So, I love getting sucked down YouTube rabbit holes at 2 in the morning. This weekend it was clips of Kendall, Greenlee and Ryan on All my Children.
Now, this isn’t a soap I kept up with like I do General Hospital, and I just now realize how many years apart some of the plot lines are that I can sort of remember. Which made me wonder…how did this triangle last so long?
I think it comes down to 3 things:
2. Everyone got to be the bad guy.
3. All 3 lines on the triangle got storylines.
1. No one (I don’t think) really wants to watch a couple be blissfully happy week after week…year over year. There are a few soap exceptions, but on the whole it’s pretty boring. We’re also not here for straight toxic behavior 24/7. You have to be messy to give the relationships stakes we can be invested in while not being a daily dumpster fire. I think on balance this triangle nailed it.
2. There are several ships on General Hospital that shall remain nameless which are why so many people tune out or ff. If one person always wins to the point that other characters have to be dumbed down or common history re-written to achieve it…that’s not enjoyable. Soap characters also are not meant to be one dimensional Bond villains. We need them to have layers not just to be the bad one* all the time.
The big two examples I can think of are Greenlee ripping Kendall’s dress, and Kendall getting pregnant with Spike. In these 2 instances, they were both wrong. And everyone got to be mad, everyone got to hold a grudge. Then weeks or months later, they slowly worked their way back to being friends.
3. This triangle wasn’t just Kendall & Ryan or Greenlee & Ryan. It wasn’t all about who gets the guy this year. A fair bit of this triangle was well fleshed out storylines where Kendall and Greenlee were thick as thieves or at each other’s throats. That gets missed a lot in relationship triangles…a triangle has three sides. It needs to be more than just a push and pull one way or the other. That last relationship (friends or enemies) is just as important.
*I mean, Nina isn’t evil incarnate. She is not a Bond villain. The more that tertiary characters like Willow keep saying “Nina bad” the more I want to stop watching. Or want Nina to win everything. When she kept Sonny a secret, you saw nuance and I didn’t like her actions. But now I want her to win everything because Carly and Willow keep saying like the same 3 lines every day and it’s getting old.
