I never said I didn't enjoy them, but a lot of them are just hard to enjoy due to being unrealistic. There are a few enjoyable harems out there.
But I do want to correct one thing though...
When it comes to MC's beating the shit out of the villain, a smart protagonist, or all those other tropes, those are people with abilities. The suspension of disbelief is based on the rules of the world.
When it comes to MC getting a harem it's a suspension of disbelief on the behavioral and psychological level. This makes it harder for many people to not only relate, but accept them as characters. Hence why there is more hate for harem over hate for overpowered MC, because even if you can't relate on a physically realistic level there can still be relation on a motivational level.
Harem romances don't have that same relatability.
I'd concede that compared to shounen, there is a steeper ratio between good series and shit series for harem stuff, but that's more to the genre itself. When you have to replace the hype of getting power with deepening relationships, shit goes wonky. It's easy to show the MC getting a more powerful Fire Punch. It's hard to show Asuna liking Kirito even more than usual.
However, I'd argue that harem stories possess a similar suspension of disbelief in terms of individual personalities. As opposed to a power system, harems rely on each of the member's characteristics. It makes more sense if you think about it like a VN dating game. You can argue that "no real human being thinks like this" but the internal consistency IS THERE (when the harem is actually written well, that is); Girl A has this issue/trait/problem/gimmick, and the MC fills that void, and in turn, emotionally satisfies her which she interprets as a feeling of intimacy since he's the one that completed her. Granted, that's an average of five different "systems" in a typical harem tale compared to just one encompassing "system" in a regular shounen series, but my point still stands.
As intricate and complicated as we'd like to think ourselves to be, humans run like machines—difficult machines, but like clockwork nonetheless. Put us in the right circumstances and variables and you can just about predict each of our every moves. Chris-Chan is an example. There are already two decades of evidence to show how trolls got him dancing a ballet like a puppet on a string. Harem stories (well-written ones, that is) apply that theory and have it play out like regular shounens, only in small doses and a healthy amount of titis and ass to fill the gap.
Though I still think it comes down to the individual. Just as I can believe MC predicted that Mercury would be in retrograde the moment his fists hit the Demon Lord six months from the battle for maximum critical damage, I can believe that ol' gloomy Lisa fell in love at first sight when MC offered to fix her glasses when she fell down the stairs. There's a system to those two scenarios, and I can believe that, so long as the author keeps it consistent.
It also depends on who's writing the stories. Somehow God just decided that only the most retarded, brain-dead, chalk-huffing individuals get to write harem stories and be done with it.
