Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing Help

Tools

Toys

Narrative

Genre

Media

Topical Tropes

Other Categories

Custom Search

alt title(s): Bromance

"It's Guy Love,
That's all it is,
Guy Love,
He's mine, I'm his,
There's nothing gay about it
In our eyes..."
J.D. and Turk, Scrubs

Super Friends version of Superman: Here is to being best friends forever in a completely platonic way!
Super Friends version of Batman: You said it! We are as close as two friends can possibly be without going over any boundaries that would be indicative to our being more than friends!

Two extremely close friends or partners, both the same gender, who spend an 'excessive' amount of time together on and off the job. So excessive that they might as well be a couple. Note that there is no official evidence whatsoever that they're romantically linked, but they might suffer withdrawals from not being around each other. There might even be a "break-up" episode. If they are life-long friends, you can almost guarantee this trope.

The lack of official information doesn't deter shippers from speculating. The weight of the resulting Fanwank will crush any reasoned observer. Regardless of romance, pairing of these two to anyone else is tricky, because any prospective romancer will have to deal with the fact that they are, at best, an additional Most Important Person. A skilled writer will figure out the dynamic as the Heterosexual Life Partner and the paramour have to share their Most Important Person's life. A less skilled writer will get rid of the competition, even if it's not romantic. Sometimes going as far as demonizing or killing them.

For some reason, Heterosexual Life Partners are fairly common across all cultures.

Sometimes this is an extreme form of an Odd Couple, in that the two are different as night and day. Those Two Guys may also acquire this label. And the title characters of any show with a title of the form X and Y. Don't expect them to be friendly to each other though, quite a few are Vitriolic Best Buds. In adventure stories, they are often Blood Brothers.

Compare The Straight Will And Grace and Like Brother And Sister, which are the same thing except easier to ship without those pesky "sexual orientations" getting in the way. Pairing them is also appealing because they've already established a bond of trust and communication, unlike some pairings... Contrast Gullible Guy Goes Gay, which can happen when a Love Potion or other revelation occurs.

Same gender characters who are simply friends aren't always Life Partners. When the fans do speculatory shipping of the same gender, that is something else entirely called Ho Yay. Not all Ho Yay is HLP and vice-versa. The key phrase for this is "Same Gender, Always Together."

Members of a Nakama generally all qualify as falling under this trope in relation to one other (or at least the ones the individual members aren't sweet on / involved with).

This is firmly established as Truth In Television as Troper Tales will attest to.

Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime and Manga 

    Comic Books 

    Film 

    Literature 

    Live Action TV 

    Professional Wrestling 

    Tabletop Games 

    Theater 

    Video Games 

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 

    Real Life