When I was first poking around the idea of resurrecting Blue Eye Books, I knew I wanted to narrow the focus. When I began, back in 2014, I just wanted to chat. Gush about the fun things, promote books I loved, and make countless posts about how awful love triangles tend to work out in books.
That’s not really the case anymore.
I think a lot of us can point to some specific thing that comes up more and more as you work your way through life, that leads to something bigger, something more directional.
For me, that was the love triangles. It seemed silly at the time, rooted in my own preferences for straight-forward romance plotlines in books, but after I fell off posting for a while, I was still reading books, and still hating those love triangles. It didn’t click until I started reading more about feminism and “the female malady” or rather women-who-are-painted-as-crazy-by-the-patriarchy-because-they’re-inconveniencing-the-system-that-benefits-men.
Yeah.
After engaging with those texts (more on that in a future post, but if you want someplace to start, I highly recommend The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell and The Female Malady by Elaine Showalter), I came back to the love triangle, and it all started making a maddening kind of sense.
I don’t think love triangles are inherently terrible and they can be done really well! However, so many I come across are based in patriarchal principles.
Typically in fantasy, we have a female MC who has two male suitors (let’s set aside the heteronormativity for a second, but that’s a whole topic in itself).
Throughout the (usually) trilogy, the girl goes back and forth: the boy next door? Or the broody dark boy who has *powers.* Hi, Twilight. I want to blame you for starting this, but… kind of not your fault.
The takeaway from this situation is essentially “oh those poor boys, pulled in by the wiles of the girl who’s just so indecisive and flighty, she can’t decide between the two!”
Except let’s unpack that.
- Decisiveness has never been a coveted female personality trait.
- Boys are not weaklings in the face of proposed romance.
- Telling men “no” has been *heavily* discouraged.
- The only power “granted” to women in patriarchy is that of sexuality.
- Women are not the fix to male loneliness. (say that louder for Twilight to hear: WOMEN ARE NOT THE FIX TO MALE LONELINESS)
- The choices presented in the love triangle are typically stand-ins for larger life choices. They’re just packaged as love interests because that’s what sells, and that’s a more believable choice for a girl to make (not whether she wants to live her life one way or another).
So often, the MC in a fantasy is given few, if any choices about her actions outside the love triangle. Events happen and she is ushered into choices by elders or her love interests, not allowed to investigate her options herself.
I would love if we could separate “life” from “romantic partner.” So often they’re construed as a single item: who you choose as your partner will dictate how you spend your time, instead of the other way around.
I recently finished the second book in The Celestial Kingdom duology by Sue Lynn Tan: Heart of the Sun Warrior. This duology had me nervous at the beginning as the love triangle was introduced, but something interesting happened in the second book. The author chose to tackle the questions of lifestyle, romantic partner, and familial obligations separately.
Make no mistake, there was still constant “will she, won’t she” throughout that second book, but alongside that choice, Xingyin is considering what her life, separate from her romantic partner, will look like once peace is achieved. What does she want the days of her life to be? How does she want to spend them? And given that, what do her potential partners want their lives to look like?
Essentially, she places herself first.
That’s something women are generally told not to do. But she does it anyway.
So what do I want to see from love triangles, from a feminist perspective?
I want our MC’s life to expand, not shrink, when there are multiple partners introduced. A romantic partner (or more) should be an addition, not a subtraction, or some kind of realization that you were never “complete” without them.
I want love interests who have better things to do than follow around the MC like a puppy. She is not your sole reason to exist. You have hobbies, a career. Act like it.
I want it to be okay if the choice our MC makes ends up not working out, or the choice is neither. Because her life is more than her romantic options. (love you, first half of the Throne of Glass series)
These kinds of love triangles (and squares, and pentagons) are out there. We just have to give them the credit they deserve.
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