 Love Triangles are one of the most common and most universally despised literary tropes out there. There's a pretty big overlap between my audience and terrible writing advice, and he hates Love Triangles so much that he literally can't go a single video without bringing it up. Please notice me, Senpai. Indeed, the Love Triangle doesn't just exist in the romance genre anymore, it's grown to be included in basically every form of media with a romantic subplot, including Spider-Man 3, The X-Men movies, Dead Space, Harry Potter, the Pirates of the Caribbean, every anime ever made, and literally, not figuratively, literally every YA novel written in the past 10 years. Let's take a second to make sure we all know exactly what a Love Triangle is. It's when three people all have some sort of romantic tension between them. Usually it's one person having feelings for the other two, and they both have feelings for him or her. Sometimes it's a three-way attraction, or unreciprocated by one or more parties. The resolution usually involves the person at the center of the triangle choosing someone and living happily ever after with them. Sometimes things go a bit different, though. Sometimes a fourth person will be involved, or a fifth. Sometimes the tension will be resolved by one party dying or everyone realizing that they aren't compatible and the whole thing dissolving. Once in a while, you'll even see the person at the center go the harem route and form a polyamorous relationship. I'm looking at you, Wheel of Time. What I'm saying is that the Love Triangle is a more complex trope than people often give it credit for. You might hate it, and you're within your rights to feel that way, but seeing it get constantly trashed as something simple and juvenile doesn't sit right with me. There's potential for great drama and character development here, even if it's rarely tapped. Don't get me wrong, I get why people hate these things. When there's one romantic plot or subplot, it gets a certain amount of focus. But if there's a Love Triangle, then the amount of focus has to be split between two different subplots, which means that they both get less time to develop into a relationship that people care about. Or the story takes time away from the more interesting plot lines to focus on the Love Triangle more. If you came to a story hoping for explosions or gigantic space battles or wizards saving the world, you'd be rightfully annoyed that it was spending so much time on the love lives of teenagers. I get it, I really do. I just think that there's more here than people want to admit. Why are they so prominent if they're so hated? That's the question I'm here to answer, and I'm going to put it in the form of a numbered list because why not? Number one. The most obvious reason that a Love Triangle would appeal to somebody is wish fulfillment. Wanting to be desired, in either a romantic way or a sexual one, is a core human trait. We all want to find someone who loves us, and if one is good, then two is better. Bella from Twilight was a dull character because she was designed to be a blank slate to project onto. She was receiving the love of these pretty boys, and the reader imagined it was them instead. Even with the characters that aren't blank slates, we're supposed to wish that we're in their place a little bit. I'm looking at you, Wheel of Time. Is this narcissistic? Is it a bit cruel to lead two or more people on and toy with their emotions, albeit unwillingly? Is it almost impossible that you'll have equally strong feelings for more than one person at a time? Yes to all of those, and so some might say that promoting this in fiction is wrong. But by that same logic, it's wrong to make action movies with badass heroes killing legions of bad guys because killing people is usually a bad thing and we don't want to promote that. Wish fulfillment exists to allow us to explore our deeper urges that are impossible, socially unacceptable, or even dangerous. When we were kids, none of us actually wanted terrorists to break into our school so that we could fight them off. That was just a daydream. Our fantasies are just that. Fantasies, and you shouldn't be judged for them. Reason number two, trying to fill time. The Hobbit movies are a perfect example of this. The book was only 310 pages and didn't have a love triangle at all, so when they adapted it into three, three hour long movies, they had a dearth of material to work with. They added in a bunch of new plot points and characters, including an elf named Tauriel, and they give her a love triangle with two others so that we can have some space-filling sexual tension to distract from the space-filling battle sequences. Okay, okay, I'm throwing shade, but I actually enjoy those movies. Don't hurt me. Some writers, like yours truly, are chronic underwriters. We work on a project, and when we reach what we think is the end, we go back and realize that we only wrote a page and a half for our 12-page research papers, and oh shit, it's due in three hours. So we have to go back and find new things to add. Sometimes this works fine. In a novel, it can give us new plot points, or characters that add new dimensions to the story. But if the length is purely arbitrary, then all that matters is getting your product to that length, quality be damned. That's when you throw in an evil twin, or a detour where the McGuffin is taken by a side character and the heroes have to get it back, or, drumroll please, a love triangle. In these cases, the dreaded LT is just a piece of filler with little thought put into it. It's not there for any story or character purposes, therefore it's boring and everyone hates it. Simple. Number three, something that I'm going to call the cheerleading effect. All stories revolve around conflict, and the vast vast majority of them want us to side with the protagonist. It's not uncommon for there to be an element of moral ambiguity, though. Think of how the Expanse has the OPA, a group of radical belters who want their home to become independent from the other powers in the solar system. There are both good and bad folks in the OPA, as well as on the sides that don't want the belt to break away. This is moral ambiguity done well, but there are dozens of cases where it's simply done with the bad guys doing something nice once in a while, or the good guys being kind of dicks. I'm looking at you, Fallout New Vegas. Moral ambiguity forces you to pick a side. When you're forced to pick a side, it makes you more invested in whatever you're consuming, because these are no longer just fictional characters, they're YOUR fictional characters. It's like cheering for a sports team. Love triangles, or rectangles, or dodecahedrons make you pick a side and therefore get more invested. At least, assuming you give a shit about the romantic subplot at all. Suzanne Collins didn't want to put a love triangle in the Hunger Games, or at least she didn't want it to have a prominent role. Her editor convinced her to make it more prominent, which is why it feels half-assed in the final product. Then the movies played up that angle considerably, making it even more of an issue to the plot and character development. It's almost impossible to watch those films without forming some sort of opinion on whether you think Katniss should bone this pretty boy who was willing to die to protect her, or this other pretty boy who later becomes a war criminal. And once you form an opinion, you start hoping for your preferred outcome. Once you start hoping for your preferred outcome, you become more invested in the characters and in the story as a whole. There's also the matter of wanting your audience to keep reading, slash watching, slash playing until the end, and adding questions is the best way to do that. Questions like, what's in the basement, or who will Katniss bone? And since the Hunger Games was such a big hit, it influenced basically every YA franchise for years. I could go into that, but I think it deserves its own video, and quite frankly this series didn't invent the concept. The point is that this is an effective way to get fans into your story and give you more money for sequels. And just like with moral ambiguity, if both sides aren't shown to be equally valid, then it doesn't really work. Number four, jumping off of that, forgive me if I'm going into conspiracies here, but I'm convinced that sometimes a love triangle is just pure marketing. The creators want the fans to talk slash argue about which ship they're on to drum up attention for their product. Remember when the Twilight movies were big and there was a bunch of merchandise that said Team Edward or Team Jacob? The 12 people who hadn't heard of Twilight by that point wound up hearing about it through Osmosis, and at least a few of them went to go watch or read it. Don't forget that somebody was making mad money from the merch sales. I can't prove that book editors and Hollywood execs and video game publishers are forcing or pressuring anyone into making this specific change, though it's far from unheard of for businessmen to force changes on products. Hollywood is infamous for this very phenomenon. If some suites realized that love triangles might make them a few more dollars, they'd definitely shove them in everywhere they could. That's just how business works. A simple reason, but a believable one. Number five, after all these popular franchises added in love triangles, and maybe even before, people sort of forgot why love triangles came about in the first place. They forgot that it's about drama and character investment and just started putting them in because they felt that that's what they're supposed to do. You know how when the Marvel movies made money a bunch of other studios all tried to have big cinematic universes without understanding why the MCU was so well liked? Part of that was just money, sure, but there were a lot of creative people, writers, directors, VFX artists, who saw what Marvel did and wanted to play with a cool idea. They had genuine passion for their art, they just missed a big part of what makes the expanded universe idea good. In almost all cases, the first film in the series was much more concerned with setting up a wider universe than it was with being a good film on its own. But film is a collaborative art form and there are more factors, so maybe this isn't the best metaphor. Look, my point is that people throw in love triangles because it's just something that's done now. The creators don't think twice about it, or maybe they think they're doing a good job with the concept. The love triangle is so ubiquitous now that it's barely worth mentioning anymore unless it's very good or very bad. Many people don't hate love triangles because they hate the very concept of love triangles, they hate them because they're done in absolutely everything. If they stop being everywhere, then maybe the hate will die out. Or if someone can just find a new way to do it, then we can go back to being ambivalent towards them for a while. But that's just a theory, a trope that exists in all forms of media theory, and cease and desist a letter from MatPat's attorney. I'd like to thank Christopher Hawkins, Desk Brennan, Joseph Pendergraft, and all my other patrons for making this possible. If you want stuff like early access to videos, then you should donate to my page. If you can't do that, then leaving a like on the video and commenting to make it more visible in YouTube's algorithm is helpful too. Bye.