On Love Triangles and Why I Hate Them
I hate love triangles. More accurately, I hate the poorly executed and overdone love triangles currently infecting the YA paranormal genre. If I could wave my magic wand and remove a single trope from the currently popular tropes pile it would be - well, actually it would probably be the jerkass boyfriend who’s only ‘virtue’ is his hotness, but ( Read more... )
Besides it usually being blindingly obvious who the protagonist will choose, I think the other issue is that there never are really any stakes involved. In Twilight, we're supposed to believe that Bella choosing between Edward and Jacob is her choosing between life and death and so on and so forth, but she clearly doesn't care. Not to mention that Meyer herself makes being a vampire so full of perks that there really is no choice at all.
One could argue that there was a one-way love triangle in Beauty and the Beast, where Belle had the choice between Gaston and the Beast, but clearly was only ever going to end up with the latter. The tension comes from what happens when Belle's choice is made clear. Gaston goes on a rampage to kill the Beast and get Belle.
In the book The Night Circus, there is no secret made that Marco and Celia will fall in love, so it's pretty obvious from the start that he's going to dump Isabelle, his first girlfriend. The first time they meet, Isabelle pretty much thinks to herself "Oh shit, there he goes". When Marco actually dumps Isabelle though, she does something in revenge that has serious consequences for the story.
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