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PLP is for different-gender friends, HLP is for same-gender friends.
I sorta wonder if this is even a distinction worth making?
Edited by wingedcatgirl Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.
To me it seems like PLP is friends who could potentially have sexual attraction to each other but don't, while HLP is friends who wouldn't be attracted to each other anyway?
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
See, that would be a distinction worth making in my onion, but as it stands, the tropes are "different gender" vs "same gender", not "compatible orientation" vs "Incompatible Orientation". Heck, PLP explicitly includes cases of Incompatible Orientation, as long as they're still different genders.
Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.
According to HLP that's exactly the distinction.
PLP is for a mixed gender friendship while HLP is for for either two dudes or two girls. I think more than anything else it's a useful split to avoid the unholy doorstopper the example list would be if you combined them.
So:
Alice and Bob: Platonic Life-Partners
Alice and Sarah: Heterosexual Life-Partners
Bob and Johnny: Also Heterosexual Life-Partners
Got it, so HLP is titled that way because characters are presumed heterosexual until proven otherwise?
I'm curious, which trope would you apply if one of the characters was non-binary?
I remember being told that Heterosexual Life-Partners was for straight male characters but Platonic Life-Partners was for mixed-gender examples and mixed-sexuality examples.
I've brought this up in threads before, but the trope distinction as it stands now (PLP=opposite gender, HLP=same gender) is actually homophobic because it implies that the same-gender couple would automatically be attracted to each other if they were homosexual. That homosexual people are attracted to everyone of our own sex is a stereotype we've been fighting for decades.
kissed by aliens
^ Don't take it too personally, it's the same between heterosexual characters, too. A male protagonist and a female protagonist simply must be attracted to each other. That's why the aversion (i.e. Platonic Life Partners) is notable enough to be a trope in its own right.
That being said, both tropes could use a tweak in their descriptions, as several tropers have already suggested.
Edited by RoundRobin - Fly, robin, fly! - ...I'm trying!
Yes. We didn't decide that, before the existence of homosexuality was common knowledge, many people thought a man and a woman couldn't just be friends but two same-sex people could be, and this perception still exists today, albeit to a lesser extent.
If we followed that logic, we'd cut trope pages for offensive stereotypes like Greedy Jew, All Gays Are Pedophiles, Women Drivers, Scary Black Man, Yellow Peril, etc.
Edited by Lymantria Join the Five-Man Band cleanup project!
The Great Conversation: Plus it presents heterosexual and homosexual as the only options, erasing people who are bisexual, pansexual, asexual, and others.
Lymantria: Those trope pages are written in a way that acknowledges them as harmful stereotypes. The homophobic implications of HLP aren't addressed on the trope page.
Edited by ElementalMacaroon
Editing the character page for Tuca & Bertie and there's been some disagreement about which trope to put them under. Basically the two main characters are women who have known each other since college and are very dependant on each other. One is canonically bisexual while the other is in a committed relationship with a man.
Platonic Life-Partners generally seems to only apply to friendships between men and women, but it has a note on the page stating that gay characters also fall under it. The description for Heterosexual Life-Partners seems to contradict this, stating that the characters do not necessarily need to be heterosexual.
My gut instinct is to go with Platonic Life-Partners since the other trope title might be misleading. Thoughts?
Edited by ElementalMacaroon