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.
(No worries, I tend to only open my reply box every 2 ~ 7 days)
Oh yeah, I can see the potential in it. There’s always the “we forgot the reasons for why we fight” that can lead to a big reveal. Closest thing that pops into my head is a shorter anime series called Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet.
It starts out with le epic space battle between humans in giant fighting robots against space crustaceans. The battles goes poorly for the humans and one of the soldiers gets separated from the rest of the fighting force when they retreat, crash lands on a planet with humans living on big boats (if you’ve ever seen the movie Water World, that sets the scene pretty well). Then its just a story about a young man who is kinda weird as he’s been nothing but a soldier from the moment he was born becoming more socialized and slowly revealing the backstory of the cause of the war between the humans and the space crustaceans.