To Pick A Side
Love triangles: the picture perfect finish to made-up problems or something more? A deeper look on this much loathed trope
Betty and James are highschool sweethearts and quite happy together. Sometime in August, James meets someone else — salt air, beach, summer sand, meetings behind the malls. She is “a figment of his worst intentions”; he is “not [hers] to lose” but the desire was enough for a while. Word spreads fast and Betty finds out — choose two girls, lose the one, she wistfully reflects of the time. James has excuses. I dreamt of you all summer long, he tells her; he’s seventeen and has no idea about girls and the world at large. Plus, I saw you dance with him, he adds, slightly accusatory; she should know he hates crowds. But he likes her a lot. Does she like him too? Can he forgive her? James takes the chance; he shows up at her party, wearing her cardigan. Will they kiss again in front of all her stupid friends? Will she have him? Find out next week in Taylor Swift’s The Teenage Love Triangle.
Maybe you’ll tell me this isn’t a love triangle; I’m inclined to agree, because James is basically cheating. But even the more “traditional” love triangles — Bella, Edward, and Jacob of Twilight; Alina, Mal, and the Darkling in the Shadow and Bone trilogy; Inuyasha, Kikyo, and Kagome of Inuyasha — all of it has me roll my eyes. I acknowledge I’m not reinventing the wheel here nor do I have any new perspective to offer with this opinion. Perhaps one thing I can say in my defense is that romance is a genre I typically avoid, so maybe my sample size is too small to see better executions. In either case, when I saw it in Business Proposal, I got so upset that multiple times near the end I had a goal: I wanted to prove myself wrong. I wanted to see what love triangles are about — what they are, why they’re disliked, what they can be at their best.
Business Proposal is about Shin Hari (Kim Sejeong), who is a food scientist at the big conglomerate gofoods. She is also the childhood friend of chaebol daughter Jin Youngseo (Seol Inah), and frequently has to stand in for her whenever Youngseo’s father sets her up for a blind date. Hari dresses herself up and acts so outrageously that the man will never consider Youngseo. Things change when the blind date is Kang Taemoo (Ahn Hyoseop), who not only enjoys “Youngseo”’s boisterous attitude — he is also the CEO of gofoods and Hari’s employer. Taemoo quickly finds out that Youngseo wasn’t the real Youngseo and offers Hari a... business proposal. In exchange for money (and later: him not financially ruining her), she has to pretend to be his girlfriend, so he won’t have to go on blind dates himself.
Enter Minwoo (Song Wonseok). The first thing we learn from him is that he is a chef and that Hari crushes on him hard. They’re comfortable with each other (though that’s not a nuance the English subtitles capture, they talk informally in Korean, something Hari doesn’t do with her employer) and Hari glances his way a lot. She’s devastated when the gift he has for her birthday — tickets to an artist both like — is so she can go with a male friend, meaning not him. Making things worse: Minwoo gets back with his ex-girlfriend, Yoora (Woohee). Case closed, Hari thinks; she decides to get over it and goes with Taemoo. When Minwoo finds out, though, he turns sour. And thanks to the job at gofoods that Hari lands for him, Minwoo directly meets Taemoo! Rivalry and jealousy ensue. Minwoo thinks Taemoo is not a good match for her; he asks Taemoo why he dates Hari out of all people and he asks Hari if she is being coerced to a situation she doesn’t want to be in. Taemoo does no such thing to Hari. He does, however, open up to her and eventually shows vulnerability.
There are a couple of issues here. Minwoo is dating somebody else, yet we’re supposed to believe that Minwoo’s behavior and words about and towards Hari only comes from a place of friendship and never attraction or romance from neither end. Take Episode 7, Taemoo and Minwoo have a fishing competition only to neglect Hari, who increasingly gets more nauseaous from the sea and has to be carried to the hospital — all while Yoora is present. Yoora gets increasingly jealous over Hari, yet it never seems to occur to Minwoo what a douchebag he is for trying to control a girl that he is not dating and neglecting the person he is dating. Hari has to put him into place several times about this matter; for her, he is no longer an option as she is more and more into Taemoo as the show progresses. To top it all off, turns out Yoora only dated Minwoo to make Hari jealous; when Minwoo finds out, he still chases after Hari. It is Hari that has to remind him that his girlfriend is inside and just revealed she never loved him. It barely feels like a human response; no emotion, no hurt, only a blank stare. As a coda, Minwoo and Hari have a final meeting, and Minwoo asks her for forgiveness just before he leaves to Italy — “a childhood dream of his,” as we’re told for the first time in twelve episodes. Hari tells him that a lot of time has to pass for them to be friends again.
All this chaos that he instigates only to be moved aside for the romantic endgame, even though he has never been a viable option in her eyes. I do not know the Minwoo Hari has been into for years at all, which I should because I’m supposed to be going through this journey with her. Yoora is even worse: while her motivations make sense — that’s her boyfriend getting cozy with a girl he’s not into, the very girl she’s jealous of — we do not know that she’s jealous of Hari until the very end, by which point it is too late. And worst of all, I know nothing about Hari. Hari reacts when Taemoo needs her. Hari reacts to Minwoo and Yoora the only way it makes sense. Hari only ever reacts. Even the supposed contract that is supposed to be out of her volition is because she has no choice.
I registered two love triangles, zeroing in on both Hari-Minwoo-Taemoo in the early half and Hari-Minwoo-Yoora in the later half. In both cases, events are poorly lead up and its climactic moments ring hollow as a result. Because Hari and Taemoo ending up together is a foregone conclusion due to the fake dating trope that holds more weight, the conflict generated by the love triangle only exists to artificially spice things up. There’s nothing that comes out for the characters either. We do not know the conclusion to Yoora as a character. If Minwoo is sorry, it’s dealt with too quickly. Hari only elevates in social status but doesn’t grow, because there’s nothing to grow from when all you do is react. The only winner here is Taemoo, who is allowed to develop from a block of ice to a Prince Charming, turning from perfect in theory to perfect in practice; I often got the sense HaeHwa, who wrote the webcomic and co-wrote the series, had a clear bias for him. In the final episode, he proposes to Hari while cherry blossoms fall all around her. The picture perfect finish to made-up problems.
“Conflict only for conflict’s sake” — Business Proposal encapsulates perfectly why people do not like love triangles. But this is just one form of the love triangle: TV Tropes counts thirteen on their “Triang Relations” page. The dynamics include situations where A likes B and B likes C and C likes A (therefore making one of them not heterosexual), an unrequited crush on C’s end, even cheating (like The Teenage Love Triangle). Usually when people talk about love triangle, they mean two people vying for the protagonist’s attention and the drama resulting from it. It is done to generate narrative tension, Trope Talk declares, continuing that ostensibly, the love triangle make us feel for at least two thirds of the triangle to get the desired end result off the audience.
It’s easy to think of the latter claim as true. Famously, Pretty in Pink changed the romantic endgame because test audiences didn’t react well to the original ending, insisting that main character Andie (Molly Ringwald) end up with Blane (Andrew McCarthy) rather than Duckie (Jon Cryer); you wouldn’t get to this point if you didn’t care about two thirds. In the same way, the reason why anyone would consider the three-way dynamic of Marla, the Narrator, and Tyler in Fight Club as a “love triangle” is because we spend a considerable amount with the three characters, and thus either care for them or root for at least one of them. Each node — Tyler to Marla, Marla to the Narrator, and Tyler to the Narrator — have unique, tense dynamics rife with conflict. One could read romance into it if one were so inclined, and this love triangle would even go all three ways, as Tyler and the Narrator have their fair share of homoerotic moments both in movie and novel (regardless of how Tyler isn’t real). To make matters more definitive, unlike the novel, which ends with the narrator’s hospitalization and Tyler never really dying, the 1999 movie adaptation ends on the narrator (Edward Norton) shooting himself in the mouth—thus killing Tyler (Brad Pitt)—and Marla (Helena Bonham-Carter) holding hands as the entire financial sector collapses. You met me at a very strange time, the narrator says. Cue the guitar riffs. How’s that for an endgame?
But consider the 1967 adaptation of The Graduate. This movie too fulfills the basic list of criteria that makes up a love triangle: one protagonist who wants, and is desired by, two others that are of the same gender (worse — of the same family); a clearly defined endgame; and conflict that is borne out of indecision. But as characters, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) and Elaine (Katherine Ross) pale next to Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman). He desires Mrs. Robinson because he wants to feel like a real adult after graduating; he desires Elaine because with her, he can be vulnerable, rebellious, and honest — he can be himself. We don’t know how Mrs. Robinson feels about cheating her husband, or how she feels about Benjamin besides finding him attractive. We also don’t know why Elaine would want to be with Benjamin. The movie confidently assumes that the drive-by dinner will be enough to justify her attraction to him, but it is flimsy. The point of the love triangle was to showcase the conflict within Benjamin. As early as the first moments of the film, we are promised that the movie will be about the titular graduate, and it is very much about his growth; we care about one of three, and that one character gets to grow and change.
I wouldn’t have called The Graduate a love triangle, because there is a fourth character that is not to be dismissed (Mr. Robinson played by William Daniels — Elaine’s father, Mrs. Robinson’s husband). But it does show the flexibility of this trope and the vague parameters it operates with. Three characters with different dynamics on each node, complete with (often heteronormative) assumptions that X does Y to Z because “he/she likes her/him”, is enough to describe the dynamic between all three as love triangle. It’s likely why ScreenRant included Neon Genesis Evangelion’s three main characters — Shinji, Asuka, and Rei — as a love triangle, though each of the teenagers are psychologically messed up and the series never shows a hint of romantic affection between any one node to another. (Shinji is most tender with Kaworu, actually!) End of Evangelion has a pretty gross scene in which Shinji jacks off to Asuka’s unconscious body; Asuka’s main conflict drives from her traumatic events with her mother. Yet here I read most of [the fans] know about the tsundere of Asuka and her conflicting feelings towards Shinji. Unless you discuss the same story, it turns to a zero sum game where the end conclusion is the truism “it boils down to execution”. This is also why, unlike with the tropes friends/enemies to lovers, nobody will absorb the trope of a love triangle as part of their personality, unless it’s to declare that you hate it on a perceived notion of seeing it “everywhere”.
There is, however, something that comes close on the positive spectrum. Second lead syndrome: It’s when you never like the main love interest, but the other one of the love triangle — the second lead. Most commonly talked about in j/k-drama circles, it’s to the point where there’s blog posts written about it and there’s YouTube videos that reason why second leads are excellent and amazing. It’s related to the fact how the second lead, usually an archetype of an ideal man, is the dream man the viewers (most often heterosexual women) want to have and date in their own lives. On a storytelling level, the male lead has to show flaws, or even be outright unlikeable, in order to create initial tension and character development later, thus earn the female lead’s (and, by extension, the viewer’s) love and care. This means that when the male lead isn’t to the viewer’s taste, there is always the second lead to fawn over; a writer’s safety net. Of course, you could swap this, thus making the second male lead more compelling and thus attractive while the main relationship is smooth sailing. Business Proposal’s second lead would be Taemoo’s assistant, Cha Sunghoon (Kim Minkyu), who has his own love interest in Jin Youngseo. If Taemoo and Hari’s relationship isn’t to the viewer’s taste, there’s always Youngseo and Sunghoon. But because Youngseo and Sunghoon have their own plot with their own conflicts, the conflict that a love triangle creates needs to come from someone else. Minwoo, the third male lead, has two functions within the story only: first, to provide ample conflict without any regard on whether or not it makes internal sense; and second, to contrast against Taemoo and set Taemoo up as eventual love interest. By design, this is a character where you will never feel second lead syndrome over. This blog post in Otakukart even lists that as net positive, snidely adding: it doesn’t look like [Minwoo] will manage to gain the sympathy of the spectators. So, get ready for a guilt-free watch!
When it comes to love triangles in k-dramas, it seems feeling guilt for the second lead is part of the game. As Amanda Arambulo wrote for TheBeauLife: What’s exciting about second lead syndrome is the irrational feeling of rooting for someone who we know is going to lose in the first place. We are expecting the heartbreak but we are still in for the ride. How can you not, Arambulo argues, when the second lead is either perfectly executed or a perfect projection? It’s not without reason that the subtitle of the article reads: A nod to the “better choice”.
For around thirty minutes, the 2001 movie Bridget Jones’ Diary gives Bridget (Renee Zellweger) a choice: to be with handsome, haughty CEO Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), or the arrogant, cold barrister Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). To make matters worse, Daniel and Mark know and hate each other; Mark, so Daniel says, was the person who slept with his fiancée. Initially, Daniel and Bridget are happy together until there is another woman in Daniel’s flat and he reveals that she was his fiancée, leaving Bridget heartbroken (and, crucially, single again). Right after this scene, Mark confesses to her that she likes him just as she is; later we watch Mark save Bridget from her terrible cooking skills, then eat the mangled dinner together with Bridget’s friends. It’s a warm, homely atmosphere, and in that moment Daniel shows up with a bottle of wine. He looks genuinely apologetic. You’re the only one who can save me, Bridge, he tells her, I need you. What about the engagement he had with fiancée Lara? Lara realized Daniel was into Bridget. Totally fucking finito. When Daniel admits to Bridget that their relationship wasn’t just a sex thing, we see on Bridget’s face that’s all she wanted to hear. Just as they’re about to kiss, Mark walks in — he’s going now. Bridget grows suspicious. She asks Daniel: Why are you here? Daniel asks back: Why is that wanker Darcy here? Said “wanker” comes back up to tell Daniel to meet him outside. Daniel gets one quip in before Mark punches him; a fight ensues from which Mark walks away a winner. Mark punches him one last time despite Daniel asking him to stop. Here, both the viewer and Bridget are with the man who we think is apologetic and thus deserves a second chance, rather than the guy who has also cheated, but where we don’t know if he’s apologised for it the same way Daniel has. Bridget calls Mark out: You give the impression of being all moral and noble and normal [...] but you’re just as bad as the rest of them! Mark shoots back: I see that I’ve been laboring under a misapprehension. He leaves; immediately Bridget feels bad about it.
What would you have done instead of her? Presented with a choice, the protagonist must decide. If the characters are colorful enough and interact, it is outright electrifying to root for one dynamic and hope they end up, even more so than in other stories where the romantic relationships are bidirectional from the get-go. It might likely be the main conflict of the story, meaning this will hog most screen/pagetime and accordingly also fan discussion. I see why Trope Talk refers to it as simply existing for the sake of narrative tension. But describing its reason of existence as narrative tension alone is simply stating a technical fact, especially so in the realm of the Anglophone world. Pick up any writing advice book written by a white man, and conflict, character arc, tension is all he will talk about. If it truly all boiled down on tension, viewers would be invested into every plot beat. It's not the same as other forms of the dramatic question like “will X save the world” or “will Y kill everybody” or “will Z confess to A [alone]”. A great charm of a love triangle is the decision. The love triangle, the second, equally valid option — and the fact that it involves another character — opens up a different avenue to the viewer. Here, the decision and how it will shake out and what the viewer acting as the character would do squeezes out the strongest reaction of viewers both male (browse through any reaction thread of hit manga and anime Nisekoi) and female (Twilight).
To go back to Pretty in Pink, in which Andie is desired by both Blane and Duckie but only desires Blane herself, the original ending had Duckie “win”. The film leads up to it: there’s a scene of Duckie talking to Andie’s father about his crush; there are various moments of him, alone, talking to himself (and to the viewer) about his inability to confess to his best friend; he fights Blane’s friend Steff (James Spader) because he talked smack about Andie. Though he ruins his relationship with Andie after he acts jealous over Blane and Andie in the club (that Andie used to frequent but that Duckie could, in a blunt metaphor, never enter), he is there, at prom, waiting for Andie, who thought she had to go alone. You’re stunning, he tells her; she’s overjoyed. The reunion was originally a romantic one, but test audiences hated it, stating, Forget the politics. We want her to get the cute boy. In the ending we have today, Steff tells Blane, she certainly went and found herself the most interesting date that our generation has to offer. Blane has had enough: you’re full of shit, he says. He apologises to Andie, and they leave outside and kiss in the rain. Duckie is dumped again, but a girl notices her, credited only as “Duckette”. Four people, two decisions, neat and simple: the love triangle is dissolved, everybody is happy.
It’s commendable and speaks to the screenplay’s overall strength that John Hughes, the screenwriter, could change the ending up in five pages (!) and still maintain narrative sense. Though it certainly comes left field after the reunion of Duckie and Andie, which represented a pivotal moment for Duckie’s character arc, it still brings a conclusion to Andie and especially Blane, who would be paid dust otherwise. Blane and Andie are sweet together, and Blane apologising to her marks a good point in his character arc. Here, it’s enough for Duckie to show up for his character arc to come to a conclusion, one that revolves a little too much around a woman who is plainly uninterested in him. So the consolatory prize Duckette isn’t too irritating. For Andie, being with Blane represents her need to be seen beyond her wealth and class status; being with Duckie would mean her acceptance of her class status as nothing to be ashamed of, or perhaps more crudely put a lesson to appreciate what you already have. From a technical standpoint, both are led up okay, although having Duckie tell us that he wants Andie, but to never show us how well they would go together — unlike Blane and Andie — was most probably the death knell for test audiences. Perhaps the best decision would have been to have both show up at the prom and for Andie to choose no one. A cop out? Perhaps, but a conclusion nonetheless. A woman is empowered by herself!
I am most interested by the comment the test audiences made: we want the cute boy. The want got granted here — in most stories, especially novels, it’s simply up to the author to make a convincing case and not show their hand. Although it could be a foregone conclusion that in Twilight Bella was always meant to be with Edward as Julia Cudney says, the narrative in the books did often toy with Bella and Jacob, the safe choice compared to the danger that Edward represented. Perhaps Jacob never had a shot; after all, he did force her to a kiss in Eclipse and later imprinted himself onto Bella’s daughter in Breaking Dawn, but all the same, he was an equal second choice before he became an obstacle that retroactively only became a detour for Bella. (It is also possible that Stephenie Meyer didn’t really know what to do with him, considering that imprinting move). Love triangles are also effective in forking the road, thus showing two representations of the protagonist’s life: in Shadow and Bone, Mal is the childhood friend and represents the family that Alina wants to protect, while the Darkling is the first person to witness Alina’s powers, and thus represents the otherworldly powers that Alina wields. Alina has a crush on Mal since the start of the novel, and Mal reciprocates her feelings. Thus, the Darkling turns from second option to obstacle and opponent. In order to fully close the door on the idea of Alina and Darkling together, Bardugo has the Darkling betray Alina and hurt her friends and play mind games with her, and on a storytelling level, this has the nice side effect to reinforce the die that have been long been cast in Mal’s favor. Bardugo tries to humanize the Darkling over the course of two books, but he has crossed a line he could never return from, a point repeated over and over. It didn’t stop people from wanting Alina and Darkling to be together either way. To them, the enticing darkness was simply the better choice — if not for the characters, then for the reader’s wish fulfillment.
If Hari was really meant to have a choice between Taemoo and Minwoo, there are two simple tweaks that keep both keep the conflict and convenient contrast between the wrong and the right choice: one, make Minwoo single; two, make him work with Hari, not just the single instance that happened in Episode 7 (the same episode where Hari faints after Taemoo and Minwoo fight) but directly in her team. Stretch the conflict out for more than one episode, set up the show’s main conflict based on this while retaining all of Minwoo’s unpleasant behavior, and you not only have your second lead lovers fawn over Sunghoon, the sleight of hand will no longer be so obvious. Of course, this is always easier said than done. It is just as likely this would feel tedious to watch regardless. Perhaps Hari and Taemoo never needed another one. She’s poor, he’s rich; forget the politics, we want the cute boy.
With the conclusion too obvious, love triangles can feel as though they take up too much space in the narrative, or introduce a point of conflict that adds nothing to the result. The journey seems secondary, which is why people dislike love triangles — done poorly, like any other plot point can be, it truly only seems designed to fill pages and runtime. It doesn’t help that a lot of the understanding of love triangles comes from the trope appearing practically everywhere as a cheap shorthand of conflict in the 00s. (And like so, so many other plot executions, this trope too can be executed in a misogynistic manner). But the sea of mediocrity cannot distract from the many moments where the love triangle is executed in a good manner; not just that, but it cannot distract from the idea that — as commodified art under capitalism shows us time and time again — it was a good idea, a good execution that paved the road to constant replication. I believe “narrative tension” being the reason why the love triangle exists in romance stories cuts this painfully short. And I believe it is not just that want that gives the reader a decision, but also the protagonist too. Only a surface level do all characters act on their own will — the plot is otherwise static, and despite the focus on arcs and character choices, the characters are led by a fate they can’t ever escape. The very few moments where it feels as though the characters decide on their own lives must either come with the plot completely taking a backseat, an immensely high skill from the author’s hand in which the narrative is seemingly completely driven from the character’s choices, both mundane and life-changing... or it is the protagonist deciding between two suitors of a love triangle. For one brief moment, if the choices are presented well and equal to one another, the character gets to decide. They are suddenly an agent of free will, where their actions have consequences on humans they’re close to — in short, they become a human being.
Have you heard Stranger Things’ newest season will feature a love triangle between Mike, Eleven, and Will? There’s a Teenage Love Triangle for you. I’m not tuning in though. The first season’s love triangle was quite enough.