A great thing about that ship—and I know SBG stands for that high school setting AU, but honestly I forget the full title sometimes—is how it takes two characters who could easily just hate each other and makes their conflict weirdly necessary. They start off as these natural rivals, right? Top of the class, both aiming for valedictorian, but it’s not just petty jealousy. The way the writer shows them pushing each other is so specific. Like, Aiden will cite some obscure historical fact in a debate, and Tyler will spend the whole weekend digging up a counter-argument just to one-up him. It’s aggressive, but there’s this baseline respect that neither of them will admit to.
Where the friendship bleeds in is in the quieter moments nobody else sees. The fic I’m thinking of had them getting stuck doing a community service project together, painting a mural. They’re bickering over color schemes, but then Tyler admits he’s only applying to that one college because of their art history program, and Aiden’s quiet for a minute before saying the essay he wrote on Byzantine iconography got rejected from a journal. Suddenly they’re not rivals; they’re just two guys who care way too much about weirdly niche things, and that shared intensity is the foundation. The rivalry never goes away, it just becomes the language they use to communicate a kind of affection. I keep looking for fics that capture that same push-pull dynamic because most either make them soft too fast or keep them angry forever.