By S. E. Zbasnik
So, you’ve got a great YA dystopian idea. Perhaps all of
humanity has been wiped out by a nefarious disease carried by hamsters so the
hope of the species rests upon the backs of sixteen to nineteen year olds who
are immune to the rodentia dementia. You have sketches of the insane clothing
all the half hamster overlord slave drivers wear. You have your plucky heroine
who is sarcastic and knows her way around a weapon. (But only with the girlier
weapons, like a bow or magic or a sharpened eyelash curler. Swords are for
boys.)
Now all you have to do is pick a love interest, but the
brooding bad boy weregerbil and the sensitive but not abusive clone of her best
friend growing up are both good options. Why not do both?
You have just entered the dreaded Love Triangle and your
sanity may never be seen again.
What’s the big deal about love triangles? Out of all the
shapes triangles are one of the easiest to draw and give us terrible hypotenuse
hippopotamus jokes. Let us break down the love triangle.
At the top you have your Mary Sue, I mean plucky heroine who
is in no way a reflection of the author. On the left is the brooding bad boy
who is either an emotionally abusive asshole that should be giving girls red
flags instead of the vapors or a bland kid who owns a leather jacket. And the
final dot in this triangle is the nice guy, the best friend, the one who’s
there to take shit because this story needs to be stretched to a trilogy and we
can’t all jam in cannibalistic teddy bears. More than likely this last one is
also an emotionally abusive asshole who has a closet full of fedoras and blames
over 50% of the population for his failure at relationships, but he’s supposed
to be the safe choice.
I often ask myself why this is called a triangle. In order
to be a true love triangle Mary Sue should say be madly in love with Bad Boy,
Nice Guy is hopelessly addicted to Mary Sue, but Bad Boy’s only got eyes for
Nice Guy. (And this is not only an acceptable love triangle, it is highly
encouraged) The classic way is more like a Love Ray, but then we’re getting
into Flash Gordon territory.
What is it about love triangles that make them so damn
detrimental to female characters? No matter how many “Plucky heroine saves the
day,” “Mary Sue hates makeup and dresses,” “Author avatar is clumsy and bad at
sports but everyone loves her anyway” you throw in, introducing a love triangle
reduces whatever insurmountable obstacles facing her down to “Do you want to be
tied to guy 1 or guy 2?” Make sure to string both along because all love
triangle heroines have a heart of ice and the inability to communicate with
their twu wuv.
The Love Triangle also persists upon this precarious notion
that THERE IS NOT A SINGLE OTHER PERSON IN THE UNIVERSE! Boy 1 loves girl, but
she does not care for him. Rather than admitting defeat, eating a tub of cookie
dough and firing up OKCupid, Boy 1 proceeds to pursue girl despite neon blazing
speck of evidence that she wants nothing to do with him. There are times as
well when the top stone in this pyramid would do well to remember there are
another three billion or so people you can choose from. After all the will
they/won’t they, miscommunications, he ran over your dog but it’s okay because
the dog was secretly satan, the author has to throw out to keep the story going
it seems the most logical conclusion is for the heroine to move far away and
swear off dating for a year or two.
But to have a heroine flapping about unattached, that is
unacceptable!
It’s a disturbingly old school of thought that’s woven into
the tapestry of the love triangle. Never once is the idea of the girl being
allowed to continue her story unattached entertained. Perhaps as part of a
joke, or the need for a moments drama™ before “Bad Boy in Leather Pants that
are Swampier than Florida in Summer” returns to rescue her; but no one is
serious. All women need to be chained to a man otherwise they’ll wind up
shriveled old husks clinging to a cat’s skeleton as they rock themselves to
sleep at the spinster age of 32.
Due to the fact that humanity is only about 25-30% female,
when it comes time for the romance subplot there aren’t a lot of extra women
flapping about. Men have to fight over
the few crumbs left and it stands to reason that…what’s that you say? Humanity
is actually more 51:49% Female to Male? Well, that’s just stupid. Look at
almost any group in tv, books, or in movies and you’ll find one to two white
boys, an obligatory multi-racial boy, and one girl. We’ll put up with one
girl’s voice, as long as it can easily be vetoed by another two to three boys.
Having one female character there to represent the entire
population of women means that it is imperative she makes the right choice when
it comes to love. If she fails in her quest to fulfill her female duties of
being the prize for the favorite hero, then why even bother having a female at
all? They’re always bleeding all over the place. (This is also why I hate the
one woman in a sea of testosterone in action movies. She’s there as either a
macguffin to get fridged or a toy for the hero so we can have a love scene.
Once that’s over, she’s as useful to the plot as the Maltese falcon.)
So, how does one combat the Love Triangle? You could start
by putting more women in your world. Pick up a coin, flip it, heads your
character’s a girl, tails it’s a boy. Now you have a balance that reflects the
real world instead of the terrifyingly bright white land in Media World. Also, entertain the idea that some people at
times in their lives don’t want or need a relationship. There are humans who
are quite content to be with friends as they save the world from land octopi,
others that have been hurt and would not logically pursue one much less two
love interests, and I’d mention asexuals but we’re still working on getting
more than 30% women. Baby steps.
Relationships are simplistically complicated and
complicatedly simple. The human experience is far more exotic and fascinating
than falling back to the cliché love triangle. If you really can’t decide
between the bad boy or the nice guy why not choose both and celebrate with a
huge orgy? Yub nub, indeed.
S. E. Zbasnik has a book coming out this May called
The King’s Blood. It’s got some magic, it’s got some witches, it’s got a black
heroine in a medieval setting, and it has more puns per cubic meter than a
clown car.
Check out the
goodreads page for more information.