How to prevent "they're falling in love" trope
I have two characters, the male being sort of a jerk, but lightening up later in the story, and the female is...very hateful. But a person who read the first chapter asked me if they were going to get together. I mean, I planned that for way later, but I want to be able to hide that better. How do I go about making the two characters seem less likely to be together?
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One possible answer might be to forge through the question immediately with a conclusion, so that you can redress the question later, unexpectedly. That is, don't skirt around the issue - plow through it and treat it as done with.
As a teen growing up, the thought of 'could this person be my future partner' always crossed my mind at least once with every acquaintance, regardless of attraction. Sometimes the answer was an immediate no, sometimes it was less certain. My wife confirms this happened with herself.
So it's highly believable your characters would ask themselves if they are attracted to the other at some stage, and you can have them draw conclusions - either (in their mind) permanent or fluid. Conclusions which they, as normal human beings, may change their mind on later.
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- Kill one off (the other can fall in love with the ghost)
- Show one dying alone in the future and set up the whole story as a flashback
- Put them on impossibly different locations (planets) or time (like centuries apart, aka: time traveling or back to the ghost thing)
- Put one or both in a relationship with someone else
- Make them mortal enemies (cultural, values, political)
- Have more than 2 characters
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You cannot prevent that suspicion altogether; especially because that is your plan. Which means your two characters are heterosexual; so you can't really use homosexuality as a show-stopper.
I would suggest you make it clear that one of them is already in love, and the other one knows it. If your guy is a jerk, that may be because he is unhappy, the woman he loves is not really in love with him, and he needs to learn in the course of the book that what he was feeling isn't really love at all.
If your girl is hateful; same thing, and same lesson: Maybe she is hateful because the guy she loves is a player, using her, and she has mistaken something else for "love". Something like dependency, or the lies of a player that convinced her they were in love but just uses her for sex.
Other than sociopaths (who cannot fall in love) people are not jerks, or hateful, for nothing. Those traits grow out of psychic trauma of some sort. Start them out in the midst of their respective traumas, already clearly thinking they are in love, and it may defeat the reader's instinct to ship them.
But you cannot prevent shipping altogether, even Batman and Robin have been shipped!
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Embrace it instead, and make the reader suffer for having even thought of it
What you have there is a reader's commitment to a goal. They expect two characters to get together from page 1, and in the first few pages you should perhaps give them some hints that it may occur. Once the reader is emotionally invested in it, rooting for this particular outcome, don't deliver it. Put struggles, doubts, conflict, issues, anything to make it harder and harder; at the same time make it clear "how great it would have been if they had been together".
Et voilà. You used a trope to engage your reader, but you didn't step immediately into it, perhaps you won't step into it at all. You can use it to propel your story forward, and recall it wisely with some false alarms to awaken the reader's attention every now and then. Just because a trope exists it is not necessarily a bad thing to exploit the expectations it creates.
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