Aye, obviously TLS is a great game with a really good story and outstanding character development, but precisely because of that it feels like a very annoying misnomer by the game to insist on categorizing Simon's relationship with his lovers as being that of a "harem, but good", pretty much because a "harem" stripped of its negative institutions and only salvaging that which would conform to modern morals and gender equality would simply be a "polyamorous relationship".
I think this problem spawns mostly from the fact the game threads the line between "satire" and "deconstruction", in simple terms I think of the first as being an entirely negative depiction of the subject, while the latter is more ambivalent. In-game examples would be that the "Chosen" are a satire of adult game MCs since they are strictly portrayed in a negative light, while the game's treatment of "retro RPG tropes" would be closer to deconstruction, because while the game is willing to make fun and point out some of the nonsense of it all, it still treats them with some reverence at times and even makes use of them to create a better experience for its audience.
With that in mind, I think that for whatever reason the dev decided that "harems" would be a target of deconstruction in TLS, not satire, which ultimately means that the writing needs to insist on the ambivalence of "harems" by not distancing itself from the subject when giving positive portrayals. This results in the game insisting on portraying Simon's relationship with his lovers as being "a relationship that has the harem institution as a basis, but this one is actually nice and fully respectful of women's autonomy and equal standing", which leads back to the problem that personally I think that everything "good and moral" about a "harem" can autonomously stand on its own as simply being "polyamory", so there is no need to reinvent the wheel by trying to whitewash the word "harem", since this ends up creating confusion.
Medieval women in male dominated cultures rarely had the autonomy to "choose" to be in relationships that afforded political and economical benefits to their families. It is absolutely a fantasy to think it wasn't historically a sexist institution, even though it can be deemed more fair than alternatives such as concubinage. Also obviously the institution did not afford the possibility of the women choosing to have other male partners aside from the owner of the harem, something modern poly relationships could support, so it is erroneous to call it a simple "rebranding".
