What’s the first thing you think of when someone mentions The Hunger Games? The dystopian setting, the brutal fight for survival, the frightening feeling its themes are more relevant every year? Or is it the love triangle? Most likely the love triangle.

Catching Fire is one of my favourite novels, but an early line where Katniss describes “how [Gale’s] hands, which could set the most intricate snare, could as easily entrap me,” makes me recoil. It’s such a jarring line in an otherwise brilliantly written story.

In a 2010 interview, Suzanne Collins’ editor Kate Egan said she asked the author for more of the love triangle, as Collins herself “was more focused on the war story.” However, particularly in Catching Fire, Collins uses the love triangle as a critique on celebrity culture as Katniss has to play up her feelings for Peeta to stay in favour with the citizens of the Capitol.

Of course, The Hunger Games was not the first successful Young Adult (YA) series to feature a prominent love triangle. Published three years before Collins’ series was Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, featuring two toxic choices for the main character Bella, named Edward and Jacob. The love triangle’s prominence in YA fiction following these two series stems from publishers recognising the trend’s success and doubling down on both the story type and its tropes.

Many series are seen as Hunger Games clones, such as Matched, Legend, The Testing, The Selection, and The Mortal Instruments. These all feature love triangles but are not as minimal as Collins’. Ironically, the most famous of these clones, Divergent, does not feature a love triangle.

Of course, YA dystopia and fantasy are just a few genres within YA fiction, and like Twilight there are YA romances including The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy that rely on the trope to keep their stories progressing. The final season of its TV adaptation took the internet by storm last summer. Even at a UEA open day in September, the social media team had to ask visitors the important question of Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah. I know enough about the series to know Conrad is the correct answer, and many love triangles do have one love interest who is “better” for the main character.

Peeta in The Hunger Games, Mal in Shadow and Bone. Even Rhysand in A Court of Thorns and Roses, which was initially marketed as YA. Three more books and a novella later, that status is impossible to imagine, although it led to the creation of the New Adult category (YA but a little older, so adult fiction in all but name).

Therefore, the love triangle could be an attempt to represent the time of life experienced by its target audience of teenagers. I can say from experience the teenage years are strange and messy. You are trying to figure yourself out, and love triangles reflect the indecision of what would be best for you, and the feeling that any choice you make will completely change your life. It is a trope that has potential for fascinating stories, but most novels use it as mere set dressing.

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