Love Triangles

I recently finished reading the Hunger Games trilogy (more thoughts forthcoming in the next book-review post), and had been vaguely aware that – along the lines of Twilight and Harry Potter – there had been some 'Team Peeta', 'Team Gale' type stuff going on within the fandom.

My question upon finishing was: 'really, people rooted for Gale in this little love triangle? Seriously? Peeta! Peeta all the way! He BAKES!'

And I found myself wondering whether I had rooted for him the whole way through because that had been the author's intention, or because of my own reading/interpretation of the text.

I can think of very few love triangles where I've genuinely understood the girl's (tends to be the girl, especially in YA fiction – which is a whole other issue) conflict. Often when it happens in TV settings there's a clear favoured outcome – e.g. with Duncan/Veronica/Logan on Veronica Mars, Logan wins all the way with the fans – or there's a back-and-forth between what the writers are doing and what the audience is responding to.

(any excuse for a Logan/Veronica clip…)

With books the love triangle may be partly invented by the fans rather than explicitly there in the text. I'm thinking of the Harry/Hermione fans in the early/middling days of Harry Potter fandom. I completely fail to see what Hermione sees in Ron, and would have liked to have seen Harry/Hermione happen, but never had any sense that the books would ever go there, or wanted the readers to believe that they might go there.

With things I've read recently, the possible 'love triangle' has been more about 'romantic false leads' and 'dragging out the tension' than anything else. Yet I'm never quite sure to what extent this is about becoming attached to a particular romantic lead as a reader (Leon in Caragh O'Brien's Birthmarked trilogy, for example) and not wanting to give up on that, rather than the whether or not the author is convincingly setting up a new/existing character as an alternative romantic interest.

I wasn't torn about 'Gale vs Peeta' in The Hunger Games, though I know some people were and know that it's there within the books as a dilemma. What I'm contemplating is whether this is about how this is set up, or about how I read the books as an individual reader, bringing existing preferences (e.g. baking over hunting!) to the equation.

And I also want to mention the one trilogy (albeit it still unfinished) where I genuinely was/am torn about the way the love triangle would go – Logan/Aura/Zachary in Jeri Smith-Ready's Shade trilogy. Without getting too spoilery about how the books go, I found myself liking Zachary an awful lot while at the same time completely getting how Aura was conflicted and hoping that there might be some way of making the Logan thing work. But I also wonder to what extent that's about the paranormal elements of that world and how they factor in to keeping people apart/together.

Just something I'm pondering. For anything (films, books, TV) featuring love triangles, did you know from the beginning who you were rooting for – or did you find yourself torn? And did the author/creator end up providing you with a satisfactory resolution? Do you root for characters or outcomes even when you sense the author/creator isn't going to go there, or do you hunt for indicators about how it'll turn out in the end?