Basic Trope: Two villains are best friends.
- Straight: Alice, the Big Bad, and Bob, The Dragon, are best friends who do villainous activities together.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice and Bob are both Always Chaotic Evil monsters who are closer than the True Companions from the side of good.
- Unholy Matrimony!: Alice and Bob are a Happily Married couple.
- Evil Is One Big, Happy Family
- Downplayed: Alice and Bob are Vitriolic Best Buds who bully others at every opportunity, but still cooperate enough to defeat the hero.
- Alice and Bob are usually Friendly Enemies to each other, but they pull an Enemy Mine against the hero.
- Justified:
- Despite their different motives, Alice and Bob have grown close to each other due to realizing how much they have in common.
- Alice and Bob were friends before they became villains, and the friendship has lasted.
- Alice and Bob could be Affably Evil and/or Well Intentioned Extremists. They both can be normal people outside their villainous careers, or they are both working toward a common goal that they believe benefits everybody, so why wouldn't they get along.
- Alice the Visionary Villain genuinely inspired Bob the Noble Demon and they are working together because Alice trusts Bob completely while Bob is a true believer.
- Inverted:
- Alice and Bob are best friends and are heroic.
- Alice and Bob are both heroes and are bitter enemies.
- Alice and Bob are villains who can't stand each other.
- Subverted: Alice and Bob only pretend to care about each other.
- Double Subverted: Alice and Bob pretend to care about each other, but eventually experience Becoming the Mask.
- Parodied: Alice and Bob sing a duet of "You've Got a Friend in Me" while dancing through the city kicking puppies, robbing banks, and kidnapping damsels.
- Zig Zagged: Alice and Bob start off as friends, but soon have a falling out after their motives start to conflict with each other. They make up during an Enemy Mine against the heroes and resume working together.
- Averted: Alice and Bob are villains who by no means have a particularly close friendship.
- Enforced: The writer wants to create villains who are best friends with each other to avoid the trend of villains always being out for themselves.
- Lampshaded: "You got Charlie as your best friend, Dan. Why don't you meet my friend, Bob?"
- Invoked: Alice sets out to create a Dragon for herself. While she's at it, she decides to give his creation qualities that will allow them to be friends.
- Exploited: Dan specifically targets Bob because he knows that it will deeply affect Alice if something happens to him.
- Defied: Alice and Bob refuse to be buddy-buddy with each other since evil people are supposed to hate each other.
- Discussed: "How can evil people like Alice and Bob be friends anyways?"
- Conversed: "And here I thought that in shows like this, villains don't have any friends because they're evil and selfish. Now they have friends?"
- Implied: Alice and Bob cooperate with one another in evil deeds, but a close friendship is never explicitly shown.
- Deconstructed: The qualities that lead them to be villains—greed, treachery, ambition, paranoia, etc—make it very hard for Alice and Bob to maintain a friendship. Eventually something happens, and there's a falling out. For most people, this would be minor; for powerful villains such as Alice and Bob, it cascades into a bitter and destructive Enemy Civil War.
- Reconstructed: Alice and Bob are Noble Demons who have a strong sense of loyalty (at least to each other) despite their evil motivations and actions.
- Played For Laughs: Alice and Bob regularly interrupt the action to to talk about inane things like how their mutual friends are doing or a funny story from their personal lives, barely acknowledging the heroes.
- Played For Drama: Alice's lack of friends is what made her evil, and Bob as her only evil friend acts as her Morality Pet.
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