Amenable List of Banned Clichés
(Unless you positively nail it)
- Skaters
- Misunderstood edgy characters
- Bleeding heart overly sad characters
- Retconning
- “It was only a dream.”
- Perfect fighters
- Everything must end in romance
- Dark and stormy nights
- Villainous parents
- The Chosen One
- Gods who cannot defeat non-God related villains
- Plot armor
- (parenthetical rants)
- Misunderstood fighters/heroes/musicians who instantly have a huge fan base
- Immediate love, platonic or otherwise
- Immediately good at everything characters
- Overly large rarely words used in a narrative (when there’s a common, smaller alternative)
- Blood fucking everywhere
- Deus ex machina
- Mary Sues in general
- Characters in horror stories lack common sense
- Gasoline explodes if you so much as think of fire
- The good guy can do no wrong
- The bad guy can do no good
- Censoring curse words
- Amnesia
- Too much TLC
- Characters who have suffered over the top abuse from friends, family, guardians, etc.
- *using asterisks to denote an action like we're role playing*
- Amnesia
- A character is dead and gone permanently as decided by the story, only to come back through some unforseen loop hole three episodes later (I'm looking at you, Dragonball)
- The bad guy is bad because he's bad.
- The good guy is good because we're supposed to root for him.
- Amnesia
- The Happy Ending Override (see 90% of sequels)
- Alarm clock wake-ups
- “Screw our orders! Those are our men out there!”
- Self sacrifice, doubly so when it is the thing that destroys plot armor
- Good guy and bad guy team up to stop a mutual threat cliché
- Rehashing
- Fourth wall breaking
- Opposites attract cliché
- Bad guy too powerful. Time for weakness ex machina.
- Anything shiny
- You make an original character for a fan fiction who is a rare breed of animal/warrior/marsupial because reasons
- ”So my friends and I were...”
- Kiss of Death cliché (characters kiss, at least one perishes shortly thereafter)
- Romance ex machina
If I can figure out how to quickly find my blog then I will add more to this with time. Do you have anything I can add?
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