Questionable friendships in Fan Works.
Crossovers
- Blessed with a Hero's Heart: Aqua expects to be worshipped, but isn't keen on doing anything to earn such regard, and proves incredibly unhelpful and unsupportive towards Izuku, even when it's in her best interests to work with him. Eventually, she ditches him in favor of Kyouya, only to get even worse: she exploits Kyouya's worship in order to indulge all of her vices, blowing him off when he begs her to stop.
- Children of an Elder God: Misato and Ritsuko are old friends... although they bicker constantly, and Ritsuko seems to enjoy getting Misato riled.Ritsuko: Hmm. I see you're busy. When you two are done, I need to see Misato."
Misato: I was just trying to find out who his girlfriend is!
Ritsuko: I suppose he had it written on the inside of his underwear or something? - Just an Unorthodox Thief: Played for Laughs when Lupin berates Jigen and Goemon for not being able to instantly sense that he was the real deal:Lupin: Ah, was our bond really that weak guys? Fuji-cakes could tell it was me from just a feelin'! You had to try to kill me and then interrogate me before you knew it was me! What kind of friends are you?
Jigen: Shut up. - In The Long Road (2015), Hiccup immediately regrets promising to introduce Jack to his friends, as he semi-sarcastically comments that he should have just pretended he didn't know them and he can really only trust Stormfly not to offend.
- In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Izuku still considers the hyper-aggressive Jerkass Katsuki Bakugou to be his best friend. This is partially due to Izuku's massive guilt complex over nearly killing Katsuki when they were toddlers. Even after everything they've been through and his fear of his growing powers, Izuku can't help but rush into the fray when Katsuki is in danger.
- In Origin Story, despite everything Alex is doing to help the Scoobies while she's trapped in the Buffyverse, the Scoobies still treat her like she's a monster who's about to attack them. At one point, Violet the Vampire Slayer points out that Buffy is treating Alex "like a yeast infection," and punches Buffy in the nose when their attitude causes Alex to fly away in tears.
- In Wonderful (Mazinja), Taylor and Sophia are friends... after a fashion. Still, they fight and argue constantly, and Taylor pokes fun at Sophia every so often.
- Echo's of the past
is a look at Laurel's life and the people in it, and largely consists of how terribly most of them have treated her. This is really pointed out in Nyssa's chapter, which starts by pointing out that if Nyssa once poisoned and nearly killed Laurel and is still one of her closest friends, the only conclusion to draw is that Laurel needs better friends. Nyssa herself comments on this, and is genuinely baffled that Laurel still tries to save people who do not care about her. - Discussed in Renegades. By this point in the Arrow timeline, Oliver has thrown Laurel's addiction struggles in her face twice (including telling her to drink herself to death), been completely unsupportive when she was starting as the Black Canary, and has said very demeaning things to her. Laurel at one point laments to Felicity how bad her relationship with him has become:Felicity: He just snaps at you and gets so angry with you. He’s not like that with anyone else. We all see it. I don't know why, but I want to believe it comes from some place of caring about you. If he didn't care he wouldn’t be so angry, right?
Laurel: It was hard, at first, to let go of the idea that he would ever be there for me the way I had been there for him and his family. I thought I was doing so well, until tonight. No one has ever been able to cut me down like he can.- To his credit, Oliver later admits he's been a terrible friend to her for a while now and starts treating her like an actual friend.
- Their Last Time revolves around Team Arrow reading through The Cutting Edge. Seeing just how miserable Laurel is and how little she values herself causes them to realize just how poorly they'd been treating her, despite ostensibly being her friends and allies.
- Danny Phantom: Lost Episodes Series: When Dash is suffering from a curse of bad luck, his friends and teammates show absolutely No Sympathy, threatening to cut him off the team if he doesn't find some way of fixing it ASAP.
- Danny Phantom: Stranded: During Trapped, Pauline gets upset at Star being grounded... because she wants her to attend a party she's throwing. She also doesn't care about Star getting trapped inside the school, berating her for missing the party and 'making her look bad'. This convinces Star to quit the A-Listers.
- Light Yagami and Naomi Misora in All You Need Is Love: "Naomi realized her closest friend was a Serial Killer who crashed at her house and tormented her son and husband."
- Gravity Falls: Once More: This is Played for Drama with Thompson, the resident Butt-Monkey of Wendy's circle of friends. Noticing that the group is starting to fray apart, he tries various methods to bring them all closer together, and ultimately succeeds... only to learn just how little any of them cared about him.
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: Draco finds Harry's ways of thinking to be so completely beyond his ability to understand his reasoning that he reflects he might have been better off remaining his rival:If you were Harry's enemy, his plots might be hard to see through at first, they might even be stupid, but his reasoning would make sense once you understood it, you would comprehend that he was trying to hurt you.
The way Harry was acting toward Draco right now did not make sense.
Because if you were Harry's friend, then he tried to be friends with you in the alien, incomprehensible way he'd been raised by Muggles to do, even if it meant destroying your entire life. - Ron Weasley and Draco Malfoy in King Lightning.The boys had become very strange friends. They still despised each other but could often be seen trading the rudest insults to each other over a chessboard.
- After filling in for Voldemort in Professor Riddle's Chronicles, Dolohov sums up his opinion of Hogwarts in the late 1960s: with enemies like these, it’s impossible to win, and with friends like these, even more so.
- In Persephone, it does not take long for the Hooligans then to realize that one of the reasons why Astrid was so quick to join Hiccup and his cause was because he treated her FAR better than they ever did.
- What is a Person Worth?:
- Initially, Lincoln isn't willing to trust most of his friends with the Awful Truth about his current situation is because they have a tendency to turn on him whenever things start looking bad. However, he eventually decides he was being too hard on them, apologizing and offering them a partial explanation. Liam, Zach and Rusty all acknowledge that they haven't given him much reason to trust them, and work to be more supportive.
- Cristina's friends play this straight during Chapter 22. Instead of being concerned about how she was being stalked, they're more interested in the idea that she might be dating Lincoln, refusing to listen when she tries to explain that their assumptions are totally wrong.
- Lampshaded by Odin in What If in regards to Heimdall who insists he's loyal to Asgard, not to the throne. Heimdall also insists Loki is a traitor who cannot be trusted, even though all of Loki's actions were actually on Odin's orders. As a result, Odin decides against letting Heimdall work off his prison sentencenote because it'd be better to "know he's blind than to rely on untrustworthy eyes".
- In Juleka vs. the Forces of the Universe, Alya regards her "bestie" Marinette as a hopelessly tongue-tied bumbler who can't manage any part of her own life. She treats her with Condescending Compassion at best, constantly trying to convince the rest of the Girl Squad that Marinette needs them to keep shoving her towards Adrien, no matter how much she resists or how often she winds up humiliated and miserable from their Zany Schemes. Ultimately, she cares more about making her ship sail than anything else.
- The Karma of Lies:
- The majority of Marinette's classmates turn out to be Fair-Weather Friends who are more interested in currying favor with Lila out of the belief that she'll help them out with her various 'connections'. They then attempt to flock back to her side after she's unmasked as Ladybug, and are shocked when she refuses to accept them back with open arms.
- Alya is particularly bad about this, as she wastes no time trying to exploit her supposed status as "Ladybug's bestie" by promising exclusive interviews and content on the Ladyblog. When Marinette points out that she didn't bother getting permission for any of this from her, Alya makes clear that she believes she OWES her all of this and more.
- Adrien also proves to be a False Friend of the highest order, having refused to do anything about Lila conning his classmates with her Fake Charities and other deceptions. Ironically, the class is far more willing to stand by his side when times get tough for him... until they learn about how he let them suffer.
- Miraculous Ladybug Salt-Shots:
- ...How Could You? has Alya and Nino accidentally send Marinette into a panic attack when they lock her into a closet with Adrien and pretend they're being attacked by a supervillain. The pair show absolutely no remorse for how much they upset their friends, smugly crowing about how their Zany Scheme "worked" and brushing off Adrien's pointed reminder of how he's already dating Kagami.
- Where You Stand: According to Alya, Marinette is a hopeless Stalker with a Crush who seriously needs to learn how to dial back her obsession with Adrien and stop being jealous of any girl who gets close to him. Despite how readily she'll lob such nasty accusations her way, however, Alya is also a Shipper on Deck who's intent on "helping" Marinette hook up with her crush, strongarming her into Zany Schemes and steamrolling over all resistance by claiming Mari just needs to "try harder!" Marinette and Nino call her out on this blatant Doublethink, asking her to pick a side and stick with it.
- Scarlet Lady: Chloé was never a good friend to Sabrina, having always treated her more like her personal servant than her closest companion. But she only gets worse after becoming the titular Nominal Heroine, ramping up her already neglectful and abusive behavior to the point where she thinks nothing of smacking her in the face with a tablet. This cruelty doesn't go unnoticed or unremarked upon by her peers, and when Sabrina finally stands up for herself and breaks things off, she's able to find actual friendship with Alix and Lila, among others.
- Tales of Karmic Lies Aftermath: In this Recursive Fanfic set after the events of The Karma of Lies, Alya repeatedly insists that she was the best friend Marinette/Ladybug ever had, despite how she treated both incredibly disrespectfully, both before and after she learned that they were the same person.
- The Wolves in the Woods: It turns out that Alya was completely aware that Lila wasn't telling the truth, but she took advantage of her claiming that Marinette was mean to her to turn most of the class against her "bestie". Why? Because Alya was secretly envious of how Marinette had earned some recognition as a designer, and wanted to "cut her back down to size". When her plan results in Marinette transferring to another school to get away from the blatant bullying, Alya becomes hellbent on getting her back, refusing to accept that she completely destroyed that relationship — after all, it's all Lila's fault!
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- All That Shimmers: The Humane Five have a bad tendency to fall into petty squabbles whenever they're together. While witnessing one of these devolve into a shouting match, Sunset privately muses that this is exactly why she was able to ruin their friendships before with just a few fake texts and e-mails, and that the old her would have reveled in watching them fight.
- A Gem of a Day has an inadvertent example: after Suri steals Rarity's wedding dress design, Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy both buy copies of it from the thief, unaware of its origins.
- Played for Laughs in A Slice of Life. Princess Celestia's personal trainer Schwarzwälder is convinced that her being a Physical God makes her fully capable of enduring his Training from Hell; when Luna sees him forcing her to lift an obscenely large weight fifty times as a "warm-up", she suggests that he triple it and add a thousand push-ups and sit-ups to the routine.
- but you gotta get up at least once more: Izuku considers Katsuki to be his dear Childhood Friend, despite Katsuki's constant verbal and physical abuse. When he finally starts to accept that his 'friend' is an abuser and tries pulling away, Katsuki pursues him and only stops when Izuku reveals the extent of the scarring he's accumulated from Katsuki's attacks over the years.
- Downplayed in Heaven's Eye when Izuku inwardly speculates that Momo and Iida don't have the highest opinion of him.Why do I get the feeling these two don't think too highly of me a lot of the time?
- Androgyninja's A Dose of Venom: Chapter 8 Invokes the trope by name; a Running Theme throughout the chapter is exploring various friendships and alliances of questionable nature.
- Sakura is tentatively attempting to rebuild her bond with Ino, but is uncertain of just where they stand, especially since there are those within the Yamanaka clan who greatly dislike Sakura after her achievements during the Chuunin Exam. It hardly helps that Inoichi, Ino's own father, is a Wild Card due to their Conflicting Loyalty.
- Sakura is also questioning the friendship she'd forged with Hinata and Team Eight over the course of the previous story after they kept her Locked Out of the Loop regarding Neji, coupled with the revelations of just how the Main House treats its Branch.
- Tsunade finds herself weighing the prospect of a potential alliance with Kirigakure in the wake of their Civil War being resolved.
- In Everybody's Gotta Leave Sometime, the gang have a last get-together before parting ways forever. And even though it's their last day together, Lucy and Violet are unable to say their most heartfelt goodbyes to Charlie Brown without adding some putdowns.
- All of Jaune's friends start out like this in Operation: Jaune's Ex-Girlfriend, forcing him to do things (talking about his ex-girlfriend, trying to get him to reunite with said ex-girlfriend) that he clearly doesn't want to do (them taking their methods Up to Eleven probably didn't help matters). Though to be fair, they didn't understand the full scope of the situation and thought they would be doing Jaune a favor in a Tough Love sort of way. Once they finally get all of the details (Jaune's ex-girlfriend is a Yandere who, among other things, planned to kidnap him), they realize they acted horribly and resolve to make amends.
- A Dash of Logic: This is Downplayed with Patrick Star. While the series steers away from making him an outright False Friend to SpongeBob, there are still several times where he proves less than helpful or even actively makes things worse for his best friend. Episodes like "Squidward, You're Fired" and "Squidtastic Voyage" show off his shortcomings all too well.
- X-Men: The Early Years: Scott, Jean, Hank, Warren, and Bobby are great friends who enjoy making each other miserable every so often.Warren turned to glare at them, "I hope you both realize that you're going to die. And, for good measure, I might just kill Scott for leaving the two of you alone, unsupervised."
Hank rolled his eyes. "One of these days you're going to have to tell me where you met Barbie's blow-up, anorexic cousin."
"Her name is Candy, Hank," Warren griped. "Thank you SO much for wrecking my date with her."
