Do you actually read what is written?
Its not about the game requiring harem, its that they absence is specifically praised even though they were part of the local culture.
According to this expert its better to falsely represent the culture there than to present it accurately.
While accuracy obviously has its merits (particularly if one is writing about a different culture from one's own), accuracy is no excuse.
It is accurate to emphasize that poop smells extraordinarily bad, or that being struck with a savage blow to the stomach should probably cause vomiting and the smell of that vomit could easily be incapacitating to a person. The former is not particularly interesting for gameplay purposes and so, in general, one does not go into details about how stinky the party's cathole is. The latter would be actively a problem for my group, because one of my players has emetophobia and can get thrown out of sorts simply by hearing retching sounds that are a little too realistic, let alone making a big deal out of the experience of vomiting.
Cultural accuracy is a tool, a very important one. We should use it wisely. This doesn't mean "absolutely never deviate even the smallest bit from the cultures you draw on." That would at the very least be completely impossible while also inventing fictional (and usually fantastical) things. What it means is,
when you deviate from accuracy, do it with forethought and intent. And it is for that reason that this "inaccuracy" is praised: because it is a willing, knowing, intentional step away from absolute accuracy in order to pursue some end which is, in fact,
more important than absolute accuracy in this context. "Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean."
Even in the purely creative sphere, many intentionally inaccurate things are praised quite highly. The vast majority of Disney stories are almost completely inaccurate to their source material, keeping only the barest veneer of the original story. This is done in part because a lot of classic fairy tales are
horribly violent by modern standards, and thus not necessarily fit for everyday consumption by children. But it's also done in part because many of their inaccuracies are actually more interesting or entertaining than the original tale. Turning Hamlet into a heroic comedy where the only victims are
King Hamlet and, in the end, his brother Claudius and the latter's collaborators Mufasa and, in the end, his brother Scar and the latter's collaborators is a wildly inaccurate take on all three of medieval Danish history (as if the original play were even remotely historically accurate!), the story as Shakespeare wrote it, or anything remotely like lion social hierarchy. And yet it's really quite a good story, all things considered, and the deviations are more than forgivable (compared to some others I could note, like
Hercules, where most changes to both the myth and the cultural context feel jarringly out of place.)
Accuracy is among the virtues of a creative work. That means it can be both deficient and excessive. Claiming that, because one of the sources of inspiration included a thing, it
absolutely must be included in the final product and to do otherwise is a
horrible affront, regardless of any other considerations to the contrary, is a form of excess. If I had to give it a name, I'd probably call it "pedantry" or "querulousness," as opposed to the vice of deficient accuracy, which would obviously be deception. Finding and choosing the
right point between deception and pedantry is not easy. It is thus worthy of praise when, on a difficult and sensitive subject like "communicating a cultural zeitgeist for a foreign culture that is often demonized or vilified," a particular work demonstrates deftness in retaining the spirit and aesthetics of that zeitgeist without exhibiting any of the common overblown vilifications thereof. Even if in so doing, the work ceases to adhere to the highest possible standards of accuracy.
Because, again,
accuracy is a tool. It is not an end. We judge the value of that accuracy—even in scientific data!—based on what end the tool strives toward and how well it achieves that end. If higher accuracy gets in the way of productive work—again,
even in scientific data!—it not only can be but
should be drawn down to a level of accuracy that does
not get in the way of productive work. (It is, of course, very
rare for higher accuracy to get in the way or productive work when it comes to scientific data. But being more accurate about measuring the density of the luminiferous aether is not productive work because, as we have fairly well established now,
there is no luminiferous aether to measure. Higher accuracy measurements of the properties of something that most likely doesn't exist are not productive, no matter how amazingly accurate those measurements might be.)
