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Mind reading is dangerous.

Withered Hope says she has a soul mate,
Living in a city in another state.
But the soul mate thinks about a picture in a book of a beautiful crook.
And the picture of the crook in the book is in love with the brand new motorbike.
But the motorbike doesn't like crooks,
it's obsessed with the Very Sad Sack

They Might Be Giants, "Withered Hope"

You love her
But she loves him
And he loves somebody else
You just can't win.

The J. Geils Band, "Love Stinks"

Love triangles are stressful and often heartbreaking. Add five or ten more people to the mix, and instead they become comedy: Characters A, B, C, and D all love character E, who might love any of them, but can't commit for reasons of honor or basic wishywashiness. There's also character F, who might love E, and whom he might love back, but they get on each other's nerves so it's hard to tell. Meanwhile, there are guys who are each sweet on A, B, C, D and F who all want to pound the crap out of E because he took their girls from them. Except on alternate Tuesdays, when their third cousin from Osaka expresses her intent to marry Character F's dog...

You get the idea.

If the Love Dodecahedron is ever resolved, it's always with F. Who by that time has annoyed you so much that you're rooting for B. In case E and F aren't believable enough on their own, the writers will attempt to quickly deal with the competition beforehand.

Writers are always aware of it, and many series have official diagrams so the fans can keep track of the Loads And Loads Of Characters.

Christopher Booker uses this concept as the very nature of (his definition of) the Comedy genre, only the point is that the Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends isn't a shoehorn but the very soul of the plot:

  • Start with at least 3 ideal relationships;
  • Each relationship is stymied because the people involved are:
  • The Villain (or sometimes the Hero) is the source of the biggest road block, so
  • Make him repent (dramatically), and then
  • Everyone can cheerfully enter into the relationship they were meant to be in all along.

The Villain (or Hero) acts as a Fisher King, casting a darkness and confusion across all the relationships until his Heel Face Turn, which frees up the main couple to get together and that, in turn, frees up everyone else.

The Love Dodecahedron is a superset of the following tropes:

Also, see Thirty Xanatos Pileup, which is similar to this trope, but with Xanatos Gambits. Though Love Dodecahedra can be the cause of such pileups. The opposite of this is No Loves Intersect.


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