Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Resolving Love Triangles in Fiction

[This is a snark piece I wrote the other year while making up D&D-style dice charts for getting around writer's block.]

Congratulations!  You have successfully lined up two possible love interests for your protagonist. Now, as you attempt to tie up all the loose plot threads (except for the one on which you're hanging the sequel), you need to decide how to resolve your protagonist's romantic affairs.

Flip a coin. Do you pair your main character with:

Heads: The expected love interest. (Team Edward!)

Or

Tails: The slightly-less-conventional love interest who adds CONFLICT and DRAMA to the story, by attracting the protagonist while having a different alignment/super power/social background/other complicating feature. (Team Jacob!)

Meh, let's make it really interesting.  Procure 1d10 (ie, a decahedral die, typically with faces labelled 1 through 10), and roll:

1) Conventional lost interest.

2) Less-conventional love interest.

3) Keep them both. (ie, the Mechanicsburg solution)


5) Slash!*  The love interests pair up, sans protagonist.  Your fans were going to write this anyway, so you're saving them the trouble.

6) Curveball. Your protagonist hooks up with the antagonist, because Draco Malfoy is really the more interesting character...

7) Happily Never After.  Your character makes his/her decision (flip coin for #1 or #2), but the 'winning' love interest actually decides not to pursue the relationship.

8) Keep 'em all.  Add in every other named character the main character(s) have ever expressed interest in, or otherwise favorably interacted with. (See Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Friday, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or any other works which contain multiple adult female characters)****

9) Multi-dimensional curve ball: your character isn't actually straight/cis/human/other assumptions made to this point, and all involved characters have to reconsider whether the situation works for them.  Roll again to resolve.

9') Roll 9 twice in a row, and your character become Captain Jack Harkness.  All pairings are now canonical.

10) Flip the coin: second place marries the protagonist's future child, who is conveniently just-like-mom. (Twilight, Anne McCaffery's Damia; see also TV Tropes "Squaring the Triangle"). Better yet, re-roll for another outcome.

*May or may not actually be "slash" depending on your definition thereof and the gender identities of the characters involved; my examples tend to be love triangles which a female-identified main character has two male-identified options, making this option "classic" M/M slash.

**Ok, so the examples in 8 are not so much triangle resolution, as a suggestion of a triangle, which soon began sharing one line segment with a pentagon, which itself shortly became a hexagon, which was subsequently cubed, and eventually led to two mutually exclusive sets, such that all members of set A ("intended to be sympathetic cis-male characters") have sex with all members of set B ("hot intended to be sympathetic cis-female characters") but with no other members of set A, and that all members of set B have sex with all members of set A, but only have platonic, non-jealous friendships with other members of set B.   But, hey, it's the twenty-first century.  Your polygon can be as slashy as you like.  And it can include non-binary identified characters. And none of them need be rape-apologist jerks.  The future's awesome like that.

No comments:

Post a Comment