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We compare two partitions of real bitangents to smooth plane quartics into sets of 4: one coming from the closures of connected components of the avoidance locus and another coming from tropical geometry. When both are defined, we use the Tarski principle for real closed fields in combination with the topology of real plane quartics and the tropical geometry of bitangents and theta characteristics to show that they coincide. 

Abstract Smooth algebraic plane quartics over algebraically closed fields of characteristic different than two have 28 bitangent lines. Their tropical counterparts often have infinitely many bitangents. They are grouped into seven equivalence classes, one for each linear system associated to an effective tropical theta characteristic on the tropical quartic. We show such classes determine tropically convex sets and provide a complete combinatorial classification of such objects into 41 types (up to symmetry). The occurrence of a given class is determined by both the combinatorial type and the metric structure of the input tropical plane quartic. We use this result to provide explicit sign-rules to obtain real lifts for each tropical bitangent class, and confirm that each one has either zero or exactly four real lifts, as previously conjectured by Len and the second author. Furthermore, such real lifts are always totally-real.