Amazon's Hit Summer Romance Boasts One of the Most Annoying Love Triangles of All Time
The long-awaited return of The Summer I Turned Pretty —Prime Video's hit teen soap based on the novels by Jenny Han—has brought hibernating fans back to the brink of war. The story centers an evolving love triangle between main character Isabel “Belly” Conklin (Lola Tung) and her childhood best friends, the Fisher brothers, Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno). As with many fictional love triangles, this one has ignited a particularly heated debate between those passionate fans who are #TeamConrad and those who are #TeamJeremiah. This divide has only widened with the recent premiere of the third season, which adapts the third and final book in the series. The question on everyone's mind is, of course, which of the two brothers (if either) Belly will end up with. The book went in one direction—the series, which author Han is co-showrunning, could potentially go in another. (Press was not provided with advance screeners, leaving the ending a mystery even to critics.)
But fans deeply invested in flying their Fisher flags for either brother are wasting their time debating the meager silver linings to two truly second-rate partners to Belly. It's become painfully clear that what fans are fighting over isn't the better choice, but a choice between two woefully inferior options. The Conrad-Belly-Jeremiah triad is, simply put, a bad love triangle—one in a growing list of bad love triangles tainting romance shows and films today.
The art of the love triangle is a sacred one. From works of classic literature, like Wuthering Heights , to more contemporary fictional romances, like those of yesteryear's teen soaps ( One Tree Hill , Dawson's Creek ) and adult dramas ( Scandal ), this plot device has stood the test of time. When deployed correctly, a good love triangle is not just a surefire way to engage an opinionated audience: It also develops the character stuck between two options, making them confront themselves and their priorities in order to finally make a choice of partner. Was the hero going to go for the charming rich girl he's had a crush on forever or the down-to-earth girl next door, like in Some Kind of Wonderful ? Was the heroine going to pine over her best friend and longtime crush or, instead, date his more emotionally available best friend, like in Dawson's Creek ? A well-crafted love triangle serves a narrative purpose but also requires some solid characterization to pull off. Pacing is important too—a good love triangle, more often than not, takes its time playing out over the course of a movie or multiple seasons of a show, usually because the decision has to be a difficult one. The scenario works best when both potential partners are actually exciting options, for different reasons. If the choice is too easy, then the trope simply feels like a waste of time.
Nowadays, however, our screens are becoming overrun with annoying triangles, which have begun to outnumber the more deft, successful ones. The trope is often rushed or unnecessarily prolonged, boring, or even completely nonsensical. Emily in Paris ' main will-they-won't-they between eponymous character Emily and chef-next-door Gabriel was kept alive for too long simply for the drama, turning Gabriel into a mangled character that even the actor, Lucas Bravo, couldn't recognize and didn't like . While Sex Education is a phenomenal show, its hemming and hawing over main character Otis and his romantic interest, Maeve, finally getting together was needlessly drawn out. What's worse is that the grating love triangle left a legitimately good character—Ruby, whose partnership with Otis was, honestly, a better relationship —as collateral damage. (And, while we're here, I wish we would abolish the trope of gay characters dating their high school bullies who suffer from internalized homophobia—that's a second love triangle that Sex Education mishandled . ) This downward trend of poor three-way relationships isn't relegated to saccharine Netflix series either. Celine Song's controversial latest feature for A24, Materialists , has fans up in arms for—among other issues—offering her protagonist two underbaked male options. While I do concede that turning a wealthy character played by Pedro Pascal into a nothingburger of a character is the only way you can convincingly portray him as the lesser of two options (yes, even when the other choice is Chris Evans), it still felt like a bummer to spend nearly two hours watching one of today's most charismatic actors suffer from a dearth of personality and interest.
This is, of course, not to say that there aren't exceptions to the trend of bad love triangles taking over our screens lately. Luca Guadagnino's Challengers and Mindy Kaling's Netflix series Never Have I Ever are two recent favorites that handled their respective love triangles incredibly well. Even the CW's Vampire Diaries proved that it could do what Twilight could not in the human-girl-falls-in-love-with-two-mystical-creatures department. But it feels as if the good ones are fewer and further between, while the bad illustrations of this trope keep popping up like a cursed game of whack-a-mole.
All this brings us back to The Summer I Turned Pretty , which boasts one of the most aggravating love triangles I've borne witness to in years. Belly spends the first season actualizing her dream of dating her lifelong crush, Conrad, the older, broodier, and more boring of the Fisher brothers. But, at the time of their coupling, Conrad is disappointed by the rapid progression of his mother's terminal illness. Like most teenagers, he doesn't cope with it in the most communicative and healthiest of ways. In Season 2, Conrad lets their relationship fizzle out by emotionally distancing himself from Belly due to his own anxieties, impending grievance, and low self-esteem, leaving Belly to heart-wrenchingly pull the plug on their relationship, despite pleading for him to help her keep it alive. Simultaneously, although Belly has always pined for Conrad, Jeremiah (the fun, buoyant, casually promiscuous brother) has always carried a torch for Belly. Their relationship is kindled during Season 2—after Belly and Conrad's implodes, of course—and Conrad handles it fairly immaturely at first, before ultimately deciding to give his blessing. In Season 3, which premiered last week, we see Belly and Jeremiah's relationship blossom for a few years until some (debated) infidelity on Jeremiah's part is finally brought to light, causing a massive rift in their relationship. As if that weren't enough to basically disqualify him from this ongoing competition for Belly's heart, we also see that Jeremiah has proven in these early episodes to be immature (emotionally and otherwise) and rather careless, never a good sign for a love interest going up against another.
Suffice it to say that the options in this triangle are bad! For a while, the way to get female characters out of this predicament (and to easily mark a work as “feminist”) was to have the protagonist finally “ choose herself ,” though that too became old hat. Now, in whatever wave of feminism we're in, it shouldn't be hard to imagine that a woman (or whoever, really) could love themselves and find love in a healthy relationship with someone else . Instead, it feels as if today's romances are being written from a scarcity mindset, in which characters not only are increasingly facing poor contenders on both sides of their tug-of-war relationship but are also, more often than not, stuck with them. It's not that the failing characteristics of the Fisher brothers are unbelievable—it's certainly normal for teenagers to be emotionally immature in general, but especially when dealing with insecurities, change, and grievance. (On that note, Belly is no saint either.) But Belly is in college, a significant period of her life when she is primed to meet other people, especially other suitors beyond the guys she's known since she was a child. Instead, the show saddles her with two crappy options for life . (The season trailer hinted at a wedding, and the book, without spoiling too much, does end with her marrying one of the two brothers.) In the fight to hold on to the well-wrought love triangle, The Summer I Turned Pretty is already a goner. But I have one final relationship: Please, for the love of God, Belly, date literally anyone else!
