On the list of first world problems, I absolutely hate the traditional love triangles where the indecisive girl tries to decide between two guys. This annoyance was fully realized after seeing To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before: P.S. I Still love You. No spoilers except for what’s in the trailers: love triangles suck.
I wish to preface this by saying that I never pick the right guy. When a whole movie or book revolves around a love triangle where the character must choose between two love options, I tend to either lean towards the guy that the character isn’t going to pick or I find both characters so repulsive by the end the love triangle should have been resolved by the main character leaving both of their choices.
It’s like when the Hunger Games movies made the love triangle into an angsty over-shadowing storyline that overplayed the true story. The love triangle angle can force the woman to choose between two men who are only thinking about themselves, or force the woman to use both men (like in the Twilight movies); either way it focuses less on the woman who the story is supposed to be about and on the men who she is trying to choose between and their feelings.
This isn’t to say there aren’t love triangles that I’m not a sucker for. The ones where it’s obvious that the villain is the wrong choice, such as in Pirates of the Caribbean or Zorro. The argument could be made that the woman has more agency when done right, because the woman must actively fight for who she truly wants, and she has a clear choice. Of course, it can also lead to objectifying of the woman, for most of the time these stories are viewed through the man’s point of view (unless you are reading a Jane Austin book which I suggest you do).
The funniest subgenre of love triangles to me is the I’m in love with the same person trope. This tends to land in the superhero category. Lowes Lane being in love with Superman, but Clark being stuck in a love triangle with himself. My favorite story of this though is The Scarlet Pimpernel where the wife, after feeling like she’s trapped in a marriage with a husband she doesn’t love, takes all the initiative to track down a masked hero who ends up being her husband. The love triangle is with the two sides of her husband’s personality but allows her to have the agency to be wrapped in the adventure and choose who she wants after realizing she isn’t happy.
My favorite trope, though, is the will-they-or-won’t-they trope. It’s a love triangle, in a sense, but the third party of the love triangle is either always changing or one of the people in the love triangle is oblivious that they are in one and all parties date other people than the person that they will end up with at the end. This allows for the characters to grow and for there to be agency on all sides if it’s done right.
No matter the love triangle trope, I think the true underlying factor of whether it’s something that should be critical or not of the storyline is if it truly gives agency to all the characters involved. But really “the poor woman who can’t decide” will always be a trope that gets under my skin.