Sonic and a Badnik, working together?! The horror! note
- This is the entire plot of The Actor And The Housewife, pairing a Colin-Firth-esque British movie star and a Mormon housewife/mother of four/part-time screenwriter. People think their best friendship is entirely strange.
- Marasi and Wayne in The Alloy of Law. She's an academic, impoverished noble, logically minded, girly-girl, who's a good shot with a rifle, whilst he's a rough thief who operates on Insane Troll Logic and thoroughly dislikes guns.
- In Animorphs, Cassie the down-to-earth, Technical Pacifist farm girl is best friends with Rachel, a shopping-obsessed beauty who develops more and more (Dark) Action Girl traits as the series progresses.
- From the same series we have Ax, The Comically Serious stranded alien, and his shorm (best friend) Tobias, an angsty human teenager accidentally stuck in the body of a red-tailed hawk (the two bonding as the "outsiders" of the otherwise human group). For added weirdness, Ax is technically Tobias' uncle as well.
- There's also Jake, the serious and often guilt-laden leader with Marco, a Plucky Comic Relief guy who can also be quite serious and even ruthlessly strategic, but they're comparably milder. K.A. Applegate seems to like this trope, though.
- Battle Royale has Yuichiro Takiguchi, an empathic Otaku who trusts people too easily given the circumstances, and Tadakatsu Hatagami, a baseball jock with a gruff attitude who's the more suspicious of the two.
- The Belgariad: In his prequel novel, Belgarath the Sorcerer becomes friends with a Nadrak prospector with whom he goes gold panning. Belgarath's internal monologue even lampshades that he, the Time Abyss arch-nemesis of his friend's patron God of Evil, would come to like his "born enemy", but the Nadrak is much more interested in profit than religion and only has a brief Freak Out when he realizes he's essentially Pals with Jesus.
- Bertie Wooster and his Aunt Dahlia. It's especially odd in that Bertie is a gentle sort who can't stand the majority of his aunts, whereas Aunt Dahlia is brusque and inclined to exhibit Tough Love. The two double nicely as Vitriolic Best Buds.
- As the Black Legion is a tale of the brotherless becoming brothers, some are bound to happen:
- Lheor and Khayon. The former is short-tempered, outspoken and insanely violent warrior form legion which despises magic, while the latter is an introspective and nostalgic sorcerer.
- Gyre and Nefertari. One's a daemon, of the breed that feeds on Eldar, and the other's a Dark Eldar who must feed on pain of others. It helps that Gyre is explicitly forbidden to kill Nefertari and that Nefertari would gain no sustenance from killing Gyre.
- Ugrivian and Nefertari. They come from races that hate each other with fierce passion, but those two become sparring partners, and later friends.
- Caging Skies: Pimmichen is a Nazi-praising Racist Grandma who has a low opinion on slavs and Jews. After Germany is declared a communist nation, Pimmichen and her Nazi grandson are ordered to take in the Polish men, and she declares that due to their nationalities, they could be spies. However, when they're found out as Fauxreigners (they were actually Russian refugees fleeing the Soviet Union and pretended to be Polish to avoid being arrested), Pimmichen refuses to let them go and shouts at the police officer that they're her friends.
- A very big part of the Circle of Magic series, where four abandoned children find themselves having to live together. Everything from their personalities and backgrounds are different. Sandry is a Spoiled Sweet noble girl, Daja is a pragmatic trader, Tris is a mean bookworm, and Briar is a untrusting ex-street rat. Yet a combination of Sandry's determination to make friends with everyone, surviving multiple disasters and having their minds linked means they're as close as can be.
- Clear and Present Danger: Representatives Alan Trent (a gay Democrat from Massachusetts) and Sam Fellows (a Mormon Republican from Arizona), both members of the House Select Intelligence Committee. Later in the series, the oddness of the friendship is explicitly commented upon.
- Cradle Series: Min Shuei, the Winter Sage, is by all appearances close friends with Akura Charity, the Sage of the Silver Heart. Charity is known for perfect control of her emotions, while Min Shuei is known for having no control of her emotions. Most of their interactions involve Min Shuei crying while Charity explains the more rational approach.
- The Death of the Vazir Mukhtar: Griboyedov (tall, thin, coldly contemptuous, outwardly stoic, brilliant poet and playwright) and Bulgarin (fat, easily excited, trashy writer and scandalous journalist).
- The Dresden Files: For those who don't know they're half-brothers, Harry and Thomas' friendship looks like this. It also gets the fun distinction of attracting serious worry from those same people, since Thomas is an incubus from a race of sociopathic Mind Rapers.
- The Drowned Cities has Mahlia, a crippled victim of war, and Tool, a Half-Human Hybrid Super-Soldier, who earn one another's respect while trying to rescue Mahlia's friend, Mouse, from the soldier boys of the United Patriot Front. By the end of the book it appears that Mahlia and Mouse's sergeant, Ocho, may also be heading this way.
- The Emigrants: Danjel is a born-again Christian with a Silk Hiding Steel-demeanor and a deep intellectual streak. Jonas-Petter is cheerfully irreverent, and his great delights in life are lewd jokes and chewing tobacco. Needless to say, the two are as thick as thieves, sticking together throughout their emigration and settling down together. When Jonas-Petter finally decides to leave Danjel and his family, he makes sure to claim the plot closest to theirs, without even looking at other land.
- Deconstructed in Emma: Rich, intelligent Spoiled Sweet Emma Woodhouse takes a liking to illegitimate, beautiful Dumb Blonde Harriet Smith and tries to bring her into high society and arrange a good marriage for her. By the end of the book, however, Emma comes to realize that the friendship has done neither of them any real good and that, despite her real affection for Harriet, all she's done is make the girl's life more difficult than it needed to be.
- Fat Kid Rules the World has the extremely thin, ratty looking Curt and the 6'1, nearly 300 pound Troy. Curt is a popular local musician while Troy is awkward and bullied. They become friends and start a punk rock band together.
- Tortantulas frequently partner up with Flatars in The Four Horsemen Universe, with the Tortantula wearing a saddle in which the Flatar rides. The Tortantula is a Giant Spider, the Flatar is a one-foot mammal that resembles a chipmunk.
- Aziraphale and Crowley from Good Omens. The respective representatives of Heaven and Hell on Earth, over the millennia they've become more attached to Earth and each other (not like that) than to their respective sides.
- Half Life (2006) has an unexpected example of friendship occurring across a Love Triangle. The mother of the conjoined protagonists gets herself impregnated by a stranger on a cross country bus trip in order to gift her lesbian lover Max with a baby. When Max rejects her she enters into a marriage of convenience with the father. When Max comes back into her life, she and the father become friends and business partners.
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince shows Draco Malfoy sharing his problems with Moaning Myrtle of all characters. Moaning Myrtle is the ghost of a muggle born and Draco usually hates them.
- His snobby, supremacist parents are also friends with Snape who’s half blooded and grew up very poor.
- In A Harvest of War we have Wild Rhona the Blood Knight and Ayan the Actual Pacifist.
- From Hell's Children: there's Precision, an evil alien bent on killing all humans whose best friend just happens to be a little human girl.
- Austin and Jeffery in Hollow Places. Jeffery is a charismatic prison guard who concerns himself with honor, believes strongly in karma, and prefers to focus on peoples' better aspects. Austin is a janitor who knows from experience that justice isn't a law of nature, has morals based on utilitarianism, and lacks the people skills to make most look past his scars and prosthetic arm.
- In Honor Harrington Sphinxians and Treecats have an interspecies friendship for each other.
- Horace Harkness, a grizzled petty officer who, at the time of the first book, has failed twelve times to be promoted to CPO due to his penchant for smuggling and picking fights with marines, makes an unlikely pair with Prescott Tremaine, a wide-eyed young ensign who is assigned to inspect shipments in the Basilisk system, with Harkness helping thanks to his familiarity with the tricks smugglers use. In the end, the Bureau of Personnel adds a note to Harkness' file saying that he is always to be posted to whatever ship Tremaine is on, because they find it preferable to Harkness hacking their systems and wreaking havoc every time Tremaine gets reassigned. Needless to say, they are pretty much inseparable.
- In Horus Heresy:
- During the Shadow Crusade, Lorgar (a skilled orator and priest by upbringing, but mediocre fighter) and Angron (always full of Unstoppable Rage, but the best fighter of the Primarchs) strike a friendship despite the fact that each represents what the other hates. It helps that Lorgar treated Angron as an actual person rather than a slavering attack dog, and went out of his way to engineer Angron's ascension to daemonhood at the height of the Heresy.
- Fulgrin (a Pretty Boy with a love of art and high culture) was quite close with Ferrus Manus (an ugly, Social Darwinist blacksmith), with the two making weapons for one another and collaborating on a number of campaigns during the Great Crusade. Unfortunately, it ended poorly when Fulgrim sided with Horus during the Heresy and killed Ferrus in the process.
- The Infernal Devices.
- Will and Jem. Will is a rude asshole and Jem is a kindhearted nice guy. They even look absolutely different: Jem is all white and silver and Will is all dark colors.
- Will and Magnus, considering that Will doesn't really do friends and that, up until that point, Magnus hated Shadowhunters.
- In The Clockwork Princess, Magnus and Henry seem to get along swimmingly. Magnus is the only person other than Charlotte to ever consider Henry brilliant and Henry introduced Magnus to glitter, his semi-infamous accessory from The Mortal Instruments series.
- Johannes Cabal: The title character is a dour, celibate people-hater with very few friends, one of whom is the succubus-like spider-devil Zarenyia. She's thrilled when he summons her to Earth, both for the pleasure of his company and for the chance of some good mayhem, and they trust each other implicitly. She even betrays Satan to protect him.
- 80's slasher novel Kill River has young teens Cyndi and Stacy. Cyndi is an antisocial, music-obsessed punk girl with no friends who's almost always quiet, whereas Stacy is a clearly popular, wealthy, spoiled girly-girl and self-admitted chatterbox, and the only thing they have in common is that both were forced by their parents to attend summer camp. Nevertheless, they almost immediately form a strong, genuine friendship and get along swimmingly, made especially noteworthy because it's Stacy who approaches Cyndi first and immediately becomes very protective of and loyal towards her.
- The Lord of the Rings:
- Merry and the entire royal house of Rohan. Especially his close friendship with Éowyn.
- Gimli and Legolas. Especially odd given that, up to that point, Dwarves and Elves weren't on the best of terms and their parents didn't get along in The Hobbit.note
- McAuslan has the Captain Smooth and Sergeant Rough pair Lt.MacKenzie and Sgt. MacCaw. MacKenzie is a slender, intensely aristocratic young officer who is politically "somewhere to the right of Louis XIV". MacCaw is a welder turned union organizer from the Glasgow shipyards, and an ardent Communist. When the two can be kept from discussing politics (which they will do, loudly and sometimes bloodily) they make a splendid team, and between them they run the best platoon in the regiment.
- Fyodor Simeonovich Kivrin and Cristobal Junta in Monday Begins on Saturday. One is laidback, always cheerful and optimistic; the other is harsh, unpredictable and quite explosive. Also he is a former Grand Inquisitor, while Kivrin has once suffered at the hands of his colleagues — in spirit if not in faith. Additionally, Kivrin is always eager to help out younger colleagues, while Junta has stated that he hates charity. None of that gets in the way of their friendship which seems to have lasted for centuries. They do occasionally have a fight, but it's all in good fun and culminates in sharing a drink anyway.
- The relationship between Junta and the main character, Sasha Privalov, seems to be evolving into this trope too. Unfortunately, the series was discontinued early on.
- Tahiri and Nen Yim develop this near the end of the New Jedi Order novels. The former is a snarky, spirited Action Girl wrestling with the lingering effects of Yuuzhan Vong experimentation and brainwashing; the latter is a reserved, driven scientific prodigy who was one of the ones responsible for said experimenting and brainwashing. They start off understandably hostile, but rather quickly develop a surprisingly strong rapport. The fact that Tahiri's Vong memories were adapted from Nen's in the first place undoubtedly helped, since it meant there was much in their subconsciousness that would have been the same.
- In The Nexus Series: Rangan, a rich Neuroscience grad-student who's also a popular DJ, becomes fast friends with Bobby, a 12-year-old boy with Autism. It helps that they are both running Nexus 5 and can communicate via emotions and thoughts through a shielding flaw in the prison they are both being held at.
- In Percy Jackson and the Olympians — Clarisse and Silena. One's the daughter of Ares, God of War. The other's the daughter of Aphrodite, Goddess of Love. Of course, in the original myths, Ares and Aphrodite were lovers; it's not clear if that makes it more or less odd... maybe they bond over sharing half-siblings.
- Peter Pays Tribute has Maggy, a bubbly air-head, befriend a boy who has given up speaking.
- Pride and Prejudice: dour, brooding Darcy and light-hearted Bingley, particularly in the Keira Knightley movie — whenever they're together, Darcy seems itching to punch Bingley in the face. The vibe in the novel, on the other hand...
- In Peter S. Beagle's "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros", a professor is friends with what he insists is a talking Indian Rhinoceros. It says it's a unicorn. Despite this difference of opinion and other differences, it's a quite close friendship.
- Schooled in Magic: Imaiqah, born into the merchant class, Alassa, born the princess of the kingdom, Emily, born on another world altogether, and the Gorgon, a non-human girl, end up as good friends through the course of the books which breaks all class barriers and social norms for the Nameless World.
- Second Apocalypse:
- Achamian is a bookish and somewhat insecure sorcerer from humble origins, while Xinemus is a highborn, confident and devout military commander whose religion dictates that sorcerers like Achamian are damned. They bonded by both serving as tutors to a prince. They're also Identical Strangers, looking like they could be brothers.
- Sorweel and Zsoronga are both hostage princes, but they come from very different cultures and don't even speak each other's language, but managed to forge a surprisingly strong friendship through Zsoronga's interpreter.
- The Secret Garden: Mary's friendship with Dickon.
- Sharpe spends most of his time struggling against evil aristocrat officers, but has a long-standing friendship with one upper-class officer, William Lawford. The two of them were captured together in India and Lawford taught Sharpe to read and write while they were rotting in Tippoo Sultan's dungeons.
- Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant but eccentric detective and his best friend and partner in fighting crime, reasonable and grounded Dr. Watson.
- Spenser and Hawk from Robert B Parker's stories. Spenser is a moral, honour-bound PI and Hawk is a semi-sociopath who makes his living as an enforcer and has no qualms at all about killing. Which is not to say they have nothing in common. Both are Sophisticated as Hell (though Hawk likes to pretend he's a dumb thug), and prefer to play by their own rules. Both clearly have the deepest respect for the other.
- A Song of Ice and Fire
- Tyrion Lannister and Jon Snow have virtually nothing in common except a highborn upbringing in a castle but bond over their shared societal status as outsiders due to being a dwarf (Tyrion) and illegitimate child (Jon). However, where Tyrion is despised by everyone in his family except for his brother Jamie, Jon is loved by his father, half-siblings and uncle; but both are The Unfavorite to someone in their home (Jon to his sort-of stepmother and Tyrion to his father and sister). By the end of their time together, Jon calls Tyrion "friend" and Tyrion might be the only Lannister to be genuinely called "friend" upon parting, especially by somebody from the Stark family.
- Willas Tyrell and Oberyn Martell are good, if not particularly close friends, and have corresponded regularly for about a decade. What makes their friendship odd is the fact that Oberyn crippled Willas in his first tourney, leaving him unfit for knighthood and incapable of walking without a cane. Willas bears no animosity, knowing that he shouldn't have been in that tournament to begin with and that his injury was an honest-to-God accident, and he and Oberyn have bonded over their mutual interest in life sciences.
- Also far from close, but witty and charming Jaime Lannister, over the course of the fourth book, begins to train with mute and asocial Ilyn Payne due to the executioner's inability to communicate. As they go on, he starts to vent about his life and his relationship worries for the very same reason, and the two begin "discussing" these matters over glasses of wine once they're done training for the night. There's still little fondness, however.
- Sonic the Hedgehog Adventure Gamebooks: As seen from the page image, Sonic forms a friendship with one of Robotnik's badniks named Catcher in The Zone Zapper. A former Catcher badnik who was hit with Robotnik's Reality Inversion Beam and turned into a "Goodnik". The book even lampshades Sonic's friendship with the badnik and deduces it might be from Sonic missing Tails, who was turned into a Tailsnik earlier in the book.
- Tales of Dunk and Egg chronicles the oddest of friendships between Dunk, a former Street Urchin turned Knight Errant and his squire, Egg secretly Prince Aegon of the Targaryen Dynasty.
- The Terrible Two is about two pranksters who go about it in very different ways: Miles Murphy, who wants to go down as a legend for his pranks and makes frequent use of the Indy Ploy, and Niles Sparks, who operates in secret and is a skilled strategist. When they become friends, people are liable to comment on it.
- In The Underland Chronicles, calling Vikus’ relationship with Ripred a "friendship" is a little strong, but the two do have more respect for each other than the other members of their species.
- In Watchers of the Throne, Aleya and Valerian strike up a friendship after fighting together in a massive battle. Both note how odd his is; Aleya is The Soulless, and as such has difficulties relating to other people, while Valerian is a Super-Soldier raised from childhood with nothing more than loyalty to the Emperor on his mind. They still make tremendous Bash Siblings.
- The Witcher: Geralt, a stoic, mutated One-Man Army and Hunter of Monsters and arguably the greatest swordsman alive who terrifies even the normal humans he is paid to protect, is thick as thieves with Dandelion, a nice, camp bard and Non-Action Guy who would almost be out of his depth fighting an ordinary house cat. In the first short-story compilation, Priestess Nenneke notes her incredulity at the closeness of their friendship as they have absolutely nothing in common.
- Wizard of Yurt: Daimbert and Joachim rapidly become close friends despite their completely different temperaments and their respective superiors telling them that magic and religion don't mix.
