Best Friends — Tag Meaning
Tags the superlative friendship: the designated person, the first call, the one who knows where the bodies are buried because they helped dig. Fics under this tag explore what best-friendship costs and gives — and in shipping contexts, it often marks the friendship that everyone else assumes is more.
What to Expect From "Best Friends" Fics
A bond of total familiarity and priority, played for warmth, comedy, or the occasional ache of a friendship at a crossroads.
How to find Best Friends fics on AO3
On AO3, click any tag to see every work that uses it, then refine with the "Filters" sidebar — combine it with your fandom or ship, set a rating, or exclude tags you don't want. See our AO3 filtering guide for the full walkthrough.
Browse "Best Friends" works on AO3Popular Fics Tagged "Best Friends"
Real examples from AO3's most-kudosed works:
Hearts Don't Break Around Here
by klancekorner
Friendship In Retrospect
by HH_Arrow
In This Secluded Spot I Respond As I Wouldn't Dare Elsewhere
by RhymePhile
heads or tails
by liknow
make it mine
by gift (orphan_account)
stay, stay, stay
by deanpendragon
Related Tags
Friendship
The foundational gen tag: friendship as the story's subject, not its backdrop. It covers the forging of new friendships, the maintenance of old ones, and fics that give a canon friendship the focused attention shipping usually monopolizes.
Tag guide →
Childhood Friends
Marks friendships with the deepest possible roots — people who knew each other before either had a finished personality. The shared history does heavy narrative lifting: embarrassing memories as currency, loyalty with decades of compound interest, and the unique grief when such a friendship breaks.
Tag guide →
Friends to Lovers
The gentle giant of romance arcs: an established friendship deepens into love, with all the comfort and terror that entails. The stakes aren't whether they like each other — they obviously do — but whether romance is worth risking the best relationship either of them has.
Tag guide →
Platonic Soulmates
Applies soulmate weight to a non-romantic bond: two people who are each other's person without being each other's partner. It appears both in soulmate-AU worlds (where the universe-assigned match turns out platonic) and in realistic fic describing a friendship of soul-deep magnitude.
Tag guide →
More Family & Friendship Tags
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