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.
  • ssj2marx@lemmy.ml
    ·
    6 days ago

    I really hate "immortality is bad".

    Maybe this says something about me, but I think it would be sick as hell to live forever, or to an arbitrarily large number of years. There's the one Heinlein novel I think about when this topic comes up, where the guy has lived for hundreds of years and done basically everything he can imagine doing, and he's getting ready to end his life just because he's out of new experiences - and I think it might be nice to be that guy, without the "being a libertarian" part. This is why in my in progress sci fi novel it's canon that the oldest humans are just turning two hundred, and nobody knows how old they'll live to be thanks to cutting edge gene therapy and cybernetics.