Tropes, dopes, formulae: The "love triangle" part I

 ****Spoiler Alert:  If you haven’t read The Hunger Games series, proceed at your own risk.****

I love it when kids get engaged with books, when they relate to the characters, dress as them for Hallowe’en, all that. My school must have had a dozen or more Katniss Everdeens walking the halls last October 31; some in Arena gear, some in dresses with sewn-on “flames” of gossamer material. Students are still showing up in Hogwarts gear as well. I'm delighted that such deserving stories as Harry Potter or The Hunger Games are such big hits with my students. Both series contain engaging plots and multidimensional characters, any of whom would be worthy of fandoms and the accompanying T-shirts.

Some of these T-shirts read “I Only Date Bakers,” “I Only Date Hunters,” or, borrowing from the recent blockbuster popularity of a certain vampire romance series, “Team Peeta” or “Team Gale.” It makes the fandom fun. However, to reduce The Hunger Games, a book series which depicts a future North America as a dystopian society with huge disparities between rich and poor, to a story of “a girl who has to choose between two hot guys” is like saying Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about a kid and an escaped slave who bond over their favorite sport of river rafting.

Unfortunately for the world of YA literature, too many authors are now resorting to adding a “love triangle” to their book because it’s a fairly easy way to ramp up the drama, the emotion, and the conflict.  It worked extremely well for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series.  Unfortunately, too many readers lack the sophistry to realize they’re being played. Twilight could best be categorized as paranormal romance, completely different in tone and intent from the dystopian Hunger Games, a story that makes statements about war, violence, the media.  And therein lies the problem. A forced love triangle may be completely irrelevant in certain genres, distracting from the original story rather than enhancing it. Instead of a developed or developing character working through an internal struggle or questing for the Magic Thingie, our hero/heroine is reduced to a character who is validated or invalidated by how attractive they are to potential love interests. Readers deserve better.


Next week: some characteristics of "love triangles" and why The Hunger Games's "love triangle" isn't.

Insightful Student Recognizes Mary Sue from Twilight

I teach creative writing to 7th and 8th graders.  It is a joy and a challenge.

The next few lessons are dealing with character creation and development.  Sadly, too many 7th and 8th-graders are okay with blank, generic characters because they actually want to "step into" the character's shoes.  I hated to burst their bubbles and explain that such characters are the work of writers who are lazy or unskilled or both.  I asked them to name names of specific characters from their reading whom they wanted to bitch-slap (not using those words, of course) at any point in the novel.  Many of them named Harry Potter, particularly at his angsty (super-angsty?  angstier?) period during Order of the Phoenix.  I asked them if they continued to read the books and if they finished the series.  All my students who got to the fifth book finished the series because they cared enough about the characters to see their stories through.

As writers, I pointed out to them, they had to be brave enough to give their characters flaws and weaknesses, and I introduced the terms "Mary Sue" and "Gary Stu."  I don't really like the second one--I would have used a generic name like "Bob" to designate a generic character, but nobody asked me, so we're stuck with Gary Stu.

I didn't want to spend the entire period on Sues, so I just chose the  parts of The Universal Mary-Sue Litmus Test that deal with name and appearance.  We hadn't even gotten to Item #14 about the character having an unusual scent when a bright student piped up,"You could be describing Twilight." "Thank you!"  was my reply.  "Bella Swan is a classic Mary-Sue."  I hope I didn't ruffle too many feathers.

I had to reiterate that it's okay to like those books, not because I'm afraid of 12 and 13-year-old girls, but if they have mothers who are fans, I don't want those people coming after me with pitchforks.  Their daughters tend to be much more reasonable.