“Shut up and kiss already!” is perhaps one of the most uttered criticisms in all of media critique.

“Will they, won’t they” romance haunts far more than just the romance section. Its fingerprints are detectable in subplots of almost all kinds of fiction.

One is almost as likely to see people argue then make eyes at each other in the next Avengers film.

While occasionally cute, it is just as often exhausting to see two characters prune, pry and pontificate about how they are a match made in heaven and at the same time a match in the bowels of hell.

The vast tendrils of the trope extend far past low-lit tragic love scenes.

It’s much older and broader than that reading gives it credit for.

“The Sword of Damocles” is both an ancient Greek proverb by Cicero and an equally prevalent media trope. In its namesake, Damocles— a flatterer in an emperor’s court— is given the role of emperor for a day to enjoy the power and feasting.

He is unable to relax a wink upon realizing that above him rests a blade. Its discerning edge is withheld from the throat of the power-hungry only by a single hair.

For only slightly shorter than it has been a parable toga-donned philosophers passed down to one another, it has been a literary trope used to describe the constant presence of imposing doom to a force that upon a cursory glance seems stable.

It is the “will they, won’t they?” of life and death— the ultimate “will they, won’t they?”

It has been an especially recurrent theme.

When childlike indecisiveness and uncertainty do not dominate the romance of a story, it often infiltrates the tone of the suspense.

Exhibit A: the new season of Euphoria.

Now that our cast has grown up and left school, there is always the foreplay of security.

The viewer watches Nate, Cassie, Rue and many more translate their uniquely chaotic high-schooler tempos into the adult world.

They all share a common denominator; they have superficially progressed.

The cast grows up, as people often do after high school.

Euphoria Season 3 at times feels like a heavily dramatized version of the game judgy friends from the same grade schools play together some years later– in which the group places bets on the eccentric characters of their shared past:

“Do you guys think Brittany from fourth period accounting class is pregnant, dead or in jail?”

Except in Euphoria, everyone is basically all three of those things at the same time while grasping onto the straws of success.

It doesn’t feel like the suspense is organic for the characters. It feels installed for short audience attention spans. Like a very high production, old radio broadcast.

Best case scenario, the characters find some success while being haunted by the specter of those looming three bad fates.

At no point can anyone ever enjoy a feast, a wedding or money because the sword of misfortune looms high and too close for comfort.

It does send a feeling of unease to the viewer, but its unsatisfying for those who crave realistic buildup and payoff.

For the second exhibit of this trend’s over-saturation to the point of exhaustion, one needs to not look far.

Twilight is effectively four novels (or their mediocre movie adaptations with a FANTASTIC soundtrack provided by Muse) of will they won’t they between a young woman and a couple of immortal cryptids— with death or high stakes presented whenever peace has even thought about entering the picture.

While the love triangle structure enabled a unique and divided fandom to blossom, it also hindered the characters’ ability to stick to a single long-term narrative arc throughout the four novels.

A common critique of the books is that characters occasionally seem to lose agency or priorities in the interest of highlighting the plot’s next most sexy and/or emotional “will they, won’t they?”

For the final exhibit, it’s worth taking a step back to assess how these tropes were handled in older mediums.

The X-Files certainly had a lot of tension between agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.

They would see other people when they felt ignored. They would make eyes and immediately argue.

It was one of the most effective examples of TV putting two sex symbols across the little screen from each other with moody music and letting the viewers’ imagination do the rest.

Even if Scully went out to brunch with a doctor the same day Mulder rolled out of a suggestive rendezvous, the two were still unified by proving the corruption plot in the government, catching the electricity serial killer or whatever other eldritch mystery stumbled into their office that week.

Despite being far less explicit and only marginally less committal than those relationships (at least in the early plot), The X-Files displays a relationship that is far more narratively sustainable and dynamic.

Art imitates life. The palette, mental color and worldview of the typical artist before the Great Recession were perhaps fundamentally different.

Or perhaps the committees behind what gets made simply believe the modern consumer wants, perhaps even craves, instability.

They might even be right.

But that might be a dark impulse.

Euphoria, Love Story and many contemporary depictions of cynical relationships often cast their participants as victims or dark and insufferable people.

With dark, insufferable motivations and tragic endings.

The Irish often joke that there has never been an Irish film with a happy ending.

While this is a slight exaggeration, it is also an admission that the art of a people scarred by colonization, oppression, genocide and civil war develops a particular flavor.

Following a similar theory, then, American media should be uniquely diverse. An array of different styles and tropes coming together and arriving at its highest form.

In its best moments, it really is.

As for whether Hollywood will return to creativity or just keep chasing the current trend for the quick buck?

I have a feeling.

But ultimately, it’s kind of a “will they, won’t they?”