Pictured: Lati. Camera-shy: Lord Arc.
World's End Harem: Fantasia (終末のハーレム ファンタジア Shuumatsu no Harem: Fantasia) is an Ecchi Harem Genre manga written by LINK and drawn by SAVAN. The comic is a Dark Fantasy reimagining of LINK's previous series World's End Harem. Very much Not Safe for Work.In a dying world where horrific monsters and a poisonous miasma prey on the fringes of civilization, and a tyrannical Empire is expanding across surrounding countries, the young Lord Arc, the bookish, unmotivated teenage heir to the House of Nargala, has fallen in love with his cousin Aurelia of House Isteshia. Just one problem: her more powerful family has promised her to the Madalis Empire's crown prince. Arc and Aurelia try to run away together, but are caught, and the physically weak Arc is tossed in his father's dungeon overnight as punishment.
During that night, however, Arc is visited by Lati, a mysterious and scantily clad dark elven sorceress, who offers him the power to make the world his: an ancient magic, "Macht", that will grant him the power of a black dragon. From then on, any woman who partakes of his blood is infused with his power, in exchange for becoming unable to live without consuming his bodily fluids.
Now possessed of both motivation and power to match, and surrounded by a growing harem of talented women, Arc sets himself to reversing his county's declining fortunes and building alliances, to prepare to attack the Empire itself and take Aurelia back.
World's End Harem: Fantasia began serialization in April 2018 in Shueisha's seinen publication Ultra Jump. Beginning in 2019 it was published in English under Seven Seas Entertainment's adult-oriented Ghost Ship imprint. It has a High School AU Spin-Off, Worlds End Harem Fantasia Academy, drawn by Okada Ando.
This manga contains examples of the following tropes:
- Altar Diplomacy:
- Aurelia is in love with Arc, but is married off to the prince of the Madalis Empire to advance House Isteshia's foreign policy goals. Their failed attempt to run away together kickstarts the Myth Arc.
- Discussed after Wenna turns up pregnant. Tia reminds Arc that even if he wanted to, he couldn't marry her: his hand in marriage is a valuable policy tool, meaning a child sired with a castle maid will have to remain illegitimate.
- Animal Motifs: All four houses of Isteshia are represented by a specific reptile, and when Arc launches his Civil War, it's even called the War of the Reptiles. Even their military doctrine and units use their respective reptile name.
- Arc and the House of Nargala are associated with lizards, and he later adds the Fiery Salamander when he decides to reunify all four Houses into the Kingdom of Fafnir.
- Isteshia is associated with crocodiles. Kaimeia is well known for her sharp teeth, voracious appetite and aggressive personality.
- Garsul is associated with turtles. Gidu Garsul is known for speaking slowly, but he's a certified Mighty Glacier. Meanwhile his daughter Miu is instead a very powerful Barrier Warrior.
- Enshu is associated with snakes. Boa Enshu not only has an oddly long bifid tongue, her magical technique involves twisting arrows in different directions like a snake.
- Cassia and the Great Duchy of Gorche are associated with a white tiger instead.
- Balkanize Me: The counties of Isteshia, Nargala, Enshu, and Garsul are all remnants of the ancient Kingdom of Fafnir, which broke apart along dynastic lines long ago. The four families of the House of Isteshia are all descended from Fafnir's royal family. Arc ultimately goes to war with his relatives to reunite the kingdom in order to defeat the empire.
- Big Eater: True to her crocodile motif, Kaimeia is known for her voracious appetite and Scary Teeth.
- Breath Weapon: Arc acquires a highly destructive breath of black fire that is only usable when his Macht is near its maximum.
- Can't Have Sex, Ever:
- Justified during the year Arc spends preparing for Lati's ritual: one of the conditions is that he abstain from sex, which turns out to be because she needs his male essence to be at the absolute maximum for the ritual to work (apparently riffing on the myth that masturbation reduces male potency).
- Downplayed afterwards: Arc avoids having vaginal sex with his harem due to the heightened risk of pregnancy, though nearly anything else goes. The exception is Lati, who routinely has vaginal sex with him to adjust his power levels: he hasn't infused her with Macht so the pregnancy risk issue doesn't apply, and Felaris later shows him that Fantasy Contraception does still work.
- Crapsack World: Monsters preying on humanity, the land itself becoming toxic to men, The Empire conquering any country it can reach and secretly amplifying the miasma poisoning the land, yeah, it's your basic Dark Fantasy world.
- Deus Sex Machina: The ritual to give Arc the power of Macht involves Lati taking his virginity inside a magic circle in an ancient temple she had him refurbish. She has sex with him several more times to teach him various ways to control his Macht levels.
- Does Not Like Spam: Arc hates liver, but ends up having to eat it once a week as a Power-Up Food while preparing for the Macht ritual.
- The Empire: The Madalis Empire is a massive country that spans the center of the continent and has been gradually subjugating the smaller polities on its fringes, and is responsible for amplifying the miasma affecting the far north. In Act II we're shown that they've turned the Free Cities in the southeast into client states (Imperial knights can do as they please to Retta's countrymen despite his city still theoretically being an independent state), and Arges Isteshia's marriage of Aurelia to Imperial Crown Prince Deutius was Altar Diplomacy in hopes of maintaining the Fafnir counties' independence.
- Evil Uncle: After Arc's father falls ill and Arc becomes the acting Count of Nargala, his uncle Tute attempts a palace coup with his aide Tia, who promises to marry "the head of the House of Nargala". It was a Batman Gambit by Arc himself: he suspected other nobles might try to make a power play, and planted Tia, whom he had saved as a child, as a Honey Trap—as she said, she serves "the head of the House of Nargala". After retaking the castle, Arc beheads him and consolidates his rule.
- Fantasy Contraception: In volume 6, Felaris eats some nuts that she says will prevent pregnancy, and then insists that Arc finish inside her. Arc also offers "moon fruit" to Celine in chapter 35 before feeding her his blood and then taking her virginity.
- Fantasy World Map: One is included in volume 7. The continent resembles North America in shape and the Madalis Empire occupies the center (approximately equivalent to the area of the Louisiana Purchase), with its capital Dio sitting on a river near the western continental divide. The Counties of Isteshia, Nargala, Garsul, and Enshuu are approximately the mid-Atlantic states (Nargala to the west, bordering the Empire across the eastern continental divide, while Isteshia is on the coast), with the Holy Capital approximating the Gulf Coast states, the Alliance of Free Cities approximating Florida, and the Elven Forest approximating New York. Further north, the independent Duchies of Gorche (Cassia's homeland) and Ezentin are respectively southwestern Canada and New England, while the Kingdom of Lancia takes up the west coast and the "Southern Heresies" drop off the map at about mid-Mexico.
- Gratuitous German: "Macht", the magic that Lati arranges for Arc to acquire, is just the German for "power", "strength", or "authority". And somewhat amusingly, it's a feminine noun.
- Hero's Slave Harem: Zig-Zagged. Once Arc gains the power of Macht, any woman who consumes his blood becomes unable to live without consuming his fluids (sweat, saliva, blood, and semen all work equally well). Lati took it upon herself to kidnap the first couple of women and infuse them without even Arc's consent, and later makes clear that he'll have to continue adding women to his harem or else run the risk of a Phlebotinum Overdose. After Wenna and Cassia, Arc has a Heel Realization about it and starts making sure that anyone else he infuses with Macht is fully informed of the consequences and benefits beforehand and explicitly consents. He backslides when his gambit to take control of House Isteshia from his grandfather requires him to covertly feed his blood to some of his female relatives—which backfires on him horribly when one woman detects the blood beforehand and the other turns out to be a Black Widow with a compulsion to kill any man she falls in love with. He returns to seeking consent after this.
- Hotter and Sexier: Reito Mizuhara in original-flavor World's End Harem was virtually a Celibate Hero despite the women throwing themselves at him (because he was trying to save himself for his Childhood Friend Romance); the series split its time between him and the more sexually active Shota Doi. Fantasia focuses on a single male lead, Arc, who has a harem of women who literally have to feed off his magic power by consuming his bodily fluids, and has significantly more sex and sex-adjacent scenes than the original.
- Kissing Cousins: Arc and Aurelia are initially said to be cousins, in an already closely related group of noble families. Chapter 31 clarifies the Tangled Family Tree: The Patriarch Arges Isteshia, despite being referred to as Arc's grandfather, is in fact his maternal great-uncle (Arc's mother was Arges's niece), and Aurelia is his granddaughter. This makes the two of them second cousins.
- Mayfly–December Friendship: Felaris's initial Fantastic Racism towards humans stems from an example of this Played for Drama. She befriended Arc's paternal grandfather when he visited their village when she was a child and he a young man, promised to come visit him, and then did so as an adolescent without considering how much longer elves live than humans: Lord Nargala had already died of old age.
- Missing Mom: Arc's mother is a complete question mark in the series.
- My God, What Have I Done?:
- At one point Arc's Macht overloads and he forces himself on Wenna. After he comes to his senses, he finds her unconscious in the bed with her clothes shredded. He's horrified, is only slightly mollified after she regains consciousness and tells him she enjoyed it, and has the same reaction all over again later when he finds out he impregnated her.
- Arc gets hit with this one more time, and this time its the biggest one in the series, when he uses a death curse to try and kill the Crown Prince of the Empire, only for a spell the Prince cast before hand to activate, causing the curse to rebound onto the Prince's wife, and Arc's love, Aurelia, and (maybe?) kill her instead. In this case, however, after a period of mourning, Arc resolves himself to kill the man he truly blames for Aurelia's death: the Crown Prince himself.
- Mystical Pregnancy: Arc and Wenna find out the hard way that if he has unprotected sex with a woman he's infused with Macht, she's virtually guaranteed to become pregnant as a result.
- Only Mostly Dead: Implied. Prince Deutius claims that Aurelia was killed by the death curse meant for him, but refuses to let any of her relatives see the body and is later shown preserving her body in a crystal in service to a mysterious prophecy mentioned in the prologue. So Aurelia may not actually be dead.
- Our Elves Are Different: High elves and dark elves, and never the twain shall meet: the "Black Tribe" are evidently not on good terms with the high elves. Arc ends up introducing Felaris to Lati in chapter 28, and has a threesome with them both.
- Porn with Plot: Even more so than original-flavor World's End Harem: like many other Ghost Ship manga, the series is virtually softcore hentai but with an extensive plot carrying the sexual content. SAVAN is mostly known for outright pornographic manga, and the relatively frequent sex scenes in this series are almost as explicit as his previous works, relying on camera angles and whited-out genitals to keep it inside the lines of Japanese censorship laws.
- Sexually Transmitted Superpowers: Arc is empowered with the magic of a black dragon, Macht, by the dark elven sorceress Lati, who takes his virginity in a Sex Magic ritual to accomplish this.
- Superhuman Transfusion: Once Arc is empowered with Macht, any woman who ingests his blood has her physical and magical abilities significantly increased, at the cost of becoming unable to live anymore without periodically consuming his bodily fluids, as well as being almost guaranteed to become pregnant if he has unprotected vaginal sex with her.
- Tangled Family Tree: The four counties of Isteshia, Nargala, Garsul, and Enshu are successor states of the Kingdom of Fafnir, which balkanized long ago, and their four ruling houses are all descended from Fafnir's royal family and variously interrelated. The Patriarch Arges Isteshia is Arc's maternal great-uncle, though Arc refers to him as his grandfather, and Arc's Love Interest Aurelia is Arges's direct granddaughter, which in turn makes Arc and Aurelia second cousins. And then there's Boa, Countess Enshu, who is notably not a blood relative but rather the widow of the former count who seized power after her husband was poisoned.
- Training Montage: Arc spends a full year in this after Lati informs him the conditions to become a proper receptacle for Macht: he practices swordplay with Celine and studies politics and economics with various learned men, while eating animal livers and powdered mandragora root to build up his body and magic potential, and actively avoiding sexual stimulation to maximize his male essence.
- Virgin Power:
- Magical power in the series partly runs on the notion that power is expelled by sexual activity. It thus logically follows that virgins or people who otherwise rarely indulge are the most powerful mages... at least according to the series' folklore.
- Zig-Zagged with main character Arc Nargala, who is a virgin at the start of the series (since he's a teenager) and is required by the dark elven sorceress Lati to abstain from any form of sexual activity for a full year to help build up magic power... for a ritual to infuse him with Sex Magic called Macht that specifically involves Lati taking his virginity. Afterwards, he alternately abstains and indulges on the advice of Lati to manage his power levels.
- Secondary character "Magical Vir—GIRL Johanna"—her words—is a wizard who has kept her virginity ostensibly to enhance her magic potential. She's a little sensitive about it. She ultimately consumes Arc's blood when she needs a power boost during the Battle of Bucket Gorge and joins his harem.
- Deutius, Crown Prince of the Madalis Empire, is an aspiring archmage, and refuses to consummate with his wife, Arc's cousin Aurelia Isteshia, on the grounds of not wanting his powers reduced—preferring to conjure Naughty Tentacles to occupy her when she presses him on producing an heir. On the other hand he's also jealous enough that he placed a curse on her that will kill both her and her partner if she has sex with anyone else.
- Virgin-Shaming: Self-inflicted by Joanna. She remains celibate to maintain Virgin Power but is still irritated by the prospect, which is shown when she repeatedly introduces herself as "Magical Virgin Joanna" instead of her intended intro of "Magical Girl Joanna".
