by Doctor Science
So, I read a lot of fanfiction, a lot of which is romance by amateur and even amateurish writers, many of whom are young (under 25) or very young (under 18). There are two tropes that seem to me have become more popular in the past 5 years or so, and I don't know if it reflects anything about reality or if they're purely fictional conventions.
The tropes are "threatening the new love interest" and "betting on whether your friends are going to get together."
1. If You Ever Do Anything to Hurt Her aka "The Shovel Speech" is a trope older than TV, but my understanding always was that the threatening party (brother is traditional) is warning the threatenee (fiancé, bridegroom) against adultery, domestic violence, or non-support. In other words, *serious* harms that the law is slow or unable to address.
When I drag my memory back through the decades to the time my group of friends weren't all boring married people, I dimly recall giving "be sure to take of him/her, they're really special" speeches, but they weren't particularly threatening. The closest thing was if a close friend started dating someone I didn't feel was worthy of them, then the speech might be a little more pointed ... in a subtle way? I hope? But definitely no threats, even joking ones, about physical harm.
Yet the Shovel Speeches I see in fanfic almost always involve "joking" physical threats -- and threats for things like "don't break their heart" or "don't make them cry", almost as though the harm the threatenee is being warned to avoid is emotional conflict or breaking up. On the contrary, when my friends went out with The Unworthy I was always *glad* when they broke up.
2. People making a Side Bet about whether their friends are going to get together romantically is something that shows up in fanfic a *lot*, but unlike the Shovel Speech I've never seen anything like it in real life -- at least, not involving actual money: the right to say "Ha! I told you so!" doesn't count.
Does this actually happen in real life? My salad days were in the 70s and early 80s, when state lotteries were just getting off the ground and legal gambling was quite restricted in the US. I remember only a small amount of "side betting", and it was mostly on things like "who starred in that movie" or "who will win the Falklands War" -- nothing with personal significance. So maybe Kids These Days really do gamble on more things than we ever did.
I wonder if these tropes are more popular in RL than they used to be because they're used on TV, where very young people, in particular, are likely to get a lot of their ideas about "romance". My first instinct was to blame "Friends" for both, because the tvtropes articles (shovel speech; side bet) list multiple instances for both. But I see that "Cheers" had "side bets on the wedding" and that was a super-popular show, so I just may be a fogey. And those kids are just on my damn lawn.

The End of Romance, serigraph by
Erté. I guess this is supposed to be Pauline, tearing up Paul's old letters while Cupid picks his nose at both of them. Or something.
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