Why is "I hate my best friend" a trope?

[burginlewis]

I agree. It's annoying. It does sometimes work if the characters are in high school or prison or some other closed environment and they can't just get out and choose new friends. But grown-ups with freedom and agency go choose new friends when presented with a platter of jerks, so the older you get (or the characters get) the stupider these stories can sound.

I prefer to write, and read, characters and friendships you form an initial opinion of that changes over the novel. Good guy that has a really dark streak, or nasty-acting girl whose heart is pure gold when the friendly girl beside her's heart isn't... that sort of thing. SO VERY sick of one-dimensional characters. They make for flat relationships you can only spice up with porn.

[dawgofdawgness]

I'm guessing the trope stemmed from the OTHER trope of teenage girls all hating each other and having rivalries within friend groups. I don't really see this happening with two guy best friends? Or maybe I just don't read enough stories with guy best friends. The only one I can actually use as an example are Darren Shan and Steven from Cirque Du Freak lol.

[HGohwell]

I don't really see this happening with two guy best friends?

Usually when I see it happening with two guys its when they're both also playing the "loser in highschool" role and the one narrating tends to feel like he's not as much of a loser as his best friend and he's holding him back and if it wasn't for him he'd be cool.

[darthmongoose]

I think the trope is an exaggeration of something that does kind of happen in real life, where being a lonely kid at school, you latch onto basically anyone who is friendly or at least not directly hostile to you, or is willing to hang out with you because of a shared interest.
Like my "best friend" aged 11 was a girl from my form in school who has also isolated for being kind of this... swotty little underdeveloped oddball, so we stuck together, but I don't think we actually liked each other, it was just better than being alone and offered a small amount of protection against bullies.

Due to the relationship being effectively one of convenience or very shallow attachment, it's not unusual to end up hanging out with someone who is... honestly kind of a weirdo, and not to mention, people can change a lot between the ages of 11 and 16, so you can easily make friends with a sweet innocent little dork and have them turn into a snarky horndog and still find yourself friends with them out of habit.

That said, it's really really possible this trope is dated as hell because when I was in my early teens, it was still the nineties. You couldn't just go find communities of people who share your interests on the internet. It was really lonely being geeky back then, and if you found somebody else who was at least willing to listen to you talk about Dungeons & Dragons, oh my god, wow! An oasis in the desert! So creators have probably written this trope based on their own experience, and then younger creators often copy tropes they like from comics they've read by older creators that don't in any way reflect their own lives.

[JRHoch]

Pretty much everything is a trope. In a lot of writer circles people will decry this trope and that trope. Don't fret them so much. It's all in the execution. Surface treatment of anything will ring shallow; nuance and depth elevates all.

[Resilo]

The contrast that 2 characters that seem to clash on everything but sharing common ground where it counts to overcome an obstacle. People find this interesting for some reason including me. Bakugo and Deku from mha are a great example. my 2 cents on the subject

[CodeMonkeyArts]

...you know...I don't know why this is a trope.

I really don't like it.

I don't like hearing an MC say it without being clear they are "Lol, j/k, I love them, they are my bestie!" or the author shows that hey this friendship became SUPER toxic so that's why the MC doesn't like it.

Instead...it's suppose to...be...funny? I dunno. I don't find the MC relatable for being a dick to their friends. Most of the time their friend is actually pretty damn cool and the MC is just...so...not cool.

If you are best friends with someone...then you like them. It's just...WHY IS THIS A THING?!

[HGohwell]

Honestly, that's an entirely different trope. That's closer to vitriolic besties and that's one I love. I adore a pair who'll seem to clash constantly, who are opposites and constantly bickering but you can either tell it's all good natured and they genuinely adore each other and are just being them, or will put it aside when needs be (one of my favourites being a cool, cold sniper who's strict on rules and constantly logical and always clashing with his best friend since childhood the womanising, flirtatious and generally lax melee fighter who are constantly bickering but you can tell in the little interactions that they adore each other).

What I'm talking about specifically is a character who will constantly talk about how awful their best friend is and mean it. There is no redeeming sign that it's a joke. There is no development or change between the often come around jump to love interest. They just constantly complain about how awful their best friend is and honestly you have no idea why they're friends apart from the fact that the character says so. Maybe sometimes this is trying to be that and is mishandled, but it seems to be too common for me to put it down to that.

[UrMom]

Haha I used to be that "idiot friend" in a group. We all stuck together out of convenience, our parents were coworkers and I didn't have any actual friend so I stuck around them. Actually, most of my "friendships" were formed out of convenience until high school. The trope always reminded me of the "I hate my wife" thing. You know, where this guy marries someone you assume he likes, but then he bitches or makes mean jokes about her around his guy friends. I never got that, if you're not in a forced or arranged marriage with that person, why marry them if you don't like them? I saw this in sitcoms as a kid, don't know if they're around in today's shows though.
Maybe it's a thing dating types can only understand.

I can't really add more than what others have said about it being an attempt at replicating real life situations. Not gonna lie, I have something like that in my story in a couple different scenarios. Although they're meant to show how some people are assholes, low emotional intelligence, or how the characters aren't very close in spite of them saying they are.

I don't really know why it's a thing, much like I don't know why other weird/stupid tropes are are a thing. The kids must really dig them for some reason. What's sad is something like that could be a good character study, people and their relationships with one another are super complicated, but I don't think that's the reason most people have the trope in their stories.

[IdiotWithPencil]

So, anyone knows why this is a thing? Anyone else bothered by it or am I just weirdly sensitive to this?

to me, it's that the writer has never had a good friendship and is very ignorant of how friendships work.

if you see two very great friends they usually poke fun at each other by calling each other names or insults like idiot, wanker, dumbass, etc; of course, this is done in jest and both usually have fun with each other while calling each other names, but to social recluses and outsiders looking in, it would seem like they genuinely hate each other.

And then it will carry on throughout the piece telling us periodically how awful and annoying and boring and stupid their best friend is and why they don't know why they're friends they're just stuck with them. This best friend often turns out to be the real love interest "nice guy/girl" when the false lead her been pushed aside. This often comes with no character development or change in relationship just the sudden realization that actually "they always loved me".

wish fulfillment?, author may have a crush and is confusing that with real friendship =/, or really has only seen friends to lovers in sitcoms -_-

[Resilo]

thats just bad writing imo

[azzy-m]

This kind of is connected to/stems from that old trope that is THANKFULLY dying off (I think... I hope) that teenagers are shallow, sex-addicted/weed-addicted/alcohol-addicted monsters divided into cliques, and in extension, the "loser" or "nerdy" MC with an even nerdier and loser-rier best friend.

Come the fuck on, I'm a teenager and even I'm sick to death of this. Just another trope to add to my ever-increasing "I Fucking Hate This Trope/Cliche" list.

At this point, I think I might become an I Hate Everything but for webcomics, books and the like by the time I'm 21

I'm only willing to like this trope if it becomes a narrative about learning to cut off toxic people off your life or something.

[abcde]

Oh God, this. I loathe this. It makes me wonder what's in the mind of writers who write stuff like this. Right off the bat the main character is shown to be vain, disloyal, and hateful. How are you supposed to root for someone who looks down and devalues a friend, and the only one to boot?

At least the cliche popular kids have a reason to stick together - maybe for surface rep. These best friends? None. Yet they keep the charade of being friends, that makes them them even worse in my book.

[FenneFox]

To be honest, I can't think of a story I've read that has that trope before. If I were to guess, it at least leaves room open for rivalries that pack a punch if the hate becomes somewhat mutual. As for the possibility for romantic relationships coming from the trope, the main way I could see that working is if the main character is the sort of bitter type who takes things for granted (which frankly, is a pretty interesting flaw to work with, allows you to have a nice message organically if they learn to not take things for granted).

[CodeMonkeyArts]

One thing I was think about is the rather internalized misogynistic notion that women are always in competition with each other...usually over a man or dating prospects. Thus if the bland, blank-slate waif virginal protag has a super modern, cool, stylish "best friend", it will be seen as more of some kind of gross victory when the super hot, dashing, tall dark and kinky rich hunk chooses the 'self-insert' protag over the stylish best friend.

Which is gross. Who cares.

Thus why I avoid a lot of romance novels and movies. I write my own dark twisted shit.

[burginlewis]

See... now I need to go read your dark twisted shit.

Stop making sense.

[CodeMonkeyArts]

Hahah I tend to think a lot about different tropes topics...only so I can avoid them in my own tales.

Not that my work doesn't have problematic tropes, I'm sure there are PLENTY.

But at least I don't act like my stories are the pinnacle of perfect romance...glares hard at 50 Shades of Grey with 50 Shades of HATE

[nathanKmcwilliams]

50 Shades of Hate would be a kick-ass metal band name xD

[CodeMonkeyArts]

...I need to design an Album Cover for that bandname now.

[nathanKmcwilliams]

The hype is real. I must see this.