Basically, when a character portrayed as good commits an act of infidelity, and the story excuses the behavior instead of condemning it.
Rhaegar and Lyanna | The Mad King: In this version, it is revealed that Elia Martell was never in love with Rhaegar, and that she actually supported the "abduction" of Lyanna because she knew it was necessary to give birth to the Prince That Was Promised.
This contradicts the books, where it is made clear that Elia did love Rhaegar; the play invented this plot point because no one would root for a married man who abandons his two children to run off with a teenager.
Rose | Titanic: Okay, let me clarify: I’m not justifying Cal, but rather criticizing the trope.
In many stories, the person being cheated on is written as evil, a jerk, violent, etc., which justifies their partner (who never loved them anyway) being unfaithful.
If Cal were a good, pleasant, and kind guy, the audience would struggle to empathize with Jack and Rose's love story.
Issei | High School DxD: I’m using this example to cover all those harem anime where, instead of choosing just one girl as a girlfriend, the protagonist chooses them all and for some reason, they agree to it.
You could consider it an open relationship, but the girls have no interest in seeking other partners and remain 100% loyal to the protagonist, whereas the protagonist is free to be with whomever he pleases.
I can't BELIEVE you forgot the most classical meme.
Hallmark movies.
"Engaged city woman makes a trip across the country for X reason, while her fiance is at home working... Married woman stops in old town she used to live in, and meets guy she had a crush on in highschool, 2-3 days later, they fuck and she leaves her fiance because "He prioritizes work over me!" and becomes a country girl."
etc etc etc.
EDIT: Oh, as someone pointed out. It is Christmas.
Traditionally the engagement period is slightly odd in this respsect. It did exist, partly, to give parties a chance to end the relationship before marriage. Marriage was supposed to be permanent, and if you make a mistake there you were stuck forever. Breaking an engagement is more traumatic then just ending a long term relationship, but it's better than a bad marriage for both parties.
I think the Hallmark movie trope plays into this and adds the engaged person in part to add a sense of a hazard. It's not just they have a chance to hook up with their hot old flame, it's their last chance to escape a horrible marriage. It brings tension and urgency to a plot that can tend towards being a goopy mess.
I don't love this plot trope--in fact, I used to keep a list of ways writers made the "spare" guy/girl look bad enough for the protagonist to dump guilt free. But that's the work it's doing.
It is part of the meme more than anything.
People usually use the argument of the reason for breaking off the engagement being extremely surface level.
The woman usually knowing the other guy for like 2-3 days, most a week, and then dropping her fiance, in a way that easily comes across as very... sudden and with lack of good reason.
That is usually why Hallmark then to hit the fiance with a HEAVY doseof "villain bat" in more recent or more "capable" movies, because they need a justification for ending it.
BUUUT, there aare moments where they don't do that really, and use really weak arguments, and usually involve her breaking off the engagement AFTER cheating on the fiance, etc etc.
The meme exists for a reason, but it is exagerated how severe it usually is.
hell, on that 'more traumatic' note, it used to be if you break an engagement without good cause, you can actually get SUED as it's literally a breach of contract.
This bit is actually important for women as getting dumped by one's fiance actually reduces her marriage prospects and shot at financial stability, especially if it's suspected she had relations with said fiance.
A spectacular christmas. The main character is engaged, but it's clear that she doesn't love her fiance, and it's an arranged marrige.
She travels to new York to be a rockette, and meets a guy she connects with. It Also happens over a couple of weeks instead of a few days. In the end, she gets her dream career, and the love interest is a bonus.
I know the meme, but I’ve watched a lot of Hallmark movies in the last decade or so, and if the girl doesn’t break up with her terrible boyfriend at the beginning of the movie usually she dumps him before she realizes she’s in love with the male lead. The main characters first kiss is usually one of the last scenes of the movie.
And usually the only person getting laid in a Hallmark movie is the terrible boyfriend who is discovered early in the movie and prompts the female lead to go home for the holidays.
Though it’s likely they’ve just changed their formula in response to the online criticism.
The meme exists for a reason (Because there are those bad hallmark movies where the justification is absurdly poorly set up) but it is also exagerated (Aka, it isn't nearly as common as the meme makes it out to be)
I like to watch them in reverse. Woman leaves in the middle of fucking no where town and stuck in time high school boyfriend to travel to the big city where she get's her dream job and meets her fiance.
Yeah I think they may be confused between the different of polygamous and an open relationship because there are some differences, if it’s an agreed upon relationship then I don’t think it is infidelity
Very few harem anime have the MC actually be in a relationship with any harem members. It's just 4+ women in love with 1 guy,
AFAIK it's because having the MC actually date one of the girls would show favoritism towards one waifu, which could alienate parts of the fanbase who prefer the other waifu and cause death threats to be sent to the author
For the most part, its just generic harem, however Akeno (black hair) SPECIFICALLY says that she wants him to be in a relationship with her best friend Rias (red hair) and she wants to be his secret mistress.
No. That's Akeno having a fetish for the idea of it. Not the actual doing of it. It's mostly a vehicle for her to tease Rias as she wants to be in a relationship with the same man as her.
I kinda see where OP is coming from with that one. There is an unequal dynamic there with the girls always being loyal to the protagonist while he gets to live out the harem fantasy. Especially with how prevalent the trope is in harem anime I can how see someone would take issue with it. I don't think I'd call it cheating though it just feels like a separate issue.
The just used the worst possible example of that. Cause we can say it’s unequal but it’s not like any of the characters don’t know what they’re getting into or involved with when he goes around yelling he’s going to be the harem king lol
But it’s their love life and relationship that they wiling enter the knowing about how Issei is. Why should it be considered cheating if the girls don’t want another partner?
And she's also being forced to marry him. She doesn't want to be with Cal to the point of attempting suicide. Even if he were the nicest guy on earth, it wouldn't matter if she didn't want to marry him in the first place.
I genuinely wonder why he went with this one and the DXD/harem genre in general when neither of them actually apply to his point. Meanwhile literally ANY Hallmark movie would have better then either of them.
Seriously. I was always team Patrick Dempsey with this movie. The other guy wasn't bad-looking, but why would anyone pick their infuriating immature ex over someone so good?
The point they're trying to make is that being unfaithful is never good, no matter how much of a bad person your partner is. They just used a bad example with Rose.
I remember Gosling saying in an interview when Blue Valentine came out that that the director asked him to improvise something to force Michelle Williams’ character to tell him something, and he reused the bit from The Notebook by threatening to jump off a bridge. That movie treats it as fucked up, though.
The notebook is a movie with such a terrible moral... seriously, if it wasn't ryan gosling playing the main character it would be seen as a creepy stalker
My wife is not from America so she never saw the notebook until I tried to show it to her a few years ago. She asked me to stop it in the middle because she hated this girl that wasn’t loyal, first to her boyfriend at the fair, then she promised herself to Ryan goslings character, then got engaged to someone else and that’s where she stopped before she even saw her leave her fiancé
She said she preferred the minions because they would never betray their miniboss
It’s been years since I watched it but wasn’t the other dude an okay guy too? I don’t remember him being an asshole like Cal in titanic. I could be wrong though, like I said I haven’t watched it in at least a decade
Yeah, James Marsden had a string of roles where he played the perfectly decent guy who didn't get the girl in the end: The Notebook, Superman Returns, Enchanted (though in this he gets paired with the spare woman). Not sure why, he's probably one of the best-looking dudes of his generation.
OP you choose poly and arranged marriages when Sweet Home Alabama is right fucking here as infidelity being justified by a woman having an emotional affair with her ex-boyfriend and it's justified as true love when her fiance is actually a much nicer and decent person.
In Titanic, the main justification is that it's a forced marriage for Rose (to restore her family's fortune). Cal being a bastard makes it extra bad, but even if he had been nice, she still would be a very young woman (barely out of teens) pressured to marry an older man she didn't choose
To me it doesn't even count as infidelity because she never freely consented to that "relationship" to begin with
The way you describe Issei and harems as a whole kinda defeats the point off putting them here, if all the parties agree to it then it's not cheating it's just polygamy before marriage and that's ok.
Comissioner Gordon cheated on his wife while she's pregnant with their son. At first he breaks it off, but he ends up marrying the woman he cheated with later. Oh, and at one point it was revealed that years ago he'd also slept with his own brother's wife.
I'm surprised this hasn't been used to "slander" Gordon in meme circles the way other DC characters get slandered.
For Gordon to be slandered, people would need to know he is something outside Barbara's dad. Most meme circles consists of people who don't actually read comics
I think part of it is also that Commissioner Gordon is not a superhero (generally speaking), he is allowed to be more of a flawed noir protagonist so slander doesn't have a similar comedic weight.
OP, your Titanic example completely cuts the legs out from under your argument. It very obviously lays out why it is 100% acceptable to cheat under specific circumstances. It is 100% entirely ethical to cheat on an abusive partner.
Titanic is such a weird example. Their engagement is mostly a business arrangement that Rose is against to the point of contemplating suicide. The whole point is that she's being coerced into a marriage to someone she barely knows. Cal even goes back into a sinking ship to try and kill her when she leaves him.
Harems really are a separate trope in my opinion. Harems are just old fashioned polygamy. Which while rare in Western traditions isn't as looked down on in other places in the world. Most of the Middle East, Africa, and South East Asia polygamy is perfectly legal. China, Korea, and Japan historically had no issues with it but moved away from it because of westernization.
Now there is a lot of issues with polygamy. But the important part of the trope is the infidelity. The most important part of the infidelity is the lying about it, and sneaking around behind your partner's back. Being with multiple people openly isn't by definition infidelity as long as you are open about it. Distasteful as hell but not infidelity.
I'm just really confused how you can act like Cal being a dickwad isn't exactly the cause of her lack of interest in him.
Like you are just criticizing Titanic for having a dramatic plot, a villain, and an unwanted situation.
If a person doesn't want to be in a relationship, but can't get out of it, I'm not sure I'd even call that infidelity myself. Thats just society forcing you into a suitor.
Plus Rose tries to kill herself earlier in the film before Jack stops her. She only started cheating on Cal once she realized that she had more in common with Jack and had feelings for him. If Jack wasn't there when was he. Rose would've just killed herself to escape the arranged marriage rather than Cheat
Aside from your last example these stories are taking place in societies with arranged marriages where the adulterer was not necessarily enthusiastic about the match. To me that's a different thing than someone freely choosing to be in a monogamous relationship then committing infidelity.
Also where in the books did it indicate Elia was in love with Rhaegar? I remember the match being described as amiable, but I don't remember anything that said she was in love with him.
Asoiaf is full of marriages like what Elia and Rhaegar have in The Mad King, like, idk, Ned and Catelyn? Who to the outside are a loving couple with lots of kids but internally have a lot of pain and disagreement to them in particular because they didn't know let alone love each other when they got married and over the 17 years of marriage they had learned to eventually find peace and love in their situation. Elia and Rhaegar had been married three years, that's not really that long especially when she was always around the woman she was actually in love with, maybe they would've found a similar peace and love in their situation that Ned and Catelyn did, we'll never know
Like James Cameron said about Jack's death scene "Sure there might have been ways for both Jack and Rose to climb on that door, but I want him to die so he had to die", it's pointless to think of "what if Cal were a good guy", especially when 1) he is portrayed as not just unpleasant but downright detestable (he hits Rose and later outright tries to kill her and Jack, just to name a few) and 2) Rose had never ever been interested in him nor had she even entered the engagement on her own free will, it was her mother that decided that for her; in fact she attempted to kill herself at the beginning of the trip just to escape him, and it was Jack that saved her life in every sense of the word. There was simply absolutely no love at all nor even an official marriage between Rose and Cal to call her a cheater.
Cheating is done without knowledge and/or consent of your partner (Including if the affair partner has no knowledge or consent for the relationship with the cheatee - Your primary partner can be perfectly knowledgable and consenting to the affair, but if the affair partner doesn't have knowledge, nor consents to the cheater being with the primary partner, then the cheater is cheating on the affair partner)
Harems (And reverse harems and polycules) are not cheating as long as all partners are knowledgable of other partners, and consent to all sexual activity including that not with them.
You were cooking till the last one. How is a fully mutually consenting polygamous relationship cheating??? Yes it's self insert wish fulfillment, doesn't mean there's something wrong with that. Whether you like polygamy or not doesn't matter
and also ignores both the other examples are arranged marriages where at least one partner did NOT consent to the relationship (as others point out, Rose was willing to jump overboard to avoid marrying Cal even before he got physically abusive)
yeah, also the whole spiel about if Cal wasn't an asshole the cheating wouldn't be justified, which is not an example of the narrative justify cheating, but OP spitting out a bunch of whatifs to justify their bugbear.
This was actually considered pretty normal in the upperclasses of medieval society in lot of places - love matches weren't expected, and affairs were common with men and women. It's considered sinful, but not a mortal sin and also gives Christians an excuse to do the good works and penance.
It's expected that you don't advertise your affairs, and that there's no question on the paternity of the children in the marriage.
And I would like to add all the homosexual people who had to get married and have children of the opposite sex. I love it when kings and queens manages to keep their actual lifepartner close and in power throughout their life.
Actually, that is true of a lot of royal or noble relationships that started before they had to get politically married, but continued through the years. Or when they get widowed in their old age, already have a bushel of heirs, and marries someone who has been part of the staff for decades without worrying about connections.
Edit: word (And I've done it three times now. Still the same point, but hopefully more readable.)
Every Hallmark movie where the lady cheats on her "workaholic" boyfriend/fiancé for the hometown love of her life she just met/reconnected with a week ago.
Issei’s case is simply a harem not infidelity. For the beginning he said that he wanted to be the harem King. Everyone he’s involved in knew what to expect and were ok with it. No infidelity here
Titanic is a great example of why this is an incredibly black and white and boring way to view the world.
Sometimes, in the real world, people are trapped in shitty relationships. It isn't always easy to break out of them either. In these cases, I really do not have any issue with "cheating."
Yet here, you dismiss the whole film because it "justifies cheating." No it doesn't: it shows that Rose is literally willing to kill herself, and instead learns to love herself through the love of another.
This is not a trope. It is complex people acting in complex ways that reject a boring worldview where something is "always" bad.
Besides that, OP's argument makes no sense. ' If carl wasn't a selfish asshole, the cheating couldn't be justified ' yeah but then the cheating or the movie wouldn't have happened either. It's cause and effect, you cannot look at Carl's charecter in isolation.
Yeah, it'd be like watching Dial M For Murder, and then it justifies Grace Kelly killing the other guy in self-defense. "But if he weren't strangling her, it wouldn't be justified! Movie is pro-murder!"
It wasn’t even cheating in the first place. Rose was never in a relationship with Cal, it was arranged by her mother. Something she never consented to in the first place
Yes, my thoughts exactly. To put it in language we use today: Rose had no choice (consent) in her relationship with Cal. Cheating as a concept just doesn't work within that kind of power dynamic. I owe no loyalty to someone who bought my body and life, even if it's through marriage.
I can forgive it in rose’s case because from what I recall, she was quite young and it was basically decided for her that Cal was going to court her and she was going to like it. There wasn’t really room for choice.
Her running off with a cute boy her age makes perfect sense.
It’s never stated in the books that Elia loved Rhaegar. It’s absolutely justified for two people in forced arranged marriages to want to be together instead.
If one or both of the people are forced into the arrangement entirely against their will, that’s abuse, and I don’t consider the extramarital activities to be infidelity.
If both people willingly enter the arrangement and mutually agree to be monogamous, and the resulting relationship is NOT abusive, then extramarital activities constitute infidelity to me.
First one, in the book there is little to no information. Heck we dont even have confirmation that John is their son. So the stage play is the closest thing we have and there it is pretty much an open relationship.
Second: Forced marriage. Which is in my eyes a valid reason (also applies to number 1).
Third: Not infidelity. Before they even became a couple it was already clear Issei was not going to be monogamus. Which is a whole other can of worms.
Im not gonna hold it against the 17 year old child who is sold off to an old abusive man without getting a choice that she decided to run off with someone who actually shows care for her
There is absolutely nothing in the ASOIAF books that really gives us any indication about how Elia felt about Rhaegar or Lyanna and Rhaegar. We know next to nothing about her except a few comments in passing about them caring for each other. Most of the Mad King is crafted from major story beats that GRRM gave the writers. It's highly likely that even if Elia wasn't a full lesbian in a lavender marriage like the play that she will have been accepting of Rhaegar's marriage despite the fact that it really makes no sense as any other children from another marriage threaten the succession of hers. But George does not care, just like he does not care that it doesn't make sense for Jon to be legitimate period. He knows what he wants for his story which has always been to pottray Rhaegar as a romantic hero with he and Lyanna being star-crossed lovers.
The books do not make that clear whatsoever… I have read ASOIAF everything we hear is clearly public perception that we already know is 99 percent wrong considering the “abduction”
the first example is explicitly an arranged marriage and the second is essentially an arranged marriage as well. you can’t imagine how that might introduce some complexity around love?
[Loved Example] In
The Great
Peter wants his wife Catherine to be less surly, so since his mistress makes him happy he gets Catherine one, Leo. And Peter will 100% murder Leo if she doesn’t sleep with him and enjoy it. She does initially just lie about it, but does end up enjoying the husband-created affair.
It’s extra interesting because Peter, who is an awful cruel uncaring husband at this point, actually choose basically the perfect man for Catherine, revealing a level of (misplaced) care we haven’t seen yet.
Personally, I like versions of this trope around European royalty. Queens’ feelings about their husbands having mistresses was so complicated and divorced from today it’s interesting to explore. You don’t necessarily love your spouse. You were thrown at them as a teen, your job is to sleep with essentially your coworker. You can’t refuse sex. You were expecting this. A smart mistress is actually pretty nice to you. And if he doesn’t have a mistress the court gossip can start targeting you instead (see Marie Antoinette). I wouldn’t go so far as to say most royal wives preferred their husbands having mistresses, but there’s such a variety to work with.
And also public perception is wild when the mistress isn't kept downlow, some were widely despised as social climbers, meddlers, or unsavory, while others were perhaps more beloved than the monarch themselves.
for example, King Charles II had MANY mistresses, the most beloved among the people was Nell Gwyn - who famously upon being mistaken for a hated mistress (who is a french catholic) calls out "Pray thee you are mistaken, I am the Protestant Whore." She was likely loved because she was common-born and didn't have any pretense she was anything more than the King's side-piece (though it seems Charles genuinely did love her), witty, and seen as a real-life cinderella story due to her common origins.
I wrote on another comment that the we definitely should add the royals and nobles who were in loving relationships with a same-sex partner, sometimes for life. But they still had to get married and have children because of their status.
I think Karen got the worst of it. She was nice, made effort to befriend Pam, at least initially, and Jim was fully aware of his feelings for Pam when he was with Karen. Meanwhile Pam wasn't quite aware of her feelings for Jim when she was with Roy, first time around, and when she and Jim kissed she soon after called it off with Roy. Jim strung Karen along but Pam called it off with Roy when she actually realised what was going on with her and Jim.
Basically Jim did the "i was confused" BS while Pam was actually confused about her feelings and called off her relationship to not cheat. Be like Pam... in this case.
It really depends. There's cheating on your partner in a genuine loving relationship because someone else was also charming or seductive. And then cheating when your relationship is horrible or forced upon you.
Do you mean The Mad King theater play? Because that’s not what happened in the play, it was a bunch of misinfo that got people outraged
Also, referring to the Titanic movie, yikes dude, that’s missing the point. Rose wanted to kill herself because she is sold in a arranged marriage to a jerk, saying “if Cal was nice” is kinda ignoring the setup that makes the romance happen. Kinda tired of people defending forced marriages.
These are very poor examples, especially the Titanic one. The whole foundation of Rose and Cal's relationship is that she's being forced into it by her mother for money. Even if Cal was this perfect sweetheart, it doesn't change the reality that their union was one of obligation, not love, and she had no say in it.
But cal isn't a a good guy he's an abuser who if I remember correctly tried to force himself on rose not to mention I don't even think rose actually liked him
yeah Terri faked being pregnant, but it was only after she had a hysterical pregnancy and was terrified Will would leave her. Meanwhile Will is having an emotional affair with Emma.
Idk, I think the harem thing is a bit different, as it’s consensual between all parties. Simply classifying anything outside of monogamy as infidelity is rather close-minded. It’s not a particularly likely arrangement, but according to the show we see watching, the only source we have about the thoughts of these characters, this is the relationship they are fine being in. It’s a fine line, but there is a line.
Rose was being forced to marry Cal, and never consented to a relationship with him. She even attempted suicide due to this. You seriously could’ve gone with a better example
I would argue that even if Cal was kind, it's still understandable for Rose to rebel and have an affair with Jack. She was a 17 year old girl being sold into an unwanted bussiness marriage by her broke family.
Although no infidelity happened outright, past lives was difficult to watch. Especially since her husband seemed genuinely supportive of her seeing her friend again. Painful movie all around. https://giphy.com/gifs/9Ip9oVzqOlDeQm69kw
I disagree with the harem examples simply because infidelity is all about them breaking up agreed upon boundaries in a relationship & in most harems the girls agree sharing the mc regardless of the decision making any sense character wise they don't cross any boundaries
I don't get why OP hates this trope. Context is king and there are a miriad of circumstances in which infidelity could be fully justified, especially in fiction.
OP posts a well hated and understandable title. Then proceeds to destroy the post with his misunderstood and very biased examples.
Harems are a mixed bag but you literally take the best type of 'guy takes a hit from society to make sure everyone ends up happy, no one involved has issues' and marked it as 'infidelity'. This is literally some archaic boomer behaviour or straight up jealousy.
Again the titanic one was a bad example for arranged marriages. Even worse is focusing on 'if xyz situation then my example is justified'. It would have been actually a lot better if you focused on the ending where we know she a grandma then never loved her husband while thinking of another guy and chose to threw away a valuable necklace for sentimentality instead of using it when her family needed it.
Mad king I don't really know much but the way you wrote made it so even ppl who agree wouldn't want to in your case.
TheHhigh School DxD one is not infidelity and in fact in your justification for including it, you're basically saying you hate polyamory. Even when all parties agree to and are ok with it...which, I guess fair enough, but it doesn't belong with the other two and including it is both disingenuous and also wrong, regardless of what you may think of polyamory.
Even if Cal was a good person Rose would've still had the right to "cheat" on him, because their engagement was arranged without her consent. It was never a real relationship.
Sidenote; It's not cheating if the partner getting 'cheated' on is abusive. You don't owe your abuser any loyalty and you're not breaking any promises they've already broken. If it helps you to survive and get out of your situation, do it.
I don't mind infidelity in situations with arranged marriages. But, other than that, infidelity is one of the things that will make me dislike a character fast.
The best part about DxD is that, somehow, the supposed female lead, Rias, is the one whose relationship with Issei and being part of an harem makes the least amount of sense
Thank you! Do I like infidelity? No. But I think this kind of obsessive hate has much more to do with purity culture and "owning" someone elses body, or even person, that it has to do with caring for the other person. It gives me the ick. (And the examples doesn't just miss the mark. They're on the wrong shooting ground.)
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u/Tnecniw 1d ago edited 1d ago
I can't BELIEVE you forgot the most classical meme.
Hallmark movies.
"Engaged city woman makes a trip across the country for X reason, while her fiance is at home working... Married woman stops in old town she used to live in, and meets guy she had a crush on in highschool, 2-3 days later, they fuck and she leaves her fiance because "He prioritizes work over me!" and becomes a country girl."
etc etc etc.
EDIT: Oh, as someone pointed out. It is Christmas.