kiss Him, Not Me, The Wallflower starts off with another ‘there’s something wrong with this girl that needs to be fixed if she is ever to find love’ message, and embraces the more wholesome flip side of it as things go on.
In The Wallflower, four handsome students are given the chance to live rent-free in a mansion on the agreement that they reform the lady of the house. The girl who lives alone there is a horror-obsessed weirdo who is physically repulsed by beautiful people that proves to be difficult to fix.
Arcana Famiglia
Arcana Famiglia follows a Mafia family whose patriarch has decided to choose a successor by hosting a tournament. The winner takes over the family, and that leadership position will be cemented by marrying his daughter.
Uncommon in reverse harem anime, the heroine of this series has herself a bit of backbone. Not content to be a prize, she enters the tournament herself intent on winning.
In terms of romance, Arcana Famiglia keeps love at arm’s length. This is due to a number of the romantic routes in this visual novel adaptation having a sizable age-gap to them as well as sometimes uncomfortably close blood ties to the heroine.
Code:Realize
Imagine characters like Arsene Lupin, Dr. Frankenstein, and Van Helsing were all handsome young men. That’s the marvel of anime, they can make those hormone-fueled literary dreams come true.
Code:Realize follows a girl who lives in seclusion due to the poison her body produces that rots everything her skin touches. However, when the royal police try to capture her to use that poison, she is pilfered from them by gentleman thief, Arsene Lupin.
While the anime does only follow the one romantic route of the multi-routed visual novel, at least it does the one thing you want from an adaptation – it brings all those beautiful boys to life.
Romantic Killer
This list is packed with otome game adaptations and the same boilerplate heroine archetype that you generally find in them. However, if you prefer your heroines with personality, Romantic Killer offers you a cheeky little otome game parody while still sporting the reverse harem in all its earnest glory.
Romantic Killer is about a girl who only loves games, chocolate, and her cat. She has no interest in real life romance right up until a fairy takes away everything she loves, and refuses to give it back until she gets out there and falls in love.
Arranging three suitors who have already had a meet-cute with her, you watch as the heroine… resists every otome trope that would lead her to love.
While often a comical story, you do watch this fiery girl help these men grow and overcome their own problems in a loving homage to otome game plots.
Fruits Basket
The best harems are always family affairs, and no family skews more male than the Sohma family in Fruits Basket.
Fruits Basket follows a newly homeless orphan girl that is discovered camping on private property by a classmate who invites her to stay at his home. While only three men live in the lonely little estate, they are part of a larger family that is cursed to turn into their designated Chinese Zodiac animal form when embraced by the opposite sex.
So begins the heroine’s long, complicated journey into the dramatic affairs of this large family that also blooms into her own romance.
Of course, to be fair, the main romance in Fruits Basket is definitely more love triangle than full-on harem. However, she endears herself to the entire family throughout the series in a way that will be familiar to the long-time harem enjoyer.
Hanasakeru Seishounen
While ostensibly grounded in reality, Hanasakeru Seishounen embraces the bizarre detachment from reality that one seems to go through when they have access to enough money.
In Hanasakeru Seishounen, you follow the daughter of a powerful businessman who, after his wife’s murder, sent his daughter away to live on a rural tropical island for her protection. Upon reaching high school age, she is summoned back and told that she is to marry one of the three suitors that he has picked out for her. She is also not told who they are because, you know, that’s not important and she will, as stated, “know them when she sees them.”
Bizarre as its set up is, Hanasakeru Seishounen is charming in that instead of parading out every available hunk all at once, you watch the heroine meet a man, fall in love with him, and then repeat the process.
Yona of the Dawn
There is no shortage of anime about a handsome group of guardians protecting a special heroine. I mean, its already on this list with Hakuouki and Code:Realize. However, that particular set up is hard to do well because it needs to be satisfying in both its plot and its eye candy.
Yona of the Dawn is one of the few that manages to be a captivating series above and beyond just the handsome men that are slowly recruited into the heroine’s orbit and/or army.
In Yona of the Dawn, a naive princess is forced to flee from the palace with her bodyguard after her cousin/crush staged a coup and killed her father. Now, she seeks to reclaim her crown by recruiting several dragon warriors of legend, who happen to be young, handsome, and with a problem that only the heroine can help them work through.
Diabolik Lovers
Screw plot. Screw character development. Do you just want to see a girl worked over and sucked on by six handsome men for 15 minute bursts?
Certainly there are areas of the internet that offer just that, but Diabolik Lovers does keep it pretty PG.
In Diabolik Lovers, a girl is sent to a mansion to live with, what she thought was distant relatives, only to discover that she is basically take-out delivery for the six vampires that live there.
While she is slowly unraveling the family’s secrets and her own special secret, Diabolik Lovers really is just watching vampires sexily devour the main character – without ever committing to taking off any clothes.
Do you have more reverse harem anime recommendations or fun alliterative ways to talk about anime boys? Let fans know in the comments section below.
