Tropes I Won’t Write

(All tropes available for review on TVTropes.org; warning for existential-level time sink threat.)

1. Crowning Moment of Awesome. Screw that noise. I’m like 90% sure this is rooted in a deep insecurity on the part of authors, being afraid of achieving something.
2. Fridged women. Ditto. Find real motivations for your heroes.
3. Rape as “spice”. GRrrrr. (I cannot 100% rule out rape happening in my books, because like murder it’s still something that needs to be written about and thought about, but never in a trivial fashion.)
4. The joke is, they’re gay!
5. The joke is, they’re nerds!
6. The joke is, they’re ____!
7. Ye moldy Noble Savage, and its modern relatives Magical Negro and Magical Native American. Hopefully these are self-explanatory.
8. Causality loops, except when they are the plot. (Non-causal-breaking time travel, however, will definitely happen.) I also detest Stable Time Loops, because of the creeping inevitability problem. (“Well, I guess we’ll just *choose* to do precisely the thing that makes this puzzle interlock!”)
9. Single-biome planets, and its relatives Injun Country, Eskimo Land, Planet of Hats, etc., etc. (Except as intentionally-created or curated places, like Rabbit Island in the sea of Japan…)
10. The dual of racist environments, veiled racism as: Fantastic Racism, Space Jews, etc.

Call me on it if you see me doing a one of these. Sometimes the cultural programming we’re all subject to infects what I end up writing.