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[skygiants]

Aside from OTPs, lacewood also asked me for my Top 5 Platonic BFF Pairings, which is an awesome question but tricky because I am going to try not to overlap with any of the BFF pairings I talked about when I did my top five BFF moments. To make narrowing it down easier, I am also very strictly ruling out anyone I think might be even a little bit not entirely platonic. (SORRY KYOKO AND KANAE, but that nosebleed disqualifies you from the running.)


1. Wendy and Lacey, The Middleman



Wendy and Lacey: best roommates ever, or BEST ROOMMATES EVER? Wendy saves the world by battling aliens, vampires, and flying fish zombies! Lacey saves the world via confrontational spoken-word performance art! Wendy bails Lacey out of prison when she needs it; Lacey helps Wendy escape from an evil dystopian AU when she needs it. TRUE FRIENDSHIP.

In other news, The Middleman passed the Bechdel Test pretty much every episode, thanks to Wendy and Lacey's fantastically supportive friendship and its importance to Wendy and to the story. Which is one of the main things that puts it among my top TV shows of all time.

2. Cha Song Joo and Sun Woo Wan, Capital Scandal



I realize this is two Cha Song Joo entries in as many top five posts, but a.) you can never have too much Cha Song Joo! and b.) I feel it's worth giving this BFF relationship a special shout-out given that kdramas are kind of known for their melodramatic tangled love squares in which everyone is in love with everyone, because amazingly Cha Song Joo and Woo Wan are soulmates whose completely platonic love for each other is never questioned. It's amazing! They sit around and bitch about how nice it would be if they had any romantic feelings for each other at all, and instead he's in love with a TINY REVOLUTIONARY and she's in love with an ANGSTY POLICEMAN because clearly they both just like being miserable all the time, ugh, what is their life, what are their choices?

And meanwhile Cha Song Joo cheerfully makes bets on Woo Wan's love life, and Woo Wan comes to crash at her place when he's feeling sulky and rebellious at his family, and they go dancing and hang out and mock each other mercilessly and it's adorable, except when he finds out she's been keeping her secret revolutionary assassin activities secret from him and then it's super sad because soulmates are not supposed to have secrets! But they get over it because that's what BFFs do.

3. Kenny and Lynda, Press Gang



Another completely platonic male-female friendship: Lynda, who rules the newsroom with an iron fist, and Kenny, who has spent most of his life following her around and being sarcastic-yet-soothing in her wake. I love their teamwork, guys! I love it more and more every episode. (For the record, I've now finished season 2 and not yet started season 3; I am looking forward to more, and yet dreading Kenny's inevitable departure, because KENNY.)

Kenny jokes that when Lynda asks his opinion the one she usually wants is "yes," and . . . he's not wrong, but that being said he's one of very few people who can and will give her an honest opinion that isn't a yes that she'll trust. And when he decides to take a break from being a nice-guy editor to be a ROCK STAR for a day, she sneakily supports him 110% without ever actually saying it, because, you know, it'd be bad for her image.

4. Charlotte and Shauna, Bad Machinery



I don't think I've ever talked here about how much I like John Allison's webcomic Bad Machinery! But I really like Bad Machinery? Scary Go Round was one of the few webcomics I was able to semi-keep-up-with over the years (rowanberries is to blame for that!) and I enjoyed it, but I actually like Bad Machinery much better and a large part of that is because it is completely grounded in the friendship between two little girls. (Eventually to be three little girls, and I love Mildred too, but we are talking about BFF pairs here so alas Mildred will have to be left out of it for now.)

Anyway, Shauna and Charlotte! They are adorable and they balance each other out really well - Shauna is bright and inquisitive and Charlotte is kind of wacky and TOGETHER THEY FIGHT CRIME. No, really. (Well, solve mysteries, same difference.) And I honestly feel the world needs more stories about wacky, endearing, ordinary, often silly, sometimes suprisingly brilliant schoolgirls fighting crime.

5. Janet and Molly, Pamela Dean's Tam Lin

Guys, Tam Lin was really, really ridiculously formative for me. As a teenager I desperately wanted college to be like it was in this book for Janet, with everyone reciting theater and poetry all the time, and weird magical happenings sort of occurring off around the edges, and - most awesomely of all - a roommate who'd read the same books I had and had the same kind of sense of humor, someone who got it. (I don't mean to play the 'I was a tragic and lonely teenager!' card here, by the way. I was lucky enough to have some awesome friends in high school, many of whom I am lucky enough to still be friends with now. But I didn't have many friends in high school who were geeky the same way I was, and the idea of just sort of walking into my room in college and finding a DESTINED GEEKY BFF SOULMATE was a pretty compelling one at sixteen.)

Honestly, while pretty much every aspect of Tam Lin is a huge wish-fulfillment fantasy for a certain kind of person - and as you can tell, I am clearly that kind of person - I think that Molly and Janet's friendship is one of the most wish-fulfillment-y bits of all. Yes, the dazzlingly attractive fairy dudes and eerily beautiful ladies trying to seduce you with Shakespeare are all great, but the really fantastic bit is having the elephant-daishiki-wearing, shared-obsession-quoting best friend who wants to room with you for all four years of college, who will argue with you about your favorite plays and who traipses along with you when you're camping out in the forest feeling ridiculous about having to pull your boyfriend off a horse.

As always, you are cordially invited to tell me about your own favorite platonic fictional BFFs!