Question about Pair The Spares

The description on Pair the Spares indicates it is specifically a means of Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends, with the "spares" to be paired off being the losers in a Love Dodecahedron. However, not all the examples involve Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends, and I'm reluctant to dismiss them simply as misuse, as at least one explicitly refers to "pairing the spares" as a concept. Is Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends a necessary part of the trope or not?

I am not sure if I am getting to the point you are asking here, but I think in some situations, some Shipping from the fans is in play now.

For example, some kinds of fans will detest seeing their Draco in Leather Pants not get the girl and it will generate the desire to at least in the canon resolve their sexual tension. But other Heels that garnered too little, or no sympathy at all from the audience I can perfectly see them ignored as a whole...

So, it depends on the examples, and within those examples, differing opinions might exist in a YMMV way. Does this make sense to the question at all, or was all I said unrelated to what you were seeking...?

That doesn't have anything to do with anything I said, no.

Let me try rephrasing and getting a little more specific. The description for Pair the Spares makes it mostly seem like it's a way of Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends, where the characters who "lost" in a love dodecahedron situation get paired with each other. However, several of the examples are about characters being paired up for reasons not related to Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends. In at least one of these (the Harry Potter one), the author explicitly acknowledged the concept of pairing the "spares", but not in a way that matches the description. Are these examples misuse, or is the description incorrect when it talks about Pair the Spares being a subtrope of Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends?

edited 20th Jun '14 4:43:27 PM by nrjxll

You mean as where the "spares" are just two characters who weren't heading for a relationship, but weren't interested in anyone before either?

As I read it, the trope requires the "spares" to be ones who didn't get the partner they originally wished. Both of them. They wanted to be in a relationship with someone who got someone else.

I don't think it's the trope if they didn't lose out in any relationship drama. If they weren't interested in someone but got rejected, it's not the trope.

Pair the Spares is definitely a subtrope of Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends, though. One way of cleaning them up.

Basically, yeah - what I'm seeing is the use of Pair the Spares for cases where the characters "left over" from the rest of the romantic relationships in a series are paired up, regardless of whether those characters were involved in any romantic drama.

To use the Harry Potter example I mentioned: there's a group of six people, three male and three female, who are the most important out of the student characters^note disregarding Draco Malfoy, who is mainly an antagonist. Four of these characters form two of the series's Official Couples. The remaining two (Neville and Luna) were explicitly not paired off because J. K. Rowling felt it would be "too neat" to have everyone meet their future spouse within this group as teenagers. I think that definitely qualifies as (an attempt to avert) "pairing the spares" by at least one definition, but it doesn't have anything to do with the current definition about Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends - while Harry Potter fans have basically shipped everyone with everyone else, within the actual books neither character was ever involved in any sort of love triangle/ dodecahedron.

There's a few more examples on the page like that (and most of them aren't aversions, so don't get hung up on that part). I feel like there's a real concept there, but it doesn't seem to fit with the definition, so I'm still wondering: is this sort of thing misuse or is the definition too focused on just one of the reasons Pair the Spares can happen?

edited 21st Jun '14 3:11:32 AM by nrjxll

The statement Rowling made isn't averting either Pair the Spares or Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends. For the first, she's not using the same definition, as the "spares" there are about people not in a romantic relationship, but for the trope it's about those who got left out of the Love Triangle / Love Dodecahedron. For the second, she did clean them up by attaching them to someone in the distant finale, which does clean it up by giving them a happy future.

Not pairing them up within the friendship circle isn't relevant for Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends, and Pair the Spares isn't about friendship circles, but Love Triangles and more corners.

I think the idea of the trope that pairing up two people from the losing ends of triangles to make them happy is rather important, rather than just pairing up characters who didn't lose out on someone they were interested in. Contrary to popular belief, it's not a given that a character in fiction has to want to be in a relationship to be happy. However, someone who has shown that interest probably won't be happy for quite a while unless it's actually resolved on screen. And it's about a pair, not one character.

Again, that's the question I'm trying to get answered: is it? You're taking the definition as granted and going from there, but in past conflicts between trope definitions and examples the former wasn't always the one that turned out to be right. We've had problems with overly-specific definitions before, and like I said the Harry Potter example isn't the only one on the page that's using the first definition for Pair the Spares.

(Incidentally, the stuff Rowling's said in interviews about who people married doesn't actually qualify as Cleaning Up Romantic Loose Ends, as that's definitely about characters that were on the losing end of a romantic conflict).

If you're going to argue that the definition is too narrow, that's TRS. If there's a problem with the examples not following the definition, and the definition is wrong, then it needs to be dealt with there. If the definition is right and the examples are wrong, either a split or a cleanup is necessary.

I've said my interpretation of what's written, and what I believe the trope is. I don't think the trope is, "Hey, two people aren't hooked up by the end, so let's hook them up," but rather, "these two have been spurned, so let's solve two problems at once by hooking them up." It's explicitly about solving the emotional trauma by losing love interests, rather than just making things look neat by having everyone hooked up.

I've not read the HP books, so I don't know the details other than what I've read here. Seen about half the films.