This year’s hottest YA accessory isn’t a tote bag or a beaded necklace. It’s a sibling love triangle. On Prime Video, on Netflix, you name it, the biggest shows are all running on the same plot: one lead, two siblings, and a lifetime of ruined holidays.
Consider the evidence: The Summer I Turned Pretty on Prime Video has been dragging us through Belly’s endless flip-flopping between Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher. Every week, a new episode drops, and every week, the internet argues about which Fisher brother deserves her mediocre choices more. Netflix doubled down with My Life with the Walter Boys, a show in which Jackie Howard moves in with her late parents’ friends and promptly gets caught between Cole and Alex Walter while testing the very limits of what counts as “foster family”. It’s not new. Earlier this year, Netflix served up XO, Kitty, a spin-off of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, which threw us a curveball: Kitty falls for Minho while simultaneously catching feelings for his sister, Yuri (played, by the way, by real-life siblings Gia Kim and Sang Heon Lee).
Elder millennials will tell you sibling love triangles have always been around. The Vampire Diaries practically built its empire on Elena dithering between Damon and Stefan Salvatore, keeping an entire generation of teens in a chokehold. One Tree Hill offered up a half-brother twist when Nathan Scott’s ex started dating Lucas Scott. Go further back, and you hit Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, where Laurie, the poster boy for Nice Guy Syndrome, proposes to Jo before rebounding with Amy. What’s different now is the saturation. It’s not one show. It’s all the shows. It feels like the entertainment industry collectively decided that the quickest way to add stakes to a tepid YA romance was to never leave a brother hanging.
That every streaming platform is now peddling plots where one lead splits their attention between siblings is just… awk. Of course it’s not incest but it skirts dangerously close to a taboo that most people would rather not unpack at the dinner table. It’s definitely leaning on the “wouldn’t this make Christmas unbearably awkward?” kind of tension. But why is this really happening?
Studies keep pointing out that Gen Z is having less sex than previous cohorts, thanks to a mix of social anxiety, economic precarity, and the dopamine drip of the internet. Which means that YA television isn’t really about replicating real teenage experiences anymore; it’s about heightened fantasy. These sibling triangles aren’t meant to reflect reality, they’re meant to feel outrageous, larger-than-life, and emotionally supercharged. If you’re not actually sneaking out to make out with your crush, you can at least live vicariously through Belly kissing one brother while pining for the other. And because the setups are so absurd, no one has to take them too seriously. Nobody’s advocating for kissing your boyfriend’s brother in real life. Instead, it’s melodrama as spectacle, like pro wrestling with prettier lighting.
There’s also a practical reason for this, according to Anshika Gupta, a 22-year-old Film Studies major. “A lot of people don’t realise this, but from a production standpoint, it’s just easier to pick up these tropes. From a storyline perspective, sibling triangles let writers build instant drama without having to work too hard on nuance. It’s higher stakes but also lazier writing.”
Another reason these sibling love triangles keep popping up is rage-bait. The classic YA tropes—friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, bad boy versus nice guy—just don’t cut it anymore. But throw in brothers (or sisters) and suddenly your show has that edge of shock value. Somewhere out there, a grad student is probably writing a thesis titled ‘Incest-Adjacent Romance in Gen Z Media: The Clickbaitification of Desire’.
Yashi Sharma, a 25-year-old computer engineer and avid watcher of The Summer I Turned Pretty, says, “So much of this content is rage-bait. That’s how you get people to make edits, to argue on the internet, and to dissect it in group chats. Every episode ends with me and my colleagues debating how annoying Belly’s choices are, and honestly, this season has rage-baited us so much we’re planning a watch party just to hate-watch together.”
Still, we can’t blame you if sometimes you really want to shake these characters by the shoulders. Belly (The Summer I Turned Pretty) is 21, allegedly an adult, yet she’s still ping-ponging between the Fisher brothers like she’s in a never-ending CW reboot. Jackie Howard (My Life with the Walter Boys) can’t seem to decide whether dating foster siblings counts as problematic or just “spicy”. Kitty Song Covey (XO, Kitty) is out there flirting with a guy and his sister, like on bisexuality speedrun mode. At some point, you have to wonder if this trope is less about romance and more about manufactured chaos. Do the writers even care who ends up with whom? Or are they just here to make sure no one’s Netflix account goes dormant?
It’s also worth remembering that a lot of these shows aren’t fresh inventions—most of them are adaptations of YA novels that younger millennials and older Gen Z devoured as teens. My Life with the Walter Boys, The Summer I Turned Pretty, We Were Liars, even To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (the source material for XO, Kitty) started on bookshelves aimed squarely at a teenage audience. Which makes you wonder why we are doubling down on this particular trope now? Out of all the storylines that could have made the leap from page to screen, somehow the sibling entanglements got top billing.
Perhaps it is time to stop leaning so heavily on YA backlists and start creating original plots that match the energy of today’s audiences. We do not need another triangle that pits siblings against each other. We need stories with sharper conflicts, messier emotions, and fresher ideas. Until then, yes, I will still be at my The Summer I Turned Pretty watch party, sighing at Belly’s choices. But maybe that is exactly the point. We keep watching even when we know we deserve better.
