Hi there! I'm currently working on a little fantasy story where in the middle of act 2, the protagonist turns against his best friend, not caring about him anymore at all. But I'm struggling to find a believable reason for them to have such a bad fight. They do have some disagreements before that specific situation, but overall it may seem to ooc especially for the protagonist to go cold like that... Ideally I'd want some external force to drive them apart like that, but I don't know how :/
Writing Conflict Between BFF Characters
So the thing withdeep, intimate friendships is that no matter what happens between you, it’salmost impossible to stop caring about a person you’ve cared about for anylengthy period of time. You may dislike them, find them annoying, or evenharbor a grudge against them for pain they’ve knowingly or unknowingly causedyou, but at the end of it all, you would never wish them harm. If somethinghappened to them, it would still cause you a great deal of pain.
Emotionsdon’t see logic, so despite any logical reason you may have for hatingsomeone, your heart doesn’t know how to stop caring when it has a long history of doing so. And when a friend has hurtyou, it’s often difficult for your heart to blame your friend, because itdoesn’t know how to feel those resentful feelings towards that particularperson.
Okay, so all I really accomplished in those paragraphs was personifying acharacter’s heart, but I think it’s all valid. If you want readers to buy thatthere’s been a real falling out, to the point where one character no longer cares for the other one at all, it’s going to take a pretty terrible conflict between them.
But let’s start with the somewhat obvious question here: Is this fight forever? Do you plan on having these characters reconcile at some point, or will this particular event be the beginning of the end of their friendship? If you’re planning on having them reconcile, then the tricky maneuver is having it be something forgivable, yet terrible enough that it creates such strong feelings of malice. And the biggest tool in your box for something like this is the good old misunderstanding.
Misunderstandings have a funny way of wrecking relationships, particularly when a person’s good intentions result in terrible consequences. A misunderstanding can result when one friend thinks the other friend has done something they never actually did.
If you have no idea where to start with this, think of something that could go wrong for your protagonist in the context of your story. An enemy they didn’t anticipate, a person (other than the best friend) whose support they lose, or even something like an injury. Once you’ve got some ideas for things that could go wrong, brainstorm ways that the best friend could be responsible for these things, regardless of whether they actually are responsible or not. From there, you can decide how this misunderstanding or misinterpretation of events occurs. Let me put it in a simple step-by-step:
Imagine a misfortune that could befall your protagonist.
Find a way to blame it on the best friend, whether they actually did it or not.
Decide how the protagonist learns this information.
A super basic example might be a character who is pursuing a bad guy, and they need special weapons to harm this bad guy. Then the weapon goes missing, and our character finds the missing weapon in the trunk underneath their friend’s bed. So if we break this down to go with our step-by-step above:
The protagonist’s weapon goes missing.
The best friend took the weapon (remember, step 2 can either be true or false, depending on if the friend actually took the weapon).
The protagonist finds the weapon in the friend’s trunk.
From here, the protagonist jumps to the conclusion that the friend stole the weapon, perhaps because they want to go off and fight the bad guy themselves, or perhaps because they want to prevent the protagonist from doing so because they are secretly aligning with the bad guy! Again, none of this need be true; the protagonist only needs to think it’s true. That creates the conflict that you’re looking for without damaging the friendship irreparably (because eventually the truth will come out and all will be forgiven).
But there’s one important part I’ve left out here - the addition step 4. Understand what actually happened.
If our protagonist’s friend did NOT steal the weapon, then we have to understand how the weapon ended up in their trunk. What actually happened that lead to this misunderstanding, and what significance does it hold? Assuming that someone planted the weapon in the trunk, we have to consider who planted it, why they planted it (with particular focus on what this person gains from planting the weapon), and what will happen to this person once the truth is discovered.
For Unrepairable Friendships
If you’re looking for some conflict that effectively ends the friendship forever, I would consider making the rift a major plot element that builds from beginning to end. You work with tension early in the novel and let it grow to explosive proportions, so that any pressure on the friendship breaks the already weakened bond. Small sources of tension can be arguments over how problems are solved, jealously over new (and seemingly more important) friendship and/or romantic relationships, disapproval of life choices, or consistently poor treatment of one friend to another.
You’ll notice that all these suggestions are based around internal conflict, as opposed to external. External conflicts can certainly break fractured friendships, but strong friendships can usually endure most misfortune that befalls them. So if you want to destroy the friendship entirely, plant the seeds early and let it germinate throughout the story until that moment in act two when things come apart.
But the bottom line here, think about your plot separately, and allow existing conflict in your plot to guide your brainstorming.
