We Are Entering the Love Triangle

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.

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