Basic Trope: A friendship between two people with different ages.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are best friends, but Alice is a forty-year-old and Bob is a thirteen-year-old.
- Exaggerated: Alice is an immortal; Bob is five years old.
- Downplayed:
- Alice is a teenager; Bob is eight years old.
- Alice and Bob appear to be the same age. However, Alice is much older than she looks — while Bob actually is the age that he looks.
- Justified:
- Alice and Bob have an uncommon shared interest that overrides the age gap.
- Alice is a friend of Bob's parents (or other older relatives of Bob's), and since they hang out a lot, Bob started becoming friends with Alice too.
- Inverted:
- Alice and Bob are friends; they are exactly the same age (in the strictest sense, as they were born at precisely the same moment on the same day).
- Alice and Bob are from different generations and are archenemies.
- Subverted: Alice, who looks thirty years old, and Bob, who looks thirteen years old, are friends ... but then it turns out that Alice has had a very stressful life and is much younger than she looks.
- Double Subverted: ...But then Bob reveals that he's a Human Alien and is really a century old.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice looks like she's thirty and Bob looks like he's thirteen, but Alice is really much younger than she looks thanks to a stressful life and Bob is a hundred-year-old human alien. But it turns out that because of the long time Bob can expect to live, his age is proportionately closer to that of a twelve-year-old human ... at least, that's what he's guessing.
- Parodied: Bob and/or Alice refuse to be friends with people their own age.
- Averted: No one has friends with a different age than themselves.
- Enforced: Executive Meddling demanded a Kid-Appeal Character for The Alice Show.
- Lampshaded: "Yeah, people think it's funny to be friends with someone old enough to be my mom."
- Invoked: Bob's mother introduces him to an older relative, hoping they'll bond with each other.
- Exploited: Another character knows that Bob will be friendly with an individual of Alice's age so they put Bob in a position where they have to befriend someone of Alice's age for beneficial reasons.
- Defied: Bob refuses to talk to anyone not near his own age unless he must.
- Discussed: "Bob, it's interesting that you, given your age, is friends with me, given my older age"
- Conversed: "Interesting how Alice and Bob are such good friends, Bob is old enough to be Alice's dad!"
- Deconstructed: Alice winds up Mistaken for Pedophile due to her relationship with Bob being suspicious given lack of other connections.
- Reconstructed: Similar relationships are common enough in this setting that she isn't Mistaken for Pedophile. Or, if she is, an investigation exonerates her.
- Implied Trope: Bob happily greets a grown woman after getting out of school. His teacher questions if she's a female relative and Bob says "no."
- Played for Laughs: Bob is 13 years old and is friends with Alice, who is older than time itself. Nobody at all questions it.
- Played for Drama: Alice, a 15 year old, meets the 40 year old Bob, and they become friends. Bob, however, is planning on grooming her as he sees her as an easy target due to her age. She doesn't realize he's trying to use her until it's too late.
Back to Intergenerational Friendship.
