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I hope this movie never has a sequel, because Jon and Sara are destined to become the most boring married couple in history. For years to come, people at parties will be whispering, "See that couple over there? The Tragers? Jon and Sara? Whatever you do, don't ask them how they met."
Two characters, a man and a woman, meet. The circumstances are none of the typical ways couples meet. There's something cutesy about it. Possibly they have an instant dislike for one another. Maybe they crash into each other in a hallway and papers fly about. Maybe one of them has been shopping for ISO Standard Urban Groceries and trips over the other walking down the street. Perhaps mistaken identity or other wacky misunderstanding is involved. Sometimes someone is naked or in an otherwise embarrassing situation.
Meet Cute is a subtrope of Boy Meets Girl, a way to quickly introduce two characters and set up their burgeoning relationship. A meet-cute is almost always rife with awkwardness, embarrassment, and sometimes outright hostility. It's often used in films, particularly the Romantic Comedy, due to time constraints; while on television a relationship can develop more naturally over many episodes, a movie has to get their couple set up right away to fit within 2 hours. Meet-cute is also a staple of shojo anime and manga, and may happen multiple times over the course of an Unwanted Harem story.
There is no clear cut definition of what constitutes meeting cute. One criterion is that it's not any way you or anyone you've ever known has met a significant other. A crucial indicator is that it makes you roll your eyes and wonder if there's a viewer alive who doesn't see where this is going — but then, it's not really intended to be subtle.
Meeting cute after the first episode of a TV series is often looked down on; it's a dead giveaway that these two will be a couple, and usually indicates that the writers are heavily invested in the couple. Chances are, they won't be willing to let go if the fans don't care for the pairing.
Television writers should probably take note that the most popular TV 'ships generally do not meet cute. They develop more naturally as characters who interact organically are found to share chemistry. Couples that meet cute tend to develop forced-down-your-throat, inauthentic, and annoying relationships.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Played with in Tenchi Muyo: Under the misguided impression that shojo manga are actually a realistic guide to teenaged relationships on Earth (an impression fostered by a mischievous Sasami), both Ayeka and Ryoko engineer classic Crash Into Hello meetings with Tenchi — months after they first met him.
- Kaoru and Aoi Meet Cute at the start of Ai Yori Aoshi. They bump into each other at the station, he fixes her shoe, walks her to her destination (taking a round trip on the train because he didn't want to wake her up) and then they discover they are childhood friends... Aww.
- Yuuichi meets every available girl in Kanon in an odd manner.
- Shuichi and Yuki in Gravitation meet cute twice: the first time, Shuichi's lyrics blow away in the park into the hands of Yuki who insults them, much to Shuichi's shock; the second happens a few days later when Shuichi jumps in front of Yuki's car in the rain and Yuki, after deprecating him again, drives him to his home to dry him off.
- Lampshaded and possibly subverted in Lucky Star: two random characters of no importance whatsoever accidentally tangle their bag keychains, and Konata (witnessing this) notes that they are now on the way to being a couple, while Kagami snaps that real life does not work that way.
- How do we know it's subverted? Do we ever see them again?
- In Eden Of The East, Akira Takizawa and Saki Morimi meet in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., with the former carrying a cell phone, a gun...and completely naked.
- In Basilisk, during their first meeting, a hiccup causes Oboro to stumble and spill a tray of tea she was serving all over Gennosuke.
- Subverted and lampshaded in Hunter X Hunter during the Greed Island arc with "Love-Love, The City of Romance" which is "famous for its easy meetings": various Moe Moe-looking characters crash into the main characters, lose their glasses, and generally need rescuing, but the main characters ignore them because they've got a mission to complete.
- Most of Love Hina is filled with this trope... Keitaro and Naru get it most often, particularly in the episode wheree they both decide, separately, that they need to go on vacation, bump into each other, both break their glasses, and have to spend the day together, doing romantic stuff, only to find out when they've regained their glasses who they are, and spend the rest of their trip escorting an anemic girl back to her home island.
- Makoto in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, after several failed matchmaking attempts, uses her time-leaping ability to forcibly arrange a Meet Cute for Kousuke and Kaho by putting them in just the right positions for Kousuke to get involuntarily tackled into Kaho by another student. This ultimately leads to Kousuke and Kaho dying in a train accident, and Makoto later undoes her meddling in favor of a much simpler approach.
- In Code Geass, how Euphemia and Suzaku first met. With her jumping out of a window several stories above ground and landing in his arms. Then again, everything about Euphemia tends to be played as being Moe Moe. Well, almost everything.
- In Kare Kano, Yukino's parents were childhood friends who bumped into each other on her mother's first day in middle school.
- The way Sena and Suzuna meet...so...very...Meet Cute...(mixed with some Crash Into Hello.) Seriously, the artist should have put a big fat "Love Interest" label on her forehead.
- Double Arts reveals in a side comic that Kiri's parents met this way. When a super-tall boy and a super-tiny girl trying to enroll in a seamstressing school misestimate the "normal" sizes of their trial garments...
- Subverted hard in Darker Than Black. Li ends up saving Chiaki several times just by being in the right place at the right time, including once with a Fake Out Make Out, and eventually promises to help her escape the country. However, "Li" is just the civilian alias of Hei, a.k.a. "The Black Angel of Death". He was stringing her along purposefully in order to learn what she knew. And on top of that, it wasn't even the real Chiaki- it was a Doll programmed with her personality as a decoy to draw him out.
- In Saiunkoku Monogatari, Shuurei and Ryuuki met when she was trying to get some cherry blossom petals to float in her tea, but couldn't reach any. Ryuuki stopped to help her out, but a strong wind made him accidentally break the whole branch off. They ended up having tea and Shuurei's home made sweet bean buns together.
- In Sailor Moon, Usagi and Mamoru meet when she accidentally hits him with a failing test she'd tossed over her shoulder. This repeated several times in the anime with her hitting him in the head with flung shoes, maintaining the Slap Slap Kiss dynamic they had for much of the first series.
- Rei tries to invoke this trope when she develops a crush on Mamoru, by attempting to run into his arms and blush accordingly. It totally doesn't work—he steps on her when she falls. Rei, even the trooper, goes with it anyway.
- Chibi Usa finds a little boy's keychain when he drops it. Cue bishie sparkle when she sees him and he seems wonderful . . . until he starts doing a lewd routine from Shin-chan, which his keychain depicts. Chibi Usa is not amused.
Live Action TV
Film
Literature
- Brutally subverted in American Gods. Mister Town meets Laura by the side of the road and offers her a lift. Within the span of less than an hour, they make playful banter and run through the rain with newspapers held over their heads, laughing. The character is convinced that he's found true love for the first time in his life. Then Laura kills him just like she killed his friends. Of course, if you've read the novel faithfully up to that point, you already know that Laura is Shadow's undead wife who's willing to murder others to help him, so you know from the start that it isn't going to end well for the hapless guy.
- In the Newbery Award-winning children's book Ginger Pye, the children's father (Mr. Pye) met their mother (the soon-to-be Mrs. Pye) when, for kicks and giggles, he decided to run "up" the "down" escalator in what he thought was an abandoned subway station. Naturally, he ended up running down their mother-to-be, who was riding "down" it. Romance ensued.
- Lampshaded and referenced in Gravity's Rainbow:
It was what Hollywood likes to call a "cute meet," out in the neat 18th-century heart of downtown Tunbridge Wells, Roger motoring in the vintage Jaguar up to London, Jessica at the roadside struggling prettily with a busted bicycle, murky wool ATS skirt hiked up on a handle bar...
- A dwarf boy and his athletic older brother run into a girl pursued by bandits. The older brother fights off the thugs and the younger brother comforts the girl. Boy and girl like each other and get married. This is how Tysha and Tyrion Lannister (with the brother being Jaime) meet in A Song Of Ice And Fire... And then It Got Worse.
- In the novel Variable Star by Robert A Heinlein and Spider Robinson, the protagonist refers to this trope by name when describing his initial encounters with various women.
Theater
- In the musical of Les Miserables, Marius and Cosette play this perfectly straight, randomly running into each other in the street. He apologizes and stoops to help her up, and then they make eye contact. Emphasis added because the musical score emphasizes that precise moment with a sting.
- The Light in the Piazza: Fabrizio catches Clara's hat when it is carried away by a gust of wind.
Video Games
- A flashback in We Love Katamari reveals that The Prince's parents - The King of All Cosmos and his wife - met cute to a ridiculous degree, in a Crash Into Hello involving a cut-off Pompadour and a half-eaten bread accidentally forming a heart shape. The result: love at first sight. Awww...
- Final Fantasy VII had Aerith meet Cloud when he fell through the ceiling of her church into a flowerbed - from a terminal height, mind you. Also, Crisis Core reveals she met previous love interest Zack in the exact same way. Ironically, Aerith and Cloud's real first meeting was a subversion of the Crash Into Hello where she was knocked over - by a random NPC - before calmly asking Cloud if he wanted to buy a flower as he wandered past.
- Deconstructed (maybe even invoked) in (surprise, surprise) Metal Gear Solid 2. We learn that Raiden and Rose met over a pedantic argument over which building King Kong was climbing in the movie. It later turns out to have been all a big set-up to ensure Raiden would fall for her, allowing her to spy on him as part of the set-up for a Xanatos Gambit.
- Non-romantic (but Ho Yay) example - when Snake first meets Otacon, Otacon wets his pants. Snake teases him about it in Metal Gear Solid 2 (in a jokingly flirtatious, 'I remember the day when we first met' kind of way), Otacon jokes about it in Metal Gear Solid 4, and in Metal Gear Mobile it's actually a plot element when Snake asks Otacon what happened when they first met in a Spot The Impostor situation.
- Chrono Trigger features one of these as the the main character runs into (or gets run into by) Marle, and causes her to lose her pendant, which Crono then helps return. Shortly afterwards, Crono goes after Marle when she gets sent into the past.
- Lampshaded in Katawa Shoujo. One version of the scene in which Emi slams into the protagonist Hisao is actually titled "Meet Cute."
Web Comics
- The anime-inspired Mega Tokyo naturally has this happen several times. Of particular note is the main couple, Piro and Kimiko, who've managed to meet cute 'bout 3 times so far... Largo and Erika probably also qualify, albeit only twice.
- Yuki and Kobayashi's Meet Cute is almost a parody; their first interaction within the strip involving her falling on him from a great height (immediately after he unintentionally distracted her) and giving him three broken ribs, a concussion, and a broken arm.
- Don't forget the exact details of Largo's first meeting with Erika. His near-fatal error of thinking her breasts weren't real and that she padded her Kasumi outfit was followed by his being asked in Japanese "Want me to break your other arm so you have a matched set?" most definitely didn't point at 'cute', rather 'keep your distance, you perv.'
- Last Resort pulls a Meet Cute almost right out of the gate with Slick pulling a Crash Into Hello onto Jigsaw as he's trying to evade his guards. Granted, Slick and Jigsaw aren't a couple yet, but being the only other of her species on board so far leaves little to the imagination.
- They don't meet any cuter than this
 .
- This Checkerboard Nightmare strip.
- F'ga in Ghastly's Ghastly Comic likes to tell people he and his boyfriend Bobby met through a glory hole. Bobby insists that it wasn't what it sounds like; "F'ga was just reaching through to borrow some toilet paper because his stall was empty and that weird guy with the Chick tracts wasn't in the bathroom that day."
- Questionable Content. Amir and Natasha first met in a mosh pit, when she kicked out one of his teeth. She saved the tooth, looked him up the next day and went with him to the dentist to stick it back in. Your Milage May Vary, or rather, if you're a metalhead you'll go "Nawww!" and if you're something else you'll go "WTF!!".
Western Animation
Fan Fic
- In Dept Heaven Apocrypha, flagship couple Milanor and Nessiah first met up having to wash dishes together as a punishment for falling asleep during the school's opening ceremony. They got into an argument, after which Nessiah wound up hospitalized due to using too much magic, and the two of them became friends there. They didn't actually become a couple until a bit later on, though.
- Meria and Seth first met while the latter was on the run from some teachers after destroying one too many precious objects. Their relationship didn't last too long, unfortunately.
Real Life (Somehow)
- Martial artist Wong Fei Hung met his fourth wife, Mok Gwai Lan, when his shoe flew off during a martial arts demonstration and hit Mok Gawi Lan in the head. She then leapt up on the stage and berated him. Impressed by her spirit, he asked her parents for her hand in marriage, and they accepted.
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