I’m going to rant at you for a little.

Raise your hand if you would bet on a teenage romance or first love surviving eternity. I don’t believe in this. Our lives change drastically from when we are teenagers and unless one of the people in the relationship basically gives up all rights to a separate identity, which is super healthy and a strong foundation for forever, things will change for the couple. Relationships die, love fades, people drift apart.

Unless one of those people is not human apparently. The world of Y.A. has head our cries of disbelief when they give us a human couple and expect us to believe their love at first sight will work out. And because of, at least in part, Stephanie Meyer, the writers now know the magic formula of young love lasting. Make one of them not be human.

Twilight Saga = Vampire falls in love with a human and you know it is a forever kind of love because of her just right blood and the fact that he is breaking all kinds of rules to be with her, Shape Shifting wolf American Indian falls in love with a baby who will eventually grow up and you know it is a forever kind of love because he imprinted and his pack can attest to that and it means that they will age together until they die together. I assume there is something similar happening in

Warm Bodies where something about love saves the zombie man and their forever love makes it possible for him not to eat her or something.

In The Host and in The 5th Wave we have an alien in a human body that defects because they didn’t know what love was but they found it and you know it is a forever kind of love because they choose their significant other over their entire race and embrace probably death which it technically forever for them if they die.

It needs to stop. If you aren’t going to give me a strong female teen character without a love interest don’t do it at all. I’d rather just have a bunch of humans being stupid about love than an additional layer of nonsense magic that pretends to make it all okay. It’s not creative. Forbidden love tends to come at a price and in some of these cases it is an entire species. If a hero or heroine is willing to murder for their people they should be willing to forgo love for their people. Just because you had relations with them doesn’t mean you should let them live when you find out about their secret. And maybe don’t have unprotected relations during unsure times.

Love plots in the middle of Y.A. battles are stupid. So unless the story literally cannot happen without the love, and any decent writer will pull that crutch out from most scripts without much issue, stop it. To be clear, Katniss can kiss a boy to get supplies but she doesn’t need to be in a love triangle. The love interest in The 5th Wave could have been a middle-aged woman or an old man or a tween with a pet dog and the plot could have survived with very little change.

Rant over. Prisma out.