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Will They or Won't They?

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This trope is under discussion in the Trope Repair Shop.

"And now, rather than admit these feelings, you're dancing around one another with this mind-numbing and frankly boorish mating ritual. So please — for my sake — either quit your bickering, or pull over, tear off those clothes, and GET IT OVER WITH ALREADY!"
Murray Bauman, Stranger Things, "The Bite"

This is a Fan Speak term used to describe any relationship that is obviously filled with Unresolved Sexual Tension but the characters resist going into a full blown relationship for a rather long time. Usually the two characters will be presented so that "they will" is the conclusion to root for; only rarely is the question of whether the writers think they should is in any real doubt. This includes situations in which the characters do finally get together, but do not last as the point of the term is to point out Shipping.

Fans of works that rely on this kind of dynamic will find that most works are very reluctant to resolving the relationship and risk losing the valuable source of dramatic tension that is the (seemingly) unrequited feelings. After all, without that lovely source of drama, the audience could cry that the work is either Jumping the Shark or suffering Shipping Bed Death depending on whatever replaces it. As such, many of works that feature these kinds of relationships will end in a Last-Minute Hookup with writers keeping the romantic tension building throughout the series, only revealing that they do (or alternatively, that they don't) in the midst of concluding any other major plot threads during the Grand Finale.

Though even fans of such relationships aren't without their complaints when shows rely on this a bit too much. Works that keep this plotline going for too long will be criticized as having a Romantic Plot Tumor that overshadows the rest of the work. Or, if the work itself is romance-focused to begin with, fans will often just get frustrated waiting for the pay-off, while works make ever-more-desperate narrative leaps to keep these two characters apart, or may even have the characters hook up for a little while, only to split up over and over again, until they finally finally let the characters get together for good...at which point, the work has lost most of its audience anyway, as people stopped caring or got exhausted by the back-and-forth.

    Some tropes that are often associated with this phrase 

No examples, please. This only defines the term.


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