Make Love or War

We first solve the rebuses in the grid (see Appendix 1). Each rebus solves to the name of one of a pair of fictional characters from the same movie or television show (with some oddballs like "GERMAN SOLDIERS" or "CASEY & ROSE"); each pair can be categorized as either "in love" or "at war" (enemies). By searching for some of these pairs or movies, as well as the abbreviation MTV from the flavortext "Most Touchy + Violent", we can find that these pairs are actually the winners of the MTV Movie & TV Awards for Best Kiss or Best Fight, hence the loving or warring. (Note that in the past, these two awards were typically designated for the actor, not the character, which may have made finding these awards harder. On the other hand, the more unconventional awardees like "Poopies and the snake" are very strong break-ins.)

Now, as clued by "find a middle ground", we should extract the letter of the cell at the midpoint of each pair. Sorting by award and year gives the cluephrase YIN YANG; TAKE DEAD ENDS.

Next, we should solve the Yin-Yang logic puzzle, using the same midpoints as clues, colored white or black depending on the award; white/yang should represent love/kissing while black/yin should represent war/fighting, though the puzzle is symmetric so this choice doesn't affect extraction.

Finally, we can read the letters on the dead ends (cells with only 1 same-color neighbor) in white-then-black and row-major order to get the final cluephrase, ANSWER IS OCTOBER SKY.

Authors' Notes

I stumbled upon this dataset while looking for something unrelated on Wikipedia, and the pair of "opposite" Kiss/Fight awards, each awarded to pairs of actors at a time caught my attention as a cute niche reference puzzle dataset. My initial title was "All's Fair", but we had to change it for flavor-consistency in the round.

Here's some interesting trivia about the awards:

• Evidently, MTV loves Twilight: Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson won Best Kiss for 4 consecutive years, Robert Pattinson won Best Fight for 2 of them, and the Twilight Saga movies themselves also won Best Movie the same 4 years. Because we couldn't have 2 ambiguous Edward Cullens in our grid, this put a cap on how far back we could reach and how many clues we could use.
• In 2017, the Best Fight award was replaced by the Best Fight Against the System (it switched back the year after). We considered putting Hidden Figures vs. "The System" as one of our warring pairs, but decided it would be too hard to find and too inconsistent.
• MTV recently spun off a separate "MTV Movie & TV Awards: Unscripted" awards show for reality television, which also has a Best Fight award. We stuck to the more traditional scripted winners, sorry "Kourtney vs. Kim Kardashian" and "Bosco vs. Lady Camden".

Appendix 1 - Rebuses