Basic Trope: Two guys challenge each other to a competition over a girl.
- Straight: Marcus and Cassius are both enamored with Julia, and decide to have a contest of strength and skill to see which of them is fit to marry her.
- Exaggerated: An unofficial rivalry between Marcus and Cassius for Julia's heart has been going on since childhood with no winner, and begins to escalate into a deadly affair once Julia becomes of marriageable age.
- Downplayed: While occasionally rancorous, the arguments between Marcus and Cassius regarding Julia are rooted in a solid understanding concerning her, and never spill over into full-on violence.
- Justified:
- Julia makes Helen of Troy look plain.
- Julia has been unwittingly stringing both men along for ages, and they're growing impatient. A competition will settle the matter once and for all.
- Julia is a princess. Whoever gets to marry her acquires significant political power.
- Inverted: Julia and Juno argue over who gets to go out with Claudius.
- Subverted:
- Marcus and Cassius finally realize their true soulmates are each other, and ditch Julia forthwith.
- Julia, on hearing about the challenge, decides she's sick of being an object to be fought over, and to put a stop to it once and for all...
- ...challenges them both herself. (If they both win, they have to share her affections.)
- ...decides neither of them are worthy of her.
- Double Subverted:
- However, Marcus and Cassius realize that their relationship won't work due to whatever reason, and their competition for Julia is reignited.
- Both Marcus and Cassius handily defeat Julia and refuse to share her.
- But she still has to get married, and in order to get rid of her unwanted suitors, her chosen man as to defeat both Marcus and Cassius.
- Parodied:
- The competition is framed as a pseudo-olympiad, complete with the 100-meter "my parents aren't home" dash.
- Julia's hand has been cut off, and Marcus and Cassius are competing for it.
- Zig Zagged: The competition between Marcus and Cassius starts out rather lighthearted, only to become more and more vicious as time goes on and their relationships with Julia get more intimate. Eventually, Julia is so disgusted with the display she tells them both to go and cool down and figure out what's really important: the fight with each other, or her.
- Averted: Neither suitor wishes to come to blows over something as unimportant as a woman's favor.
- Enforced: Julia has promised her hand in marriage to the victor.
- Lampshaded: Julia is skeptical about the contest, considering it less a fight over her than a fight to see whether Marcus or Cassius is the bigger meathead.
- Invoked: The contest is both suggested and refereed by Julia's father, Augustus, mainly to get Marcus and Cassius to stop singing their awful love songs at his daughter's window every night.
- Exploited: Anthony plays the situation to his advantage by egging Marcus and Cassius into a mutually destructive competition, leaving him unoccupied to woo Julia.
- Defied:
- The three suddenly remember polygamy is legal in the jurisdiction.
- Marcus and Cassius realize that this is pretty damn stupid, before going on to chase a different girl in case either of them had wooed Julia beforehand.
- Discussed: Marcus and Cassius name their weapons in the fight: lance, mace, pen and paper.
- Conversed: The rules of the competition are plainly stated to nip any of the inevitable quibbles that may happen in the bud.
- Implied: Marcus and Cassius both begin bulking up and training to compete against one another physically, and learn as many love sonnets as possible.
- Deconstructed: The competition eventually turns lethal when Cassius is killed trying to complete a task. Although Marcus has won by default, Julia feels responsible for Cassius's death by allowing the competition to continue, and, grief-stricken, refuses to return Marcus's affections.
- Reconstructed: The real challenge to overcome is Julia's trepidation about starting a relationship. After a long courtship with both men, wherein both of them are totally honest and pour their souls out to her regarding their feelings, at last she makes her choice: Quintus, her gardener.
Go and win fair lady's heart back at the main page.
