“I Choose Me” trope: how a feminist solution to a love triangle became a cliché.

In the Season 3 finale of The Bold Type, the frothy Freeform show set at a women’s magazine, social media director Kat Edison finds herself at that most familiar of television turning points, locked in a love triangle with two attractive parties both willing and eager to date her. #TheBoldType pic.twitter.com/ZLNtDuahUt — The Bold Type June 17, 2019 Yup, she hits ’em with the ol’ ICM, or as it’s more commonly known, the “I choose me.” The ICM is generally regarded as a cop-out, and for good reason: While love triangles are clichéd, they at least promise resolution, which makes it all the more unsatisfying when one doesn’t end so much as dissolve with no clear winner or loser. For as long as love triangles have triangulated, the “I choose me” resolution has been theoretically possible, but it was one particular 1995 spin on it that really solidified the scenario into a full-blown trope: That would be the episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 when Kelly Taylor chose Kelly Taylor. But however much “I choose me” reverberated at the time, no one could have predicted the phrase’s long afterlife. In a 2018 Guardian roundup of the best teen TV shows, 90210 was allotted 150 words, but even that short blurb saw fit to mention “I choose me” as among the show’s “classic storylines,” as do many similar lists.