Sexy Man, Instant Harem

The perks of being the man in charge.

Often, The Casanova emits an aura of sex appeal. This aura is such a powerful force of attraction that at times, it seems like women are literally incapable of extricating themselves from him. They lose all sense of shame, crawl all over him, and are outright ecstatic if he pays any individual attention to them. The harem won't even mind the fact that he's dealing with the affections of several women at once, and hardly even views them as distinguishable.

Well, that last part is sort of forgiveable. Because the harem in this context isn't distinguishable. The vast majority of the time, the women in this harem are characters who are irrelevant to the plot at large. Heck, they'll be lucky if they even get names. Their purpose isn't to actually do anything except show that the guy in question is meant to be lusted after. Bear in mind that they'll usually ignore all of his dialogue with other characters even if he's talking about them.

Note that most women who are either main cast or supporting cast will usually be immune to this aura. This is probably due in part to the fact that it's very, very difficult to build a real, self-respecting character out of someone who feels no shame about openly lusting after a character whose main defining trait is his sex appeal.

See also: Chick Magnet, Even the Guys Want Him, Kavorka Man, Head-Turning Beauty, Instant Fan Club, Favors for the Sexy. Contrast Unwanted Harem.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Many, many advertisements for body spray. Character uses body spray product. Character becomes so sexy that all nearby women actually start attacking him to get after the sexy. At this point, this is used so much that it might as well be Brand X.
  • Brilliantly self-parodied in the Hai Karate ads of the '70s, where the guy tries to fight off the girls using karate and Hilarity Ensues.
  • Another '70s ad, for a cologne called "Bacchus," pretended that this was the real secret of the Roman army's victories: they arranged to splash the stuff on the men of enemy towns, who are then mobbed by their own (all very beautiful) womenfolk. "Because when a man is irresistible to women, he has more interesting things to do than fight a war."
  • Axe body spray probably takes the crown for this one, implying that it can render bathing unnecessary, and still drive women into a sexual frenzy. Sadly, many users believe it, if the smell on most college campuses is any indication.
  • Parodied rather amusingly in a new SpecSavers advert.
  • Another Axe commercial shows women being turned on by their pots and pans, which (we discover) are made from recycled Axe spray cans.

Anime & Manga

• Durarara!!'s Rokujo Chikage is rarely seen without a number of women hanging off of him, whom he dates all at once (none of them seem to mind).
• Many of the males of Fruits Basket have girls fall in Love at First Sight, but certain characters, especially Yuki, but to a lesser extent, Momiji and Aya, inspire drooling fangirls to follow him and swear to protect him from anything, ESPECIALLY other girls.
• Fushigi Yuugi gives us an example that overlaps with No Accounting for Taste and Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: the Emperor of Kutou has several beautiful wives/concubines. He talks to Nakago while in bed with three of them. Hotohori also has a Royal Harem, but as he's holding out for the Priestess, he never takes advantage of it. And, of course, both Miaka and Yui fight over Tamahome.
• GTO: The Early Years:
  • Hiroshi Abe. Once his character is established, a random woman or harem can be seen in nearly all of his appearances.
  • Averted with Makoto: He has several girlfriends, but has to be careful to keep them all a secret from one another. He receives a lot of angry phone calls once it appears that one of them is pregnant.
• Kongoh Bancho tends to subvert this pretty hard when it shows up. The first time occurs with Oyanana as an expression of how influential he is at school as the son of the school's chairman. After he's humbled by his encounters with the main character and stops relying on this influence, his "friends" all end up turning on him. Fortunately, Character Development kicks in and eventually makes him someone who earns the respect of others on his own merits. The other time this trope shows up, "White Rose" Bancho has a harem of beautiful young women as his underlings. All it takes is for Hikyou Bancho to make secret deals with each of them before one of them stabs him in the back in a bid for power, followed by all of them attacking each other thinking they're the one Hikyou Bancho wanted to team up with.
• Magi: Labyrinth of Magic: At festival time, it seems all King Sinbad has to do is sit still for a moment and he's swamped by scantily clad girls all taking turns to lounge in his lap.
• Naze Turbine from Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans probably beats most of the examples here, for having a harem large enough to maintain a Cool Starship. Though, as of later episodes revealed, the "harem" part was downplayed as it's more of a front, because that the women he keeps in his group were rescued from obscurity. Still, he's not at all bothered with any of them coming to him.
• In Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok, or whatever we call it today, Loki's "true unsealed" form seems to have this effect on basically anyone. Even the female protagonist seems affected, and he's got a literal Instant Fanclub following him all over the place with heart-shaped eyes.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • Everyone is lusting for Negi Springfield, so he's gotten this on occasion. It gets even worse when Asuna force-feeds him his own Love Potion because she doesn't think it will work. It does. Though oddly not on her. Then he breaks out the magic aging pills, turns into a Bishounen, and pretty much instantly acquires ''a fan club''.
  • Kotaro also gets quite a warm reception from most girls when he uses the aging pills.
  • Even Fate Averruncus is jumping on the bandwagon in recent chapters, and he started off with five of them.
• Hani already had a fan-club before joining the Ouran Highschool Host Club. Tamaki and the twins also seem to attract a great deal of fangirls. Even Haruhi has extreme chick magnet powers despite lacking the 'man' part of this trope, even to those who know. Also at least a few guys, who tend to feel a bit uncomfortable about it. The commentaries even point out the bit about the fangirls not having names, apparently they keep track of recurring fangirls by the formula <character being lusted after><distinctive trait of hair> - "twins girl, blonde".
• Parallel Paradise: Being a Living Aphrodisiac to the girls of the parallel world, Youta takes this to its logical conclusion: a single touch is enough to put them in heat. Despite the obvious temptation, Youta does his absolute damnedest to keep his true identity under wraps: not only is it just not in his nature to take advantage of girls like that, Lumi accurately points out that his identity as the sole man in the parallel world could throw its social order into absolute chaos. While the inevitable happens and he does sleep with many of the girls he meets, they're portrayed as Friends with Benefits rather than a proper harem, and ultimately he's in a reciprocated boyfriend/girlfriend relationship with the aforementioned Lumi.
• Gary from Pokémon: The Series has a band of attractive, short-skirted cheerleaders who follow him around in a convertible. This becomes a little more creepy when you consider that he's about ten years old.
• Revolutionary Girl Utena:
  • Girls tend to behave this way around Kiryuu Touga. Including, at one point, his sister. Although that was a misunderstanding... Mostly.
  • Akio, who appears later in the series as the main antagonist, has a much stronger (and creepier) influence. Case in point? His Sexy Man Instant Harem includes Touga. The only thing in the series that seems to get more action than Akio is his CAR.
• Way too many people at Kyouhei's school in The Wallflower seem to be entirely and unhealthily devoted to the four bishies.
• Duke Devlin from Yu-Gi-Oh! has this immediate impact on the school environment once he appears. For extra implausibility points, he pulls this off with card tricks. Lucky for him, card games in Yu-Gi-Oh are Serious Business. Lampshaded in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, where sexy theme music plays every time he opens his mouth — which the other characters find annoying.

Comic Books

• Skywise in ElfQuest is the trope's poster boy for the series, having a few girlfriends (and a boyfriend or two) in every tribe. It seems the only thing he has to do to get the girls is to show up. And then he ends up in a long-term relationship with the series' equivalent of a goddess.
• There's a rarely recurring pin that Jughead has in Archie Comics that not only draws every woman not related to him (we hope) to him with insatiable lust, but it also makes the chronic girl-hater actually love the attention. Another one-shot comic has Reggie claim that this happened to him on vacation, with various nationalities of bimbos featured.
• The Incredible Hercules provides the current page image. Being a Greek god probably helps. As Wolverine puts it, "I've seen it in bar after bar. Whatever women want, that guy has it." He's stated in-universe to have a reputation as a fantastic and caring lover.
• In Star Wars (Marvel 1977), Luke Skywalker has this effect◊ on Zeltrons. They actively pursue him, and the first time he ended up surrounded by them he ran away and was alarmed whenever someone propositioned him. Later he matures and becomes composed enough to be "used to it", but he still tries to get away when it's not too rude to do so. The Zeltron hat is Ethical Sluthood, and they're attracted to novelty in general... but the Star Wars Expanded Universe later makes it clear that they can also pick up on Force-Sensitivity and find it immensely appealing.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1:
  • While most of the women besides Diana who show interest in Steve Trevor are people he'd lock in prison or shoot in the face before speaking to if he didn't have to play Honey Trap to try to learn their plans the Holliday Girls pretty much all agree he'd delectable and spend a lot of time around him, even though they'd never make a move on him and he'd never reciprocate since they all know he's in love with Diana.
  • The Statuesque Stunner Marya is a female example, who seems to gain a crowd of appreciative young men wherever she goes. She mourns that any time she wants a few they turn out to be a "tease" who isn't into what she wants to do.

Literature

• Conan the Barbarian: Conan is portrayed as irresistible to most women he meets (having two women fighting over him in one story, which he views as perfectly normal), and as king of Aquilonia, even gets his own Royal Harem.

Film — Animation

• Never quite played straight in Disney's Aladdin. The chorus girls start out mockingly describing Aladdin's charm as a street urchin and mostly seem to praise him as Prince Ali because of Genie's magic. Their counterpoint adoration of him during the "Prince Ali" song is awesome, regardless.
  • Played straight in the live-action remake, where they (portrayed as school girls) adore him.
• Gaston in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. His fangirls appear to be identical triplets.

Film — Live-Action

• This was a common device in old musical comedies since it made a good excuse to show off the Chorus Girls.
• Subverted in Catch Me If You Can, in which Abagnale escapes an airport filled with FBI agents by tricking hot college girls into posing as flight attendants. He strolls right by two police officers in his pilot costume, and all they can say is "I wish I was a pilot." Also counts as a crowning moment of awesome.
• In Good Luck Chuck, the main character is "cursed" with the ability to have any woman who has sex with him find true love within a few days. The reason the word is in quotation marks is that apparently in this universe, women are so desperate for true love that they'll start throwing themselves at Chuck without abandon based solely on the Internet superstition that they'll find true love afterwards.
  • To elaborate, his secretary says that the rumor about his curse has yet to be disproved (a whole article about the "Dentist who you'll want a drill from", he himself made a comment about how he always ends up invited to his ex-girlfriends' weddings.) The main ones SPREADING the rumor are his happily married exes. The main reason that the women are throwing themselves at him is that for all intents and purposes, they really will find true love after shagging him.
• In Michael, John Travolta's character has this power over most of the women in the film — the sole exception being Dorothy, the female lead. Frank asks Dorothy at one point just what it is that women see in the angel. She doesn't have a clue. Michael lampshades the trope by claiming that he put a "block" on Dorothy. But Michael is an angel, so it's not out of keeping for him to have magical powers. This is presumably the source of his power over women, and how he can arbitrarily "block" Dorothy
• In A Sound of Thunder (the movie, not the story), Travis is bet upon by his co-workers to bed a woman who they are working for that day. He succeeds without even doing anything — she wanted him so badly that she convinced the doorman she was his cousin and went up to his apartment butt-naked for the chance to have sex with him. A later dialogue between Travis and the doorman implies that women apparently do this all the time.

Live-Action TV

• Gaius Baltar gets one in Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica. Probably due to his running a cult at the time.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" pretty much epitomizes this trope, though in that particular case it is magic-induced. Quickly proves to be a case of Blessed with Suck, as the women begin to compete with each other, before deciding that if they can't have Xander, nobody can.
  • "Him", centers around a high school student who has this effect on any woman who he speaks to, to include his classmate Dawn, Dawn's older sister (and school counselor) Buffy, and lesbian Willow. Also a case of magic in this case (though different magic from Xander's situation), and heading towards similar results as the first case. This time, however, the kid had no idea what was going on.
• Doctor Who and its spinoff Torchwood have the charming Extreme Omnisexual and Chivalrous Pervert Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), who could probably be nicknamed Jack "Flirts With Anything That Moves" Harkness. And a lot of those people, regardless of species, gender or even if they're robots, find themselves reciprocating, because Even the Guys Want Him.
• Gossip Girl's Chuck Bass. If you can get past the Narm, that is.
• Happy Days: The Fonz can get a whole herd of women to flock to his side by simply snapping his fingers. A Hilarious Outtake showed the guys of the show mocking this characteristic by going in place of the girls after the finger snap. Well, we are talking about The Fonz here, or at least the Flanderized Fonzie; before this, he was just a loser-mechanic who scored the lowest female trash in Milwaukee.
• The titular character in Lucifer gets this several times.

Manhua

• Universal Love Grocery: Right after giving a seminar at Pepper University, Shiye is swarmed by female students asking for his number and if he has a girlfriend. He refuses to answer such personal questions and asks them to step back, clearly looking very uncomfortable.

Video Games

• Al-Cid Margrace in both Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy Tactics A2. Interestingly, in A2, female Hume NPCs are rare, so he's mostly surrounded by Viera and Gria.
• In Ikemen Sengoku, Shingen's route has a scene of him greeting the female main character with numerous scantily-clad women draped over him, causing her to liken him to "a villainous James Bond." However, this scene is actually a subversion: the His Perspective version of it reveals that the women are actually spies who only pretend to be his harem as a disguise and that while he has slept with some of them, it was limited to only occasional one-night stands done just for friendly comfort.
• Persona 3:
  • Early on, Akihiko asks you and Junpei to meet him at the police station...while surrounded by a group of (according to Junpei) very attractive girls. Humourously, Akihiko completely ignores them for the whole event, implying that he's used to this trope and even finds it rather annoying.
  • The female MC social link also takes this on, a bit: while he may find a lot of girls who are attracted to him, it's been a long time since he's found anyone who has affection for him...

Webcomics

• Commander Kitty dreams of being one.
• Count Vinny from Erfworld summons some Archons with a snap of his fingers here◊.

Western Animation

• Happens to Kuzco in an episode of The Emperor's New School when he drinks a potion that makes every girl see him as a hunk... it does not turn out well.

Real Life

• Truth in Television. For Hugh Hefner anyway. The ability of a man to do this outside of the Playboy Mansion has yet to be demonstrated, though. It's speculated that it was more about Hef's unfathomable wealth and connections than his raw sexuality; which, for the last decade or so of his life, simply had to be running on fumes. (And a little blue pill). Six of one, seven of the other. After his death, various former girlfriend stepped up and gave differing accounts: some said they loved him, others called him a control freak who ran everything on a schedule and demanded sex that not even he seemed to actually enjoy.
• Wesley Snipes reported in an interview that Woody Harrelson had this going on back in the Nineties. Snipes couldn't understand how Harrelson could be dating several women at once, who all knew about each other and didn't break up with him.

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