disjointed thoughts about love triangle plot tumors

In which I find an old essay of mine trapped in my google docs about love triangle plot tumors and post it because I'm trying to get better about being proud of my writing even when it's meh.

Twilight was weirdly formative for basically everybody in my generation. Even if you didn’t like Twilight (and despite my enthusiastic nostalgia I only liked it, I wasn’t a die-hard), you have been affected by Twilight even if you didn’t like or watch it. This is because every other movie marketed to the same demographic involving a female main character was put through Twilight treatment: audience surrogate main character in the middle of a love triangle between one hot edgelord and a second hot edgelord who’s a different type of hot than the first edgelord. It was massively emphasized in the movies because that’s what movie executives thought played to the female demographic.

First, let’s break down how love triangle plot tumors work, because they are everywhere. Basically, the main conflict of the story ends up getting shoved to the back to make room for this girl character agonizing over which hot boy to date/marry/love, while the story glosses over some real red flags.

The reason why the love triangle works so well in Twilight is because that’s the real main conflict audiences are coming to see. Sure, some of us are dying to figure out how the social dynamics of the Volturi clan work or wishing we’d gotten to spend some more time with Edward’s vampire siblings, but the main conflict is really Bella’s relationships with Edward and Jacob, who both suck. Like, they really suck. However, this is no Phantom of the Opera or Wuthering Heights or Romeo and Juliet, stories that Twilight heavily borrows from and based much of the narration around, where the story is clear that the men in the story suck ass. No, both Edward  and Jacob’s antics are seen as romantic and as relationship goals, which worked well to muddy the expectations of a generation of women.

Next, we’ve got to go over the sinister nature of the choice presented to Bella in this love triangle, because the Twilight love triangle is a great example of just how much of the dynamics involved in a classic love triangle reduce the apex character to a prize to be won. Only by understanding the nature of this love triangle can we understand how anyone who’s come in contact with a story framed in this way has been affected negatively by it. 

Bella’s feelings about Edward or Jacob are almost irrelevant to how they’re going to proceed. No matter how many times Bella says she’s not about Jacob and she’s not trying to get with him, Jacob likes her, so he’s going to continually wear her down and say that she’s in love with him until she ultimately breaks from the manipulation and begs Jacob to kiss her for HIS benefit. (Can you tell Eclipse is my least favorite?)

Meanwhile, no matter how many times Bella says she’s about Edward and wants to get with him, Edward has this thing about protecting her, so he’ll be emotionally aloof and even buy into the “Jacob might be better for her” narrative that Jacob is selling, and even break up with her in an ain’t shit way to soothe his own conscience (read: ego). Eclipse in particular frames this choice as an actual choice between the two sides of Bella’s self, when in reality, they’re both equally shitty and just as controlling and it wasn’t really a choice at all. On top of this, Bella says pretty explicitly that even if she didn’t love Edward that much, she’d still want to be a vampire because she feels like she belongs with them and most like herself around them, and neither Edward nor Jacob respect that choice of hers, which, ew.

That in fact is the problem with this type of love triangle. Bella’s relationship with Edward is put on the same level as Jacob physically assaulting her and wheedling a consensual kiss out of her, and because this franchise sold so well, many other franchises followed suit. This gives Bella, and us as the audience, the illusion of choice.

The most clear logical throughline of this trope is the Hunger Games movies, which is not even about a relationship like Twilight is. The Hunger Games is a story about a girl who becomes the unwitting face of a revolution and the pitfalls that such a role entails, with a sprinkle of “will they won’t they” between Katniss and Peeta, while Gale was just around. The romances were supposed to be a way to gauge her mental state dealing with the actual plot, not the actual plot itself. Peeta was emblematic of Katniss’s hope, while Gale shared in Katniss’s trauma, and both of them are important to her character development. However, Hollywood was like “hey Twilight worked with a love triangle, let’s copy paste” and we got “Team Peeta” and “Team Gale” discourse for no reason. (As an aside, if we must partake in that debate, Team Peeta is the only right answer and I will not be taking questions.) 

This trend continued in Divergent, which nixed the love triangle part but went out of its way to shove the actual plot to the background so we could see Tris and Four making eyes at each other, which, way to undercut your actually cool premise there. I remember Divergent being heavily marketed to me on Tumblr and being excited about this book series, only to be left wanting for something more substantial when it came out. I didn’t even finish the third one, I don’t know how it ends, and part of me just doesn’t care. 

You can see this marketing in a lot of things in the 2010s and to be honest, we’re worse off for it. Notice that it happens mostly to female characters; the worst example of this I can think of is the Hobbit trilogy, where we got a heterosexual love triangle despite there not being any women in the story, the existing worldbuilding, and the actress playing Tauriel explicitly saying she did not want to do another love triangle. There is a version of the Hobbit movies that has Tauriel just being a cool female character in the Hobbit, and it was left on the cutting room floor because some dumbass executives thought that was what audiences wanted. We all know how that went. 

I’m glad this kind of marketing died off in the mid 2010s. We still see shades of this, and I’d argue a resurgence of this kind of thing might happen with adaptations of some Booktok books (ACOTAR, I’m looking at you), but I’d like to think we’re beyond this now. I hope. I pray we’re beyond it, the next generation cannot take it.