I don’t know if this trend has always existed and I’ve only noticed it the last few years, or if it’s new, but the “one guy dies” solution to love triangle strikes me as particularly evil. At this point, I’ve read enough books that employ this device that I can’t relax when I don’t have a sense of how a love triangle is going to be resolved.
From my perspective, it never feels like an organic ending to a story. The author spends so much time getting me equally invested in all three characters. I start to really believe in the female protagonist’s love for both guys. When the final book in the series reaches the 75% mark and both guys are still in the picture and still unattached to anybody but her, I start to get very worried. WITH GOOD REASON! Barring the type of 11th hour personality change that results in one of the men revealing himself to be a major dickhead, I know, I KNOW that one of them is going to bite it. Romance, Thunderdome-style: two men enter, one man leaves. Romance, Highlander-style: There can be only one. And for whatever reason, the one to die is always the one that the female protagonist is currently with. Like, way to go, loser: enjoy having her for a while, because you are totally going to die really soon and tragically.
The first book that I remember reading this in had a lot of other weird things happening that I didn’t like, so my reaction was more, “WTF? That was odd,” than anything else. The next time it happened, I was really pissed off. Seriously?? That was the best ending you could come up with? I find this to be a totally cheap plot decide, and feel that the author has written herself into a corner. She has made two viable HEA candidates for her character, and instead of crushing one set of fans or another, she literally kills one of the guys, meaning that there are no possible backsies, do-overs, or reversals. Maybe I’ll feel differently about this when I’m not a half hour removed from reading yet another series that ended this way, but UGH.
Stop it, authors.
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