[100 Girlfriends] Shouldn’t this be more of an actual polycule by now?

The more 100 Girlfriends goes on, the more I keep coming back to the same thought: shouldn’t this be more of an actual polycule by now?

The premise is already absurdly committed to shared romance. Rentaro is not balancing a normal love triangle or even a standard harem. He is building a relationship with a ridiculous number of girls at once, and the series itself leans hard into the idea of them as one big family unit rather than just a pile of separate one-on-one pairings.

That is exactly why the series’ hesitation around romance or intimacy between the girls stands out more the longer it goes on.

At this point, it feels strange that girl-girl attraction is still so often treated as flavour rather than structure. Hakari and Karane are the clearest example. The series clearly likes playing with that dynamic. It knows there is charge there. It knows it adds energy to scenes. But a lot of the time it still feels like that intimacy is being used as a gag, a bit of fanservice, or just extra spice rather than as something that is allowed to seriously develop.

And I think that is where the series starts feeling limited.

I am not saying the manga needs to turn into full yuri. I am not saying every girl needs to be equally in love with every other girl. But once you have this many women living in this much emotional and physical closeness, it only makes sense that some of those bonds would start developing into something more openly romantic or intimate. That is just the natural direction of a setup like this.

Instead, the series often feels like it wants that possibility close enough to be exciting, but not close enough to actually change the structure of the fantasy.