Guys, does this have potential as a light novel premise?

Tenori Tejima

"Once upon a time, a hero was born with the power to control all 6 arcana (or 12 opposing elements). He was prophesized to do great things and defeat the evil demon lord.

A great battle ensued, lasting seven days. Demon lord was good; Hero could not land an ultimate killing blow. At the end of the 7th day, Hero found an opening; he managed to target the demonlord with a sealing spell that scattered his powers into 10,000 pieces all over the continent.

Unfortunately, that also left the Hero open to an attack, and the tenacious Demon Lord, before dying, tore away all of the Hero's powers and everything else from his body.

Protagonist now wakes up with no memories of being a hero (complete amnesia), magicless, and surrounded by 6 waifus, each representing an important facet the Hero once had.

Each of the waifu controls one of the different arcana. The female lead, who controls the Wave Arcana (Fire and Water magic), seems to have also inherited the Hero's unwavering righteousness and leadership skills. She rallies all the others to finish up the Hero's task by cleaning up all 10,000 evil magic that befell into the continent.

Unfortunately, the other arcana (Darkness-Light, Air-Gravity, Death-Life, Time-Entropy, and Earth-Aether), all have different agendas and personalities, and don't want to work together at all. Protagonist is now entangled between 6 waifus with god-tier magic, and has to decide what to do with them. May or may not be an isekai."

As with all harem, the main objective is how to give each girl enough character depth to be S+ tier waifu. Also possible is to just remove the protag and have the Hero divide into 6 girls, thereby making it not a harem. That might make it a little bit unique, but the question of the girls' character development still stands.

I was thinking initially to divide the elements into Fire-Light (for justice), Darkness-Death (for evil side), Water-Life (because water supports plant), Aether-Time (Aether is the things that can't be touched, so decent similarity), Gravity-Earth (for toughness) and Air-Entropy (the last ones), but this seemed too 'clean' and not at all interesting for characters to have. It would be more entertaining if they controlled contradictory elements, ones that don't synergize at all, and blamed each other for taking the element they want.

Maybe in the future they could settle their differences and combine into these "perfect duos", (i.e.: Fire-Water and Darkness-Light can't agree on anything, but can fusion into a new Fire-Light waifu when they agree to work together), but anyway, that's for the future chapters to worry about.

The main question is this: ...is it possible to make personality/quirky waifu traits for these girls that gives them an entertaining chemistry? Enough for it to be memorable and not just be an average fantasy harem rom-com? Or is this just a 'dud premise' that's going to reskin, one way or another, all the "tsundere" and the "loli" and all other anime tropes we've seen time and time again?

(for reference, I consider Date a Live and Busou Shoujo Machiavellianism to have the most solid lineup of waifus, as every girl seems to have their own unique appeal, and no one is a weak link)

Raitoiro

Conserning the main question i don't really see what you want to know, if the characters are good or not, mostly depend of what you do with them. It does seem like each waifu could easly end up covering an archtype but it's not nessecarily a problem.

I think having the hero be splited into 6 waifus without the main protag would be more interesting, or if you have a MC with a Harem make sure to have some real issues with the harem not something where somehow everybody end up friends and the hero love everyone equaly. Also if MC is magicless won't he be rather useless, he doesn’t seem need in the first place ?
Same for his amnesia, if he is revive surounded by the waifu they can just explain things to him.

Your world building, however, seems to have some issue:

@tenori-tejima said in Guys, does this have potential as a light novel premise?:

Unfortunately, that also left the Hero open to an attack, and the tenacious Demon Lord, before dying, tore away all of the Hero's powers and everything else from his body.

How can the demon be sceal and at the same time kill the hero, wasn't the Demon lord power scattered ?

Unfortunately, the other arcana (Darkness-Light, Air-Gravity, Death-Life, Time-Entropy, and Earth-Aether), all have different agendas and personalities, and don't want to work together at all. Protagonist is now entangled between 6 waifus with god-tier magic, and has to decide what to do with them. May or may not be an isekai."

The magic system seem strange on multiple points:

you said, each arcana is made of 2 opposed elements but how are air and gravity or earth aether oppose and more importantly time and entropy ?
*some elements also overlaps: time and entropy are nearly the same thing, aether is just the medium for light
*some elements look like they could be a problem, like what's a death spell ? Is it a spell that intantly kill, and if that the case why would anyone bother with any other magic when it come to combat. Or is it a word where micro-organisms don't exist and all diseases are cause by death magic? Beause otherwise it desease, mold, cancer should be life magic. Same question for time, entropy, aether, and to a lesser extent darkness.
less importantly, if gravity is an element what are magnetisme or electricity ?
also you say the hero used a spell to sceal and scatter the demon lord powers, what element was it, none really seem to fit ?
finaly what's the evil magic of the DL, is just that he use darkness and death element or is it something else entirely ?

Tenori Tejima

@raitoiro

Sorry about that. The 12 elements in there are based on the online cardgame at elementsthegame.com (it's free to play and easy to register)

We're actually having a heated debate right now as to how the elements should be divided (paired up). You can read more of it here if you want:

http://elementscommunity.org/forum/literary-arts/gravity-and-entropy-don't-pair-up/

Death element in that game is actually something like slow acting poisons, so the story counterpart of that would be the kind of magic assasins find useful.

For the Demon Lord, I imagine him as something completely non human and uses hell-spawn magic that can't be learned by anyone. It contains darkness and death, but is also mixed with things only the Demon Lord can comprehend. (I actually took the evil element from another online game, DragonFable).

However, being darkness and death, the Demon Lord's magic also has some weakness to Light. Hero was not able to land any of his ultimate killing blows (that would've killed Demon Lord then and there), so when presented with the opportunity, he settled for the next best thing by casting a very powerful Light spell which takes advantage of Demon Lord having Death and Darkness element. Even though Hero was not able to finish the Demon Lord for good, dividing his magic into tiny little pieces is more than enough to say it's a victory.

But the thing is, attacking usually leaves you open to attack yourself, so Demon Lord, as a last ditch attempt, attacks Hero with everything he's got. He employs a similarly powerful curse that restricts the Hero from using full 100% of his powers (possibly ever again). Now his legendary strength is divided into 6 parts, and worse, each 1/6th is now a sentient being that can think for itself.
Not only do these 6 waifus hate each other (insert sexist joke here), they kind of think "I'm the strongest element there is, and everyone else is just a scrub. That's why I was the Hero's favorite."

That's why, instead of taking the usual direction of an adventure novel (the waifus journey to destroy all 10,000 Demon Lord remnants), the female lead first has to convince the others to join her cause, and the only way this could ever be resolved is by brute force.

So the focus of the story would be female lead challenging the other waifus in battle to prove her strength, one by one enumeration style, like the girls in Busou Shoujo or the Generation of Miracles in Kuroko's Basketball. Maybe sometimes she wins, maybe one time she loses, maybe she works together with another waifu to bring down the top waifu, who knows. They all have their own motivations and desires, and just tolerate each other at best. The character development would come from them coming to terms with each other. Maybe they can even recreate the Hero one time when they all work together, (and if they're too fixated on arguing, maybe a second Demon Lord emerges from combined scraps)