Basic Trope: A friendship between two people with very different lifespans.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are best friends, but Alice is expected to live a thousand years, while Bob is only expected to live seventy.
- Exaggerated: Bob's species die in the course of about a week; Alice is The Ageless.
- Downplayed: Intergenerational Friendship.
- Justified:
- Alice isn't human, and her species have a much longer lifespan than humans do.
- Bob's species have an extremely short lifespan.
- Inverted: Alice and Bob's lifespans are tied to each other; they have exactly the same life expectancy.
- Subverted:
- Alice and Bob are best friends, even though Alice can expect to live a thousand years and Bob only has seventy...but then Alice contracts a terminal disease that cuts her lifespan so it roughly matches Bob's.
- About twenty years after Bob's death, Alice meets Bob in his new incarnation.
- Double Subverted:
- ... But then Bob becomes immortal. Now he can expect to outlive Alice by a long while.
- ... But Bob is unable to remember anything about his prior incarnation.
- Zig Zagged: Alice and Bob are best friends, even though Alice can expect to live a thousand years and Bob only has seventy. But then Alice contracts a terminal disease, cutting her lifespan so it roughly matches Bob's. However, Bob becomes immortal, meaning he can expect to outlive Alice by a long while. However, he uses the same thing that made him immortal on her, meaning they now have the same life expectancy.
- Averted: No one has friends with a different life expectancy than themselves.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited:
- Emperor Evulz traps Alice in a prison and gives her a Breaking Speech about how he'll let her out in a thousand years or so... after her best friend has died from old age.
- Bob makes Alice the godmother of his children, knowing that she'll be there for them long after he's gone.
- Defied: Alice finds Applied Phlebotinum that can make Bob's lifespan equivalent to her own.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
Back to Mayfly–December Friendship.
