"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."
"Love hurts, even when it's got everything going for it. And this love of yours has nothing going for it. Nothing at all."
Forget life-threatening superheroism, acting
Too Dumb To Live, and
Tempting Fate. The most dangerous thing any hero can do in any media is... falling in love. Dare to love someone else and you set up yourself and your beloved for a plethora of emotional griefs. Love in
Real Life is responsible for vast quantities of anguished poetry and tragic literature; factor in all the crazy stuff that happens on TV, and drama and disaster are practically guaranteed.
About to commit permanently? Look for an
Anyone Can Die to put a permanent end to the
Will They Or Wont They issue. Forget to
say goodbye to your beloved that one time? It'll haunt you for the rest of your life. And let's not forget that becoming emotionally attached to one person leaves you open to the stress caused by the
villain abducting your beloved or
them even being killed off senselessly just to shape you into the
Anti Hero. Love will make your heart go soft and pitter-pattering into the path to be crushed by the cruel forces of fate against
Star Crossed Lovers. Small wonder that
so many try to protect their loved ones by dumping them.
If you've got more than one love interest, you've got a headache-inducing
Love Triangle or even
Love Dodecahedron on your hands. Tread these waters
very carefully, lest you be on the receiving end of a
Yandere's poisonous affections or a
Tsundere's
Megaton Punch. Pick one lover and you can look forward to either a
Thundering Herd of
jilted rivals or the
silent shattering of many other hearts. All in the name of comedy, you say? Comedy never became as twisted as it does when dealing with lovers
crazy enough to beat down your door,
glomp you, and refuse to let go.
And heaven forbid if your love turns out to be one-sided. You'll become a
crazy psycho stalker if you don't choose
to nobly sacrifice your love. Sometimes you'll even go all the way
into a full-fledged villain with a grudge against humanity because humanity was not kind enough to let you have that one girl. Sometimes it's even
your own creator who decides that you can't get the girl because
he couldn't get her in real life!
In the right/wrong genre,
even when you win, you lose. Little wonder why many a hero has chosen to be a
Genre Savvy Celibate Hero.
However, if you
do manage to get it right, love can be the
purest and most powerful thing in the world.
Counteracted with
Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends.
Examples:
- Pick an Opera, any opera.
- Aida by Giuseppe Verdi is a good example. Aida, an Ethiopian princess in hiding, falls in love with and is loved by Radames, the general of the Egyptian army. Her mistress, the Pharaoh's daughter is her canny rival. After Radames saves her father, the king of Ethiopia, from certain death after being captured in battle, he brow beats her into fullfiling her "duty" as an Ethiopian to get Radames to reveal the Egyptian's troops' positions, sentencing him to death and dooming them to live apart. It's a "Happily Ever After" ending though; Aida sneaks into the tomb where Radames has been buried alive so they can slowly die together. So yes, the Deus Angst Machina is as integral a part of Opera as humor is to Comedy.
- Romeo and Juliet and every imitator. Entire dissertations could be written on how both would have lived longer, happier lives if Romeo had decided to stay in and mope, Juliet had told him she wanted at least three dates before considering marriage, or the friar's advice to Juliet had been to take up her father's offer of being kicked out of the house rather than telling her to fake her death.
- The original version of The Little Mermaid: The mermaid loves the prince and gives up her voice and family to be with him, but he ends up marrying someone else and she turns into sea foam. But a tacked-on Aesop-fuelled ending gives her an immortal (ie. human) soul anyway. Reputedly fueled by Creator Breakdown.
- Davey Jones and Calypso's relationship in the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies. Yeah, that ended well.
- Pick anything written by Joss Whedon.
- One of the many reasons Charlie Brown is The Woobie in the Peanuts strip is his inability to get the Little Red Haired Girl to notice him. A minor case of Creator Breakdown, Schultz admitted that he had his own "Little Red Haired Girl," whom he lost.
- If this wasn't so funny, it would be depressing: Charlie Brown is to Peppermint Patty as the Little Red Haired Girl is to Charlie Brown, making it an unrequited Love Triangle. Good Grief!
- Indeed, unrequited love is a running theme throughout the comic's run: Linus towards Miss Othmar, Sally towards Linus ("I'm not your sweet babboo!"), Lucy towards Schroder... the list goes on.
- Teen Titans: Just when things were looking up for Beast Boy in the last season, culminating in him successfully leading a team of C-list teen heroes against the arc's Big Bad, the series gave him a Downer Ending / No Ending with the return of either a look-alike or amnesiac Terra, his morally conflicted season 2 flame.
- Dokuro-chan from Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan is an extremely brutal and literal version of this. The Opening probably puts this best:
"I'll cut you, punch you, toy with you
Kick you, be a cocktease, drip stuff on you
But that's just how I express my love."
- Edgar Allan Poe was a very firm believer in this. He thought the best theme to write about was the death of a beautiful young woman, often leading to the protagonist's descent into madness.
- From the Hellboy movie art book: "When, in 1988, Liz Sherman joined the B.P.R.D., Hellboy fell in love. From then on, he knew the meaning of pain."
- Two names separated by a stroke: Roy/Riza.
- Which is a pittance compared to what Lan Fan goes through for her love of Ling. Cutting your arm off hurts a lot more than getting a burn on your back
- True for both The Hero and Worthy Opponent on Avatar The Last Airbender: Aang is told he will have to let go of his love for Katara to ever master the Avatar State, and after becoming disillusioned with his life in the Fire Nation, the one thing Zuko has to leave behind that he still cares about is his New Old Flame Mai. See, they're Not So Different.
- Pick practically ANY hero in ANY Gundam series. If you don't believe me...
- Then, pick any hero in any Gundam-inspired series:
- Space Runaway Ideon: Cosmo suffers a Heroic BSOD discovering that a girl he grew fond of, Kitty Kitten (cheesy name, I know), was killed almost accidentally.
- Code Geass: Suzaku witnesses his big love Princess Euphemia fatally shot by his arch-nemesis, after which she effectively dies in his arms (Pieta Plagiarism galore), then some fifteen episodes later Lelouch, the said "arch-nemesis", experiences a girl he always cared for (well, perhaps not romantically but it was definitely headed that way) dying on him in a very similar fashion.
- Game example: Max Payne 2
This is love. When someone drags you from the wreckage when you have given in, ready to just lie there and die. This is love. When someone, no matter what the cost, shows you there is hope, a choice, that you can put down your gun. This is love. Love hurts. - Max's narration in a cutscene in
Max Payne 2, just before
his love interest is gunned down by the Big Bad because she refused to kill him.
- The new Battlestar Galactica series loves this:
- Sharon/Helo
- Lee/Kara
- Adama/Roslin
- John/Aeryn in Far Scape. They make out. They fight alongside each other. They're tortured. They try to kill each other. They have sex. They die. (They get better.) They murder people to get back to each other. They fight. They make out. They blow up a bunch of bad guys. They have a kid. I just saved you four seasons of awesome TV.
- D'Argo and Chiana are just as much fun!
- Ayumi from Honey And Clover has a bad case of unrequited love for Takumi, who sees her more like his sister. A lot of the first season of the anime is devoted to Ayumi's suffering because of this. Takumi in turn has a hard time with his feelings for (older) Rika.
- Odin Sphere: The entire plot is full of this. Only a few characters actually get happy endings, assuming you didn't muck it up and get the bad ending, in which case it turns into a Kill Em All.
- The House of Night's vampyre protagonist Zoey ends up falling for three guys simultaneously (ish). It ends badly when She thinks her own-age vampyre boyfriend Erik is dead,flees to the hot-but-older Loren for comfort, and ends up losing her virginity to him. Proving that Joss Whedon is not the only one who can be incredibly cruel to his characters,the following things happen in quick succession: It breaks her bond with her human boyfriend Heath, Erik walks in on her and Loren Kissing, and it turns out Loren was in cahoots with the villaness and only using Zoey. And then Loren is brutally murdered. Ouch. Poor Zoey.
