: Re: Who is the perfect rival to the right-person-wrong-time character in a love triangle? I'm looking for a well balanced love triangle. The thought of a wrong-person-right-time rival seems to be

@Candy753

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If you want real rivals, why make one of them "wrong"? As an exercise, why not try to make both of the romantic rivals "Mister Right", just in different ways? For example, one of the more interesting aspects of the early 90s Winona Ryder / Janeane Garofalo romcom "Reality Bites" is that a good case could be made that the corporate guy (played by Ben Stiller) was a way, way better fit for Ryder's character than the douchey artist (Ethan Hawke). I think the movie tried way too hard to make the audience root for the latter instead of the former but that sense is still there.

I think the best romantic comedies - Annie Hall, 500 Days of Summer, Celeste and James Forever, and Silver Linings Playbook for 4 examples - portray people interacting with each other, sometimes finding love, sometimes falling out of it, but always acting human. A guy who is nothing but suave and awesome and "Mister Right" all the way through is around 18 times more boring than a guy who has strengths and who you find likable but who also real flaws beyond "OH HE'S SUCH A MAAAAN" or "hey, he sure is messy!!! He accidentally put his tie in the refrigerator!!!!".

High Fidelity, the book or the movie, is another fantastic example. There you have your two main characters who aren't stuck in a "right place at the wrong time situation", they've tried to make love work between them and they've mostly failed at it. The story that's told is as much a slow epiphany by Rob (the John Cusack character) that he's kind of a jerk as anything else. His "rival" for some of the story, the guy played by Tim Robbins in the movie, isn't really that bad of a person either, he just happens to be the guy who is currently dating Rob's ex and that alone makes him the villain in Rob's story. Rob has some real hang-ups that cause him to do some really, really bad things to his GF (whose name completely escapes me at the moment, sorry), and not all of those hang-ups are resolved by the end. We feel for him, though, because he's making a concerted effort to fix the way he thinks about things.

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