It's difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of having a show finally deliver on the premise and promise of the harem genre after literal decades of refusal, denial, indecisiveness, laziness, exploitation. I sincerely hope seeing this success story inspires other creatives and studios to finally realize, oh right, this is the way.
Thanks for reminding me of the travesty that was the ending of To-Love-ru. The entire original manga revolved around a love triangle where one of the girls wasn't just fine with a three-way relationship but actively encouraged it. The sequel revolved around convincing the MC to actually go for the harem route, because that would make everyone happy. In the end neither happened. In regards to harem writers always pussying out, this can be blamed on so many people, especially older generations, never breaking their monogamy brainwashing and thinking that true love can only happen between TWO people, and since it is a romance story they HAVE TO have a monogamy ending. And the excuses for dragging out those plots are the worst. In particular Infinite Stratos comes to mind, where the MC appears to be denser than a black hole, but in actuality believes that leading on the girls instead of flat out telling them he's not interested is the nicer thing to do. Granted, the writer is a hack, so he probably believes it himself. Tl;dr if you're not going for a polygamy ending don't write a harem story.
