Love is a battlefield.
Buffy was torn between Angel and Spike. “Twilight” had warring camps of “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob.”
Now, the popular Prime Video show, “The Summer I Turned Pretty” is back for its third and final season, following Isabel “Belly” Conklin (Lola Tung), a teen girl torn between brothers Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno) and Conrad (Christopher Briney).
Trends come and go, but love triangles are a pop culture staple.
Jennifer Prokop, a romance expert who analyzes the genre on “Fated Mates” podcast, told The Post that most love triangles are about the main character – usually a young woman – deciding on a life path.
Often, she explained, the choice between love interests is, “‘I could go to a place of safety and security, or risk.’ Especially when we’re talking about young people, the work of young adult romance is identity development. And so, you’re deciding who you want to be.”
Prokop added, “A really important thing about identity development is learning how to take risks.”
So, when a heroine ends up with the love interest who seemed like “the bad boy,” that message might be, “It’s okay to take a risk. Like, yeah, you might break your heart. But so what – you’ll live,” she said.
That’s why the trope is most common in stories about young adults coming of age, such as “The Vampire Diaries,” “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” “The Hunger Games,” “Twilight,” “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” and “Dawson’s Creek.”
“The Vampire Diaries” creator Julie Plec, who presided over an iconic love triangle – Elena (Nina Dobrev), who was torn between brooding good guy vampire Stefan (Paul Wesley) and his snarky bad boy brother, Damon (Ian Somerhalder) – told The Post that the most challenging part of a love triangle is, “its almost impossible to predict at the casting stage what you’re going to get, in terms of chemistry.”
Plec said that a good love triangle shouldn’t be set in stone, especially in a TV show.
“When you’re dealing with a show that has an infinite amount of years ahead of it, your best bet is to keep your options open,” she explained. “You can have all the intentions in the world for a relationship, but that just doesn’t show up onscreen.”
Citing another “Vampire Diaries” love triangle of Caroline (Candice King), who was torn between her werewolf boyfriend, Tyler (Michael Trevino), and the sparks she felt with the villainous Klaus (Joseph Morgan), Plec said that Caroline’s chemistry with Klaus was unplanned.
“There can be surprises where something hits you out of nowhere. As a storyteller, you want to be prepared for all those things,” she said.
In a love triangle plot, “best laid plans can be fluid – if something works that you didn’t expect, or if, frankly, it doesn’t work that you really were hoping would work,” said Plec.
Because most love triangles are about teens and twentysomethings, audiences have less patience when stories are about older characters, Prokop said.
For example, she cited the “Stephanie Plum” book series, which was adapted into the 2012 movie “One For The Money” starring Katherine Heigl. In that story, the 30-year-old heroine is torn between two men.
The love triangle in the book series is drawn out across more than twenty books, and “people tire of that,” Prokop told The Post.
“I think [love triangles] are really hard [for older characters], because adult viewers will see that as a stalling technique, rather than an identity development kind of technique. It could be dangerous,” said Prokop.
Bridget Chun, who hosts the podcast “Romance at a Glance,” told The Post that in most fandoms with a love triangle, some viewers “will always latch onto one character.”
“Now, there might be something where they cheat on [their love interest] in Season 3. Or, you have to do something devastating to get someone who’s rooting for someone to change their mind,” she said. “I think the important thing is that both [options in a love triangle] be feasible options — especially in the beginning.”
Plec had firsthand experience with trying to orchestrate audience expectations.
“When you’re planning a long-running show and a long-running love triangle, you want to wait as long as humanly possible before you get the second half of the couple together,” she explained.
However, “TVD” fans who were rooting for Elena and Damon to be together had such “powerful intensity….we kept having to make choices trying to change their minds about wanting it so quickly.”
But, it didn’t work, because, “Each choice we made just further cemented their desire to have it.”
“We were having Damon do really terrible things that had catastrophic consequences for all the other characters,” she explained. “In our efforts to slow down the freight train of Elena and Damon…a lot of people had to die.”
Chun, meanwhile, recalled watching the “Dawson’s Creek” finale in high school with her soccer team. On that show, the ending resolved the love triangle between Joey (Katie Holmes), Dawson (James Van Der Beek) and Pacey (Joshua Jackson).
“I was like, ‘If she doesn’t choose Pacey at the end of this episode, I’m going to flip a ping pong table over!’” she recalled.
Years after “Dawson’s Creek,” Chun is now a fan of “The Summer I Turned Pretty” — and is rooting for Belly to end up with Jeremiah.
“I think you can find ‘evidence’ for your side, especially in a good show.…having that chat is so fun,” she told The Post. “I mean, it can be so toxic. It can be crazy. People [in fandoms] go way too far, I think.”
Case in point: the official social media accounts for “The Summer I Turned Pretty” put out a message imploring fans to be “kind” and reminding them against “bullying,” ahead of the Season 3 premiere (now streaming).
Plec recalled that at the height of “The Vampire Diaries” popularity, some of the “volume of response” of the fandom feedback on social media could get, “legitimately scary.”
But, Chun said there’s an upside to the fandoms rooting for different “teams” of a love triangle, too.
“It can definitely bond you together,” Chun noted.
“If you find a group of friends and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, you guys love [this relationship] too?’ I have one friend where, we’re going to watch the show together when it premieres. But she’s rooting for Conrad. So it’ll be fun for us to both be like, ‘No! That’s terrible!’”
Prokop suggested that love triangles are especially rooted in American culture.
“There’s nothing more American than the idea that if you make the right series of choices, things will turn out right for you. And, for a lot of people, that includes who they marry or [end up with].”
“So I think maybe it has to do with a very particular kind of belief that we’re a series of choices,” as opposed to how some other cultures believe, “we’re a series of coincidences. Or, we’re a series of community building activities.”
When asked if creators of love triangles feel stressed out about the possibility of disappointing half the audience, Plec laughed and said, “Yes – exclamation point!”
