Basic Trope: A character is friends with another character of a different social/monetary status.
- Straight:
- Lady Alice is friends with Bob, the farmer down the road.
- Alice, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, is friends with Bob, the custodian.
- Exaggerated:
- Queen Alice becomes friends with Bob, a beggar who came to her gate looking for food and shelter.
- Alice the CEO is friends with the unemployed and homeless Bob.
- Downplayed:
- Queen Alice is friends with Lord Robert, a lower-ranking nobleman.
- Alice the CEO is friends with Bob, one of the up-and-coming junior executives.
- Alice, a pizza delivery worker has just received a promotion. She still maintains her friendship with her former co-worker Bob.
- Justified:
- Bob is the only person Alice can be herself with.
- Bob helped Alice when she was in trouble, and she became friends with him out of gratitude.
- Bob has known AgriTech CEO Alice since they were five-year-old neighboring farmer's children.
- Bob is a good source of information about how things are for ordinary people.
- Inverted: Alice and Bob come from the upper- and lowermost classes respectively and view each other as their Arch-Enemy or at least foremost rival.
- Subverted:
- Lady Alice becomes friends with Bob the farmer ... only for him to reveal afterwards that he is the King of nearby Troperia in disguise.
- Alice the CEO is friends with the custodian Bob ... only for him to get a big inheritance from a rich uncle.
- Double Subverted:
- However, the Troperians don't like Lady Alice, and dethrone Bob for befriending her, leaving him a farmer once again.
- However, Bob loses his inheritance in a bad stock investment and returns to being the custodian.
- Parodied: Alice and Bob are friends because they're from different social classes. Bob hates other poor people because they're poor, while Alice hates other rich people because they're rich.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice and Bob go from being friends, enemies, indifferent to each other, and back.
- Averted: No one has friends of a different social/monetary class to their own.
- Enforced: The executives want to send a message about the importance of friendship and open-mindedness.
- Lampshaded: "You're friends? But you're her gardener!"
- Invoked: Lord Charles, Lady Alice's brother, notices she and Bob have a lot in common and hires Bob to take care of the estate's gardens so they can have time together.
- Exploited: Carol, Bob's sister, begs him to marry her to get access to her wealth.
- Defied: Alice and Bob refuse to associate with each other, or a third party keeps them from doing so.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Bob and Alice are respectively dressed in rags and finery but are seen talking to each other very happily.
- Deconstructed: Alice and Bob's friendship is very blatantly still an unequal, and even toxic one. Class differences still exist between the two, which causes them to relate a lot less to each other. Money itself is also an issue, Bob still being below the poverty line & Alice having more than she'll ever need. This tends to cause arguments between the two until eventually, they stop being friends altogether.
- Reconstructed: Alice temporarily loses her wealth and is helped out by Bob. This rekindles their friendship and gives Alice increased understanding of Bob's struggles, reducing the impetus for them to fight.
- Played for Laughs: While she is a kind, generous woman, Lady Alice is still a Upper-Class Twit who comically lacks understanding of Bob's lifestyle.
I see you enjoy your Interclass Friendship with the main page, troper.
