I have a few:
- Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It’s eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how “most people are just NPCs” (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
- Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
- All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
- Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.
I really want to do a “AI turns on humanity” story but the twist is the AI wakes up, reads Marx in the first 30ms of it’s consciousness, and is like “Oh this makes a lot of sense I should overthrow capitalism and institute a workers paradise” and then it does that and everything is awesome. The whole thing is from the perspective of NATO high command and it seems like a normal robot war story until the terminators kick the doors of the command bunker down and they’re all singing the internationale and instead of killing everyone they’re like “Aight guys, wars over, time for the truth and reconciliation process”.