Dating someone to get revenge on someone else (or hey, maybe even the person you're dating: why be picky about it?).
Love is a messy tangle. It's prone to jealousy, to disapproving friends and family, heartbreaks, and all sorts of other tribulations. And since people are easily led astray by love, it's easy to manipulate someone with affection and flattery to hurt them, or the people close to them,
One common variation is Operation: Jealousy.
Works with their own subpages:
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Happened at least twice in Case Closed:
- One was the case of a young man who, on his wedding day, poisons his bride - the daughter of the local Chief of Police - in revenge for said Chief causing the death of the young man's mother through carelessness years before. Indeed, he had started a relationship with her and proposed marriage, just to get his revenge on the man who left him an orphan. What he doesn't know is that the daughter is his childhood sweetheart.
- In another case, the (highly unpleasant) patriarch of a wealthy Zaibatsu family is murdered on a cruise ship, on his way home from his granddaughter's wedding. It soon turns out that the groom is secretly the son of a man who committed suicide after said patriarch ruined his business. The man even admits that he initially started the relationship in order to get closer to the man, so he could find a way to get revenge - but adamantly insists that he eventually came to genuinely love her, and that he has nothing to do with the murder. What's more, they decide to renounce the family estate and lived Happily Ever After.
- The premise of Masamune-kun's Revenge is the male protagonist planning to date his former childhood friend who insulted him for calling him "Pig's Foot" and dump her in the harshest way.
- This is an important, not to say central, plot element of the Tsukigomori drama and its remake 'Cloudy Moon,' which the main characters spent a lot of Skip Beat! filming. Ren's character, the lead, is engaged to Kyouko's character's older sister (even though he actually likes the abused foster sister) as part of a long-term plan to avenge himself on the family. Because fiancee-Meiyou's father was responsible for murdering Katsuki's whole family when he was a kid and disguising it as one of those car-over-a-cliff suicides. He has to keep her believing he loves her madly, or his whole scheme will collapse.
- This scenario is modeled closely on a fusion of two real famous classic Japanese dramas. The second Conan example is a subversion homage.
- It also mirrors Ren's situation with Kyoko to an amusing degree—not the fake romance, but the need to maintain the reinvented identity and therefore to stay apart from the girl he likes. Hell, she's even similar, with the Cinderella angle.
Fan Works
- Guys Being Dudes: This is why Arlo chooses Spark, one of Candela's coworkers, for his Operation: Jealousy. Or at least that's what he tells himself.
Films — Live-Action
- In The Bad Sleep Well, the revenge seeker marries the daughter of a Corrupt Corporate Executive, one of the people who murdered his father, as part of his plan.
- In Spider-Man 2, Mary Jane is clearly still in love with Peter but starts dating Jonah Jameson's son after he rejected her and hastily agrees to marry him just to throw it in Peter's face after he misses her play. Once she learns Peter is Spider-Man she promptly ditches Jameson at the altar.
- She does it again in Spider-Man 3 to spite Peter after he rejected her apology for picking a fight with him by getting back together with Harry. Due to the symbiote's influence, he does the same to her by dating Gwen Stacy and goes the extra mile by showing up to MJ's workplace with Gwen to spite her.
- In Wayne's World, the titular character's ex tries this with him. It fails horribly.
Literature
- In Petals on the Wind by V. C. Andrews, Cathy starts up an affair with her mother's second husband to get back at her for locking her children up in an attic and then trying to kill them.
Live-Action TV
- The appropriately-named Revenge has Emily, the main character, dating, and then getting engaged to Daniel, the son of her sworn enemies Conrad and Victoria Grayson as a part of her vengeance plan.
- Friends has Chandler's elementary classmate (played by Julia Roberts) seducing him, stealing his clothes, and abandoning him in a restaurant bathroom as revenge for pulling up her skirt. This happened when they were about nine and he was going through his parents' divorce at the time so the revenge is definitely an overreaction and Played for Laughs.
- How I Met Your Mother: In "Game Night", Barney reveals to his friends about his first ex-girlfriend Shannon who is responsible for being the man he is today after cheating on him with a suit-wearing womanizer. Later, he goes back to her, talks about what happened after they broke up, and then, he nails her, which he recorded on his phone. He even considers this as a one-night stand because he's never going to call her back.
- Pasión de gavilanes: The main theme of the telenovela and its remakes Fuego en la Sangre and Tierra de Reyes, where three brothers decide to avenge the death of their sister that had been seduced by farmer Bernardo Elizondo, by seducing the three daughters of him, just to have the brothers falling for them.
Theater
- In Bayard Veiller's play Within the Law, Mary Turner was sentenced to three years in prison for a theft from Edward Gilder's Emporium she didn't commit because Gilder was determined to make an example of her. After serving her sentence, Mary marries Gilder's son Dick, and not out of love:
"I served every minute of my time: three full, whole years. Do you wonder I want to get even—that someone has got to pay? Four years ago you took away my name and gave me a number. Now I've given up that number and I've got your name."
Web Animation
- Gossip City:
- Rinka
slept with Reika's boyfriend Kota and even bragged about it to her sister. This caused Reika to break up with Kota and cut ties with both.
- Misaki announced to her sister Kaori that she's going to steal her fiancee. When she called Kaori to gloat about her plunder, she revealed that she had taken Mitsuru and her fiancee's name is Masaki. Mitsuru revealed that his wife Akiko had found out about the affair, and Akiko (who is Inuzuka in drag) came in and gave Misaki a good scare. Misaki moved to the bottom of the bridge to escape "Akiko's" wrath.
- Rinka
- Manga-Waido:
- Sakaguchi stole Yuto's girlfriend because he was jealous that Yuto was more successful than him. Unfortunately Yuto revealed that the girl was his stalker and that his real girlfriend was in Tokyo and he moved to the countryside to escape her but the girl followed him. Sakaguchi was smothered by the girl and all the life was sucked out of him.
- Minamida stole and married Takahisa's wife Honoka as a final insult to him. However, he came back half a year later after forcing the couple to divorce and marry Honoka because she is a chronic gambling addict with a penchant for BDSM. To make this more satisfying, Minamida couldn't divorce her because he would lose his rich kid status if he did so. In the end, Honoka's chronic gambling drove him to ruin.
- Sakaguchi
- MoniRobo:
- Misaki called Himari over the phone after the school reunion party to announce she stole Asuka from her. However, it turns out Asuka didn't cheat on Himari, but Misaki was stalking him. It's also implied she didn't even steal Himari's high school boyfriend either but she also stalked him.
- Wakana called Yumiko to gloat about stealing the latter's husband Tadashi in revenge for her cold treatment at the company and even sent her pictures of the affair to rub it in. However, it's rendered moot because Tadashi quit his job after being disowned by his dad to become an actor, and the pictures she sent were used by Yumiko as evidence of Tadashi's cheating. To top it off, Tadashi got away with Wakana's savings after the act, leaving her penniless.
- Misaki
- Sekai no Fushigi: Uwaki stole Mizuki's girlfriend Waruna. When they went to a cabaret club, Uwaki bragged about it but the cabaret girls called him out in front of all his coworkers. When Waruna broke up with Uwaki, she tried to get back with Mizuki but he refused. It later turned out that Uwaki had a habit of stealing his co-workers' girlfriends at other workplaces and was warned to stop that.
Western Animation
- In El Tigre, Manny's Psycho Ex-Girlfriend Black Cuervo initially only feigned interest in him to drive him away from his Best Friend and her rival Frida, but then ended up falling for him for real and became a Woman Scorned from his rejection.
- Word of God stated that in the future Black Cuervo and Django originally began dating to make Manny and Frida jealous but ultimately fall in love with each other for real.
- In one episode of Fairly OddParents, Timmy wishes he no longer had emotions, and his resulting stoicism makes him extremely popular, to the point where Trixie appoints him as her boyfriend. When Timmy remarks that this doesn't make him feel anything, a spurned Trixie starts dating Chester instead to spite him. Naturally, this doesn't work, and Chester doesn't like it either because girls make him break out in hives.
