Love triangles featuring siblings are one of the oldest love tropes in the book. But how many times do audiences really need to see the same cliché, just with different attractive actors?
In 2025 alone, three projects centered on sibling love triangles will have been released, including season three of The Summer I Turned Pretty, season two of My Life With the Walter Boys and Prime Video’s new movie, Tell Me Softly. The latter, which released on Friday, is based on author Mercedes Ron’s young adult romance novel about a girl, Kamila Hamilton, whose seemingly perfect life gets upended when the Di Bianco brothers — her childhood best friends and first loves — reenter her life.
This concept of siblings fighting over a loved one isn’t new. The romantic trope has been around for some time, dating back to author Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women, which also inspired two film adaptations, including one directed by Gillian Armstrong in 1994 and another by Greta Gerwig in 2019.
However, sibling love triangles found a new life in the 21st century, first with popular teen dramas like One Tree Hill, The Vampire Diaries, Reign and the sitcom Baby Daddy. And though it appeared the trope took a bit of an onscreen break for a few years, Hollywood couldn’t stay away long, as The Summer I Turned Pretty and Walter Boys adaptations followed shortly after.
With this much output, it makes you wonder what these shows and movies are trying to project. Once you look past the charming personalities, attractive looks and butterfly feelings viewers get when watching, you realize this trope is actually romanticizing unhealthy dynamics between families and partners. Another observation: most of these love triangles center on one girl and two brothers, but seemingly not the other way around.
Even if some viewers start to feel a fatigued by sibling love squabbling, there’s still a large audience patiently waiting to binge new content, and the numbers prove it. Also, let’s be honest — Hollywood follows the views and money.
Earlier this year, the third and final season of Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty stayed on the Top 10 chart for 10 weeks, with 6.57 billion minutes viewed, according to Nielsen. Season two of My Life With the Walter Boys also stayed three weeks in the Top 10, with 2.55 billion minutes viewed.
But years before these shows, The Vampire Diaries — which centered on a teen girl torn between two vampire brothers — dominated the CW. When the show premiered in 2009, it was the CW’s most-watched series premiere ever at the time. The supernatural drama, which ran for eight seasons, continued to be a hit for the network, with the series finale in 2017 hitting a year-plus ratings high. Though its peak was during the show’s freshman outing, drawing upward of 4 million viewers.
As for One Tree Hill, the teen drama also saw success on The WB/CW in the early and mid-200s, thanks to its loyal fanbase and high viewership. It was also one of the network’s longest-running shows, scoring nine seasons from 2003 to 2012.
Will the same happen for Prime Video’s newest offering in the genre, Tell Me Softly? Time will tell.
Prime’s Culpables trilogy, based on Ron’s other best-selling books, was also a global hit for the streamer, so there’s a built-in audience for the author on standby. But even if the film succeeds in viewership, maybe a break wouldn’t hurt from this overdone, and somewhat controversial, story arc. Though, there are still two other installments in Ron’s Tell Me trilogy that have a possibility of being adapted, depending on the first film’s success.
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