![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So I was catching up on two Tapas webtoons today: Wistful Summer and Home Sweet Home. I haven't read either in a pretty long time (because the denouement of each was paywalled and I wasn't sure I wanted to spend money on them) but for reasons I shan't disclose I was suddenly able to read every episode of both these things. And both of them! Decided to resolve the love triangles their plots hinged on in the least satisfactory way possible! Allow me to explain (obviously, spoilers for both of these comics):
Home Sweet Home is about a love triangle including two characters who look nearly identical (and I am definitely capable of telling them apart. Sometimes). Jungyeon and Hyunjin have been in a committed relationship for a while, when Jungyeon's mom announces she's getting remarried to a guy with a son a little younger than Jungyeon, Sunwoo. Sunwoo develops feelings for Jungyeon, Hyunjin gets super jealous and controlling and toxic, and then the comic ends with a timeskip some way into the future and Sunwoo has moved on from his crush and Jungyeon and Hyunjin are still together. None of the characters seemed to have grown or changed, and no one seemed to even be aware of how horrible Hyunjin was to Jungyeon (repeatedly getting him drunk on purpose, guilt-tripping and manipulating him), and it felt anticlimactic and pointless.
Wistful Summer is about two childhood friends, Sam and Henry, who have been secretly pining for each other for years, while Sam gets married and Henry dates other people. Then Sam gets divorced, And Henry has a fling with Seth, a random college kid who looks exactly like Sam because he has Issues, and Seth really, really likes him, but gracefully bows out so Henry and Sam can finally get together. Yippee. While this was slightly less deeply, exisitentially baffling than the ending of Home Sweet Home it was, likewise, anticlimactic and pointless.
Which had me wondering: are there ever satisfying solutions to love triangles?
Spoilers for the endings to: An Easy Introduction to Love Triangles (To Pass the Exam!) and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Thinking about other things I've read recently with love triangles as the focus of the plot, in Canno's An Easy Introduction to Love Triangles (To Pass the Exam!), the love triangle went A likes B who likes C who likes A, as opposed to the more typical Type-V love triangle where A and B both like C. This love triangle ended with all three of them getting together. Nice! But this is pretty rare.
Chihayafuru by Yuki Suetsugu's mostly about Chihaya becoming the best Karuta player in the world, but also about Taichi and Arata both liking Chihaya. Fans of this anime/manga tend to fall into team Arata and team Taichi camps. What makes this love triangle so heartbreaking is that Taichi and Arata both care about each other almost as much as they care about Chihaya (or maybe more, because they're so much more similar to each other than they are to her. They understand each other on a level Chihaya can't.) Chihaya is also largely oblivious to their feelings until they shove them in their face. For quite a while, I thought an OT3 solution would be a believable, possible resolution to this love triangle. Recent chapters are pointing more to Chihaya/Arata, but I just feel so bad for Taichi! I want him to be happy! And he's so sad right now! Anyway, Chihayafuru's still going and has been going for 14 years now, so maybe someone in this comic will get together before I get married. (Not counting Kana-chan and Tsukue-kun, who are very cute.)
... I like Chihayafuru a normal amount.
Anyway, moving on!
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was lauded for its decision to end the series with the titular Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Rebecca Bunch) choosing not to date any of her love interests and instead focus on herself for a while. They all stay friends, but she works on learning how to be happy without fixating on a guy. It felt like a natural progression for a show about Rebecca learning to manage and improve her mental health instead of pinning all her hopes and dreams on some dude she went to summer camp with.
There's another way to solve a love triangle I only remember seeing in this one Haikyuu!! fic I love by renaissance, in which the two vertices pining for the same person end up getting together instead. Iconic and we stan. I love rivalries, and I feel like this works because while the relationship with the person being desired is kind of abstract and at a remove, the relationship between the two people competing for their affection is more concrete as they have to interact on an equal level more.
I don't know what the point of this post is except: do you like love triangles? What kinds of love triangles do you think work well? What kind do you think don't work well?
Home Sweet Home is about a love triangle including two characters who look nearly identical (and I am definitely capable of telling them apart. Sometimes). Jungyeon and Hyunjin have been in a committed relationship for a while, when Jungyeon's mom announces she's getting remarried to a guy with a son a little younger than Jungyeon, Sunwoo. Sunwoo develops feelings for Jungyeon, Hyunjin gets super jealous and controlling and toxic, and then the comic ends with a timeskip some way into the future and Sunwoo has moved on from his crush and Jungyeon and Hyunjin are still together. None of the characters seemed to have grown or changed, and no one seemed to even be aware of how horrible Hyunjin was to Jungyeon (repeatedly getting him drunk on purpose, guilt-tripping and manipulating him), and it felt anticlimactic and pointless.
Wistful Summer is about two childhood friends, Sam and Henry, who have been secretly pining for each other for years, while Sam gets married and Henry dates other people. Then Sam gets divorced, And Henry has a fling with Seth, a random college kid who looks exactly like Sam because he has Issues, and Seth really, really likes him, but gracefully bows out so Henry and Sam can finally get together. Yippee. While this was slightly less deeply, exisitentially baffling than the ending of Home Sweet Home it was, likewise, anticlimactic and pointless.
Which had me wondering: are there ever satisfying solutions to love triangles?
Spoilers for the endings to: An Easy Introduction to Love Triangles (To Pass the Exam!) and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Thinking about other things I've read recently with love triangles as the focus of the plot, in Canno's An Easy Introduction to Love Triangles (To Pass the Exam!), the love triangle went A likes B who likes C who likes A, as opposed to the more typical Type-V love triangle where A and B both like C. This love triangle ended with all three of them getting together. Nice! But this is pretty rare.
Chihayafuru by Yuki Suetsugu's mostly about Chihaya becoming the best Karuta player in the world, but also about Taichi and Arata both liking Chihaya. Fans of this anime/manga tend to fall into team Arata and team Taichi camps. What makes this love triangle so heartbreaking is that Taichi and Arata both care about each other almost as much as they care about Chihaya (or maybe more, because they're so much more similar to each other than they are to her. They understand each other on a level Chihaya can't.) Chihaya is also largely oblivious to their feelings until they shove them in their face. For quite a while, I thought an OT3 solution would be a believable, possible resolution to this love triangle. Recent chapters are pointing more to Chihaya/Arata, but I just feel so bad for Taichi! I want him to be happy! And he's so sad right now! Anyway, Chihayafuru's still going and has been going for 14 years now, so maybe someone in this comic will get together before I get married. (Not counting Kana-chan and Tsukue-kun, who are very cute.)
... I like Chihayafuru a normal amount.
Anyway, moving on!
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was lauded for its decision to end the series with the titular Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (Rebecca Bunch) choosing not to date any of her love interests and instead focus on herself for a while. They all stay friends, but she works on learning how to be happy without fixating on a guy. It felt like a natural progression for a show about Rebecca learning to manage and improve her mental health instead of pinning all her hopes and dreams on some dude she went to summer camp with.
There's another way to solve a love triangle I only remember seeing in this one Haikyuu!! fic I love by renaissance, in which the two vertices pining for the same person end up getting together instead. Iconic and we stan. I love rivalries, and I feel like this works because while the relationship with the person being desired is kind of abstract and at a remove, the relationship between the two people competing for their affection is more concrete as they have to interact on an equal level more.
I don't know what the point of this post is except: do you like love triangles? What kinds of love triangles do you think work well? What kind do you think don't work well?
