Weaponized Love Triangles Ruled The Culture In 2024

Love triangles are far from a new narrative device, but they’ve taken a noticeably fresh form in 2024. Before this year, the trope was most famous for its prevalence in teen dramas: Jeremiah and Conrad would each long for Belly on The Summer I Turned Pretty, or Archie would go back and forth between Betty and Veronica on Riverdale.

But 2024 was the year the love triangle grew up, and transformed from a mopey mess into a vicious weapon. In both autobiographical pop music and fictional stories on screen, love triangles got darker and spikier, more focused on exacting vengeance than lamenting regrets. When it comes to dominating the charts and box offices, it’s proof that nothing sells like a little revenge.

The clearest example is Sabrina Carpenter’s career trajectory. She’s been releasing music for a decade, but gained her first instance of real notoriety in 2021 when she was speculated to be the subject of Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license,” along with her rumored boyfriend Joshua Bassett. Carpenter capitalized on the interest on her 2022 album Emails I Can’t Send, most notably on the pointed single “Because I Liked a Boy,” in which she forlornly sings about everyone turning on her due to a relationship.

That was a recipe for some success for Carpenter (Emails became her highest charting album to date at that time), but it wasn’t until she replaced those tears with a knife that she really piqued the culture’s interest. On 2024’s Short n’ Sweet, Carpenter focused on yet another triangle — her reported situationship with Shawn Mendes during his break from ex Camila Cabello — but this time, she leaned into vengeance. Her “Taste” video shows her violently killing an ex-boyfriend and his new girl. Elsewhere on the album, Carpenter laughs at how dumb her ex was, listing off disses that seem to allude to Mendes.

The other pop girlies were clearly on the same page as Carpenter. Taylor Swift used her Tortured Poets Department to take aim at a pair of exes she was reportedly seeing around the same time. Swifties were shocked to find the album wasn’t predominantly sad songs about Joe Alwyn but was filled with passionate jabs at Matty Healy, whom she was only linked to for a month after the Alwyn breakup.

Almost immediately, fans divvied up Tortured Poets into Joe tracks and Matty tracks (with a couple Travis Kelce numbers for good measure), and while the apparent Matty songs were notably angrier, she still delivered crushing blows to both exes. The Joe and Matty timeline isn’t a perfect triangle, but certain songs — like the lascivious “Guilty As Sin” — clearly contend with desire and shame during that era. Swift combined feelings from a painful LTR breakup and a possibly ill-advised rebound fling, connecting the two other points with one slash.

Then, of course, there’s Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine, a reflection on the murky period between one relationship ending and a new one quickly beginning. Like Swift, Grande seemingly addressed two relationships on one album, beginning with shady songs alluding to her ex-husband Dalton Gomez and transitioning into head-over-heels odes to her new boyfriend Ethan Slater. The record isn’t quite as cutting as Tortured Poets, but Grande clearly understood how to turn a complicated moment into her own weapon to wield as she sees fit.

While the chart-topping pop hits provide the prime examples of this trend, you could also see destructive love triangles on the big and small screens all year long. Even in fictional worlds, our fascination with vengeful and messy romantic connections took hold. Challengers embraced the passionate, kinetic volley of a three-way love; the second season of Interview with the Vampire threw a third vampire with devious designs in the middle of Louis and Lestat’s relationship; and of course, there’s the It Ends with Us of it all.

It turns out triangles have pointed edges for a reason — and pop culture’s biggest hitters have finally figured out how to utilize them.