Star Trek vs. Star Wars (and a collection of memes)

Good point. Though in the latter films it seems she is always reacting never acting.

I do find the opposites attract trope a bit annoying, but I've occasionally seen it in real life, not often though. Mainly the Han-Leia love story came about as realistically as it did because Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher were having an affair in real life.

They had the chemistry of short term lovers in the movie, not a long term happy couple, though very few movies have that in them.

Even if you take out the cringey dialog about sand, I don't how Anakin could have gotten out of the friend zone, but I guess Star Wars is not the place to look for romance.

In long running TV series and to a lesser extent movies, the will/they won't they romance plot often loses audience interest when the uncertainty dies and the couple is established as being together.

The only time I ever recall seeing a will they/won't they plot that ends in "won't" (without one of the characters dying) is

Spoiler: SPOILER for a 6+ year old movie

Pacific Rim. Sorry if I spoiled things. But the very end where it kind of looks like the protagonist couple is going to kiss they had a very plutonic moment. That was oddly satisfying for the subversion.

Maybe I'm just too cynical about romance. I really liked the Hunger Games trilogy. It was a Young Adult book series so Katniss kind of had to resolve her love triangle, but I thought the reasonable conclusion was that Katniss be celibate and just be focus on making sure the new emerging government doesn't suck. I think her relationship with the guy she ended up choosing was fundamentally unhealthy and the relationship with the guy she rejected would have been worse.

Spoiler: Hunger Games spoilers

Katniss' character is based on two things, an implacable will to survive and love for her sister.

Throughout the entire series, Katniss does whatever it takes to survive no matter how difficult, humiliating, or dangerous the task is, but she is not a thrill seeker or a fool. She doesn't take unnecessary risks...unless it's for her sister.

The times she really acts instead of reacts is to help (or later avenge) her sister. Other than that, she always does what benefits her own survival.

She picked Peeta. Gale kind of sort of accidentally killed Katniss' sister and Peeta was an artistic but weak cry baby was sort of a surrogate for Katniss' dead sister.

One thing the books showed a lot more than the movies (though the movies did address) is that even the winners of the past Hunger Games never emerge whole. They have a lot of lot of PTSD related problems among other problems (and that is before the government inflicts additional miseries on them). If I had that much crazy in my head I would choose not to reproduce but that is just me.

 

Well, sometime people with problems do "normal" things in the hope those will fix the problems: they believe that if they are put in a what is seen as positive relation, they will be happy again. It never works.

 

To a male perspective yes, Twilight is garbage. But the Twilight "Saga" was commercially impressive if nothing else though the last movie got a lackluster response from even their hard core fans (I dare say because it was a four-part series, trilogies are where it's at).

And 50 Shades of Grey was a fanfiction of Twilight that made the author millions of dollars.

The female equivalent of the Hero's Journey in terms of archetypical stories is Beauty and the Beast "Woman tames a savage man."

The savage man could be a literal monster, like Beast, a vampire, werewolf, zombie, or demon. Beautician and the Beast and The King and I the "monster" is an iron fisted ruler. My mom likes old movies from 1900s to 1960s. There were a lot of movies back then where the female lead tames a grizzled war hero back.

Sometimes the metaphorical monster is a criminal, traditionally a pirate or thief, but I've seen gangster, hitman, and others used the romantic target.

The new 21st century standard is the woman tames a sociopathic CEO.

Teen movies not marketed towards boys typically has a bad boy being tamed. If a teen movie is marketed towards boys, the nerdy guy gets the girl in the end. If a teen stories is marketed towards boys AND girls, there will be a will they, won't they love triangle with a sweet nerdy guy and a tough bad boy with a hard exterior that is secretly an inner softy. Which ever boy fails to get the protagonist girl will suddenly find a new love interest pop out of nowhere in the third act.

The second most common type of romantic story has been called "the female power fantasy" archetypified by Brigid Jones Diary and the secondary romantic plot of Twilight.

"The male power fantasy" is essentially James Bond. A manly guy has hordes of women throwing themselves at him for commitment free intimacy.

The female power fantasy is when the protagonist female who is otherwise unremarkable has one or ideally two Grade A alpha males pining after her desperately for no good reason. This can easily be combined with taming the beast plots if the alpha males in question are bad boys.

There are a couple other romantic plots, but they have fallen out of favor. Romeo and Juliet style plots where the young lovers have to deal with their families or society at large opposing their being together is one such plot. It has fallen out of favor because fewer people identify with it. It is rarer for family or society at large to be a barrier to two people hooking up in the real world. Though Brokeback Mountain represents a brief resurgence of this plotline with same-sex couples though apart from Brokeback I cannot name any that are commercially successful.

I like what a professor once described as a Comedy of Remarriage, because it doesn't have to be literal. There are a lot of plutonic movies in this stripe where friends who grew apart come back together.

There is also a romantic story where one or both romantic partners are pulled from the brink of self destruction by the power of love. In some ways Beauty and the Beast also has this one. This one is pretty bad. To my understanding, a romantic relationship will not heal psychological turmoil. Fixing your issues will open the doors to a healthy relationship. A healthy relationship can not fix broken people (if it did that, Anakin wouldn't have fallen in theory), it just spreads the turmoil around.