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I have been given permission to skip class to take Mom to a conference and I am taking it without hesitation.

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Someone who knows and likes triad verse needs to give me their Skype so I can talk to them about it.

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Things I want to meta in Triad Verse:

Pride and Prejudice

Sense and Sensibility

Firefly

The Matrix

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Guys help I want to meta a full-blown triad verse rewrite of Pride and Prejudice.

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Triad Verse Romance Structures (or, Rae saw a tag on the verse blog and there was no going back)

I talked before about the different romantic rivalry tropes in Triad Verse. This is about the other kind of romance story, where there's no rivalry and it's just about them falling in love and getting together (and of course it occasionally goes beyond that, but like our world, people like to pretend that getting to the relationship is the happily ever after). I'm borrowing examples from other people's triad verse meta, but obvs this is my thoughts and not law.

The main romance story structures are:

The "stepping stones" structure. This is by far the most common. You start with two single people, they form a primer couple, they spend the rest of the story looking for a third and then they get their third and/or get married at the end. It's typical. It's a standard bestseller. It's not the fairy tale, though. Famous stepping stone stories include Aladdin (Aladdin, Jasmine, Rajah) and Glee (Finn, Puck, and Kurt).

A variation on this is the "not until" structure, where the two people who would normally be the primer couple wait until they have a third before starting a relationship. A little less of a sure thing; some people see it as more romantic to wait, some see it as naive, and some relate a little too strongly to the feeling and want to read about the perfect relationships instead. Famous not until stories include Snow White/Sleeping Beauty (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty/Rose Red, and Prince Phillip) and for the younger crowd, Matt, Tyler, and Caroline of The Vampire Diaries.

The "missing piece" structure. Instead of focusing on the primer couple, this focuses on the third. There's a lot of tension and conflict to be derived from this structure if the primer couple has been going on a while; the third may feel left out. In books, this usually ends with the third confessing their feelings of inadequacy and the primer couple taking great pains to make sure that their third feels loved. Famous missing piece stories include When Harry And Helen Met Sally and another version of the Snow White story.

The "rebuilding" structure. The standing couple after a divorce or death is looking for their new third. Oftentimes that third has also lost their spouses to divorce or death, and they all find comfort in each other. Other times the third has never been part of a triad before, and are a little naive about things. They go through some jarring realizations about the happily-ever-after narrative but the triad gets their happily-for-now in the end. Famous rebuilding stories include Captain America (which extends past the painful speculation in the quote) and a variety of subplots involving parents in YA stories, like in Teen Wolf.

The "triskele" structure. This one is the fairy tale, because it so rarely happens in real life. This has three people, with an equal amount of familiarity or lack thereof, fall in love all at the same time and end with a triad. Famous triskele stories include Harry Potter (Harry, Ron, and Hermione) and Pride and Prejudice (Jane, Mr. Darcy, and another elegant young man of lesser status but just as charming).

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The new picture of Jared and Thomas in the train, is stolen from Gen’s private instagram, please do not share it

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Triad Verse TV Shows: GRIMM

Grimm is, for those who don't know, a paranormal mystery/adventure kind of like Supernatural if Supernatural was about an actual cop and that cop had powers and had a ton of friends in the supernatural community so basically it's really nothing like Supernatural except that there's a monster every week that Nick (the Grimm) has to kill. Nick is a Grimm, as in Brothers Grimm, meaning he can see Wesen (AKA fairy tale monsters) and it's basically his job to keep them from killing people.

Nick Burkhardt

Obviously in triad verse it's much rarer to have orphans. Three parents aren't likely to all die of illness and leave a child alone, and when they all have different work schedules even accidents are less likely to kill all of them. Which is why it was such a tragedy when Nick was orphaned--all three of his parents died in a car accident that only he survived. His aunt Marie raised him with the help of a platonic roommate and said roommate's string of romantic partners.

At the start of the series, Nick is in a primer couple with Juliette Silverton. They've spent a good deal of time looking for a third, including Nick's partner Hank Griffin. But while they do love Hank, Juliette isn't entirely confident about marrying him, and Hank leaves without being prompted after the Adalind incident. Nick knows it's not Hank's fault at that point, of course, but neither of his partners do. During season one, Nick also tries to make Monroe his third, but the men quietly agree that unless they're willing to tell Juliette everything (and they're not), it would be too dangerous for her.

At the end of season two, Renard becomes Nick and Juliette's third. They're still navigating the waters of that relationship, complicated by the fact that they started via magic and Renard is Nick's boss.

Hank Griffin

Divorces are also much rarer in triad verse, so Hank hasn't had as many wives--but he was married to two women at one point, a situation which ended in a very, very messy three-way split. Since then he's been in primer couples and the occasional unmarried triad, but he's pretty gun shy about marriage. He's also monosexual-heterosexual and doesn't admit it even to himself, because after everything it's just a source of frustration that he couldn't even fall in love with Nick. At the moment, he's single.

Monroe

In triadverse Grimmverse, Wesen are much, much more serious about their primer couples than humans. This is mostly for practical reasons; since Wesen are a minority, and every type of Wesen is an even smaller minority, and most Wesen only want to marry/mate with their own type, primer couples become a huge deal, with many Wesen having elaborate commitment ceremonies while they're still a couple. Monroe is no exception. He liked Nick and Juliette, felt like he might have fallen in love with them; but he fell hard for Rosalee, and they are just as sickeningly sweet as in our world's version of the show. They have not found a third, as of yet.

Adalind Schade

Adalind's story is actually almost identical to canon. The only real difference is that she and Eric had a third involved, another of Eric's higher-ranking vassals, this one a royal. Both of the women expected him to eventually propose to them, using the other woman Elizabeth as the mother of his children since any child of his by Adalind would be the same kind of half-breed as Sean, which none of them really wanted. The other difference is that she wanted to make her guardian another link in an attempt at a triad. Other than that, pretty much the same, right down to the cheating on each brother with the other. She and Sean never involved a third, that relationship being primarily about sex.

Sergeant Wu (shh I'm pretending we still don't know his name because I think the rhyming name sounds terrible)

Sergeant Wu is single by choice. His close friends, who we met in "Mommy Dearest," were engaged to him before Wu moved to the US a few years before them. The relationship didn't survive the distance, and they married a third in the Philippines, another woman, who they brought with them to the US. Although Wu has had some brief relationships since then, including with Hank and for a very short time with Nick and Juliette, he's been mostly single ever since, and doesn't plan on changing that.

That's all I got right now. I have nothing on Renard, Juliette, or Rosalee beyond what I mentioned in Nick and Monroe's entries.

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Triad Verse "Love Triangles" (or, Rae rambles about romance tropes in Triad Verse)

In our world, love triangles are huge. It's hard to find a YA book in particular that doesn't have a love triangle in it. It's almost always a triangle, too--no more and no less than two people vying over one other person. This works well because in our world, three is a magical number for writers. Three characters provide six different dynamics (A to B, A to C, B to A, B to C, C to A, C to B), which gives a TV show/movie/book plenty to work with without biting off so much you end up skimping on one of them. We've got (no romance intended by the slashes I'm just lazy) Sam/Dean/Cas in some seasons, Harry/Ron/Hermione, Bella/Edward/Jacob, etc. Shows like Grimm and Teen Wolf feature three characters on most of their posters and box sets. Two is also awesome for interactions, especially in more episodic shows with a revolving door secondary cast: Ichabod/Abbie, Sam/Dean for most seasons, Beckett/Castle, Bones/Booth, etc. Such shows basically give us two mains and one major who will be gone next week.

This is a very long way of explaining one reason love triangles are so popular in our world. Two is good for a basic story. Three is better if you're going to stick with those characters.

BUT in triad verse, three is standard. Three is normal. Readers and viewers are used to thinking of groups of threes. The societal narrative is structured around a three-person, sixfold dynamic. Which means writers would automatically think in terms of threes when writing an individual scene, and three characters would be considered relatively static. Writers would need to have four or five characters to make those "love triangles" work. It also presents WAY more options.

So I think in triad verse, they don't refer to "love [shape]s" except as subtropes. The overall trope is the "romantic rivalry," and within that there are several common presentations:

The "love zee", where one person from each of two primer couples is in love with the other.

The "love bowtie," where two primer couples both want the same person for their third.

The "love X," or "love asterisk," where many individual people are in love with the same person, some of whom could love others besides. The person at the middle of said X or asterisk is usually torn between the one person who they love the most and two people who they know they could form a lasting triad with.

The "love square," which is basically the direct equivalent of our love triangle, which is actually a love vee most of the time. Four people are involved, each in love with two others. Very rarely are any of them in a primer couple.

The "love vee," which is what we would think of as a love triangle but which presents a different problem in triad verse. Instead of one person having to choose one, they're torn between having both people they love and waiting until they can have a full triad.

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I took it between Boston and Manhattan a couple times to visit family when I was in college in Massachusetts. :)

It turns out I can get a round-trip ticket to Chicago for five weeks for $48 if I take Amtrak from Indianapolis.

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It turns out I can get a round-trip ticket to Chicago for five weeks for $48 if I take Amtrak from Indianapolis.

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The cheapest flights from Dayton to Chicago for a month are around $350 and with a wedding in the works that's unlikely. If I could think of more booking sites I'd check them for better ones, because there has to be something better than that.

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I have no doubt the Westermark effect is in play, and you have said that the society-wide triads came into existence a couple thousand years ago rather than at the dawn of time or whatever. The question is, when humanity was still tiny and everyone was likely to fall in love with more than one person of more than one gender... how likely were the family lines to cross? How much did humans adapt to instinctively avoid relatives? (I'm so not kidding about the scent thing, by the way, people really do pick partners with dissimilar scents to keep from crossing the genetic lines.) Now, we've got seven billion people on the planet and no one's in that position, but way back in history, there's a pretty strong chance that those genetic lines would end up crossing or being within a few degrees of each other, so how likely are people to still instinctively avoid relatives? Mostly I'm asking about the scent adaptation here.

And this is why I should keep my questions to the submit box. And to when I'm fully awake.

Here's a weird question for you. In our world, our biology has adapted to prevent incest. There's the Westermarck Effect where siblings who grow up together discount each other as potential romantic partners. And we actually choose our partners partly based on scent, and we tend pick people whose scents are very dissimilar to ours in order to prevent incest. In triadverse, most people are bisexual and polyamorous. This changed society, but how/did it change those parts of human biology?

Even though families are more complicated in triad verse and you would be more likely to grow up with half-siblings than in our universe, it would still be better not to mate with them. Thus, the Westermarck Effect is just as powerful in triad verse. Sometimes, especially in royal families, same-sex siblings would ignore it and enter into a marriage with a common wife/husband in order to keep the royal line “pure”.

The Westermark Effect is found in people of all sexualities, as far as I can find in poking around on the internet for a few minutes. I would hypothesize that the relaxation of sexuality that would occur to make most people bisexual and polyamorous, would not include a relaxation of the Westermark Effect. If it did, you’d have a lot more people with recessive genetic diseases, many of which reduce or eliminate fertility. 

Even if you and your half-sibling have very different immune systems, you’ll still have grown up together, and thus instinctually avoid developing a sexual relationship with that sibling. The same holds true for step siblings who are not related by blood, but grow up together from young childhood.

I think the best model for triad verse humans is actually the bonobo, where sex is used more for social bonding than for procreation.

As always, everyone feel free to add to this discussion!

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no homo by remainnameless

Stiles’ sophomore year starts something like this: 3 FourLokos + 1 peer-pressuring cat - 1 best bro to end all best bros = 1 Craigslist ad headline that reads “str8 dude - m4m - strictly platonic”. Derek is the fool who replies.

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This website is made up of killers

A compilation of my favourite ‘we’re all killers’ posts.

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I just spent another chunk of time sending asks to triadverse and I still regret nothing.

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So my sorority has raised over $6k for Relay for Life.

And we have another 5 days!

If you guys feel generous, the donate link is here: http://main.acsevents.org/goto/rharris

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Teen Wolf Order of the Stick AU:

(For those who don’t know, Order of the Stick is a D&D-based stick figure webcomic that can be found and read in its entirety at giantitp.com and should absolutely be read ASAP, but which you don’t need to have read to understand this… entirely.)

Derek as the hapless bard who despite having a decent INT score manages to only ever get in people’s way.

Scott as the single-class fighter who leads the pack team because his dad left him with a blood oath to finish.

Lydia as the arrogant elf wizard with more power than anyone knows what to do with and the worst luck in the world when it comes to being there for big fights.

Allison as the somewhat proud and smirky rogue who has a heart of gold she never lets anyone see.

Isaac as the cleric.

Stiles as the ranger whose alignment usually hovers just south of neutral but whose pragmatism and ruthlessness sometimes veers into “ohshit” territory (face it, even without the backseat driver Stiles has never exactly been an angel).

THEY FACE OFF AGAINST:

Deucalion the evil werewolf lich sorcerer and his possibly-traitorous seconds Ethan and Aidan, with the Monster in the Dark being Jackson the kanima

Peter Hale, the trope-happy Man Behind the Man of the Empire of Blood, along with his team Talia Hale, cleric alongside him and the real leader; Erica Reyes, psion extraordinaire; Laura Hale, the wizard with a contingency spell for every eventuality; Kira, the fox-like rogue of the team; and one other who we have yet to meet.

The three archfiends Gerard, Victoria, and Kate

Queen of the Damned Jennifer Blake

At one point the Linear Guild, run by Matt, with Ennis as Thog and Kali as Sabine and Malia as Zzd’tri and a host of revolving door characters as the others; but they have been disbanded as of Matt’s death at Peter’s hands.

ALONG THE WAY THEY RUN INTO:

Lord Deaton of Beacon Hills, who is killed by a paladin named Braeden and succeeded by his nephew Vernon Boyd

Rafael McCall, who keeps trying to make Scott work harder at killing Deucalion

Chris Argent, who managed to get himself locked up while trying to free the Empires of Blood, Sweat, and Tears and who has never managed to escape since then

Marin Morell, a former paladin who when Allison leaves to rejoin the Order takes over the Resistance

Yeah, I shifted alignments and character relationships around some. It was a battle between fitting as many characters in as possible and keeping the ones I put in as accurate as possible, and this is what I got.