This is a general list of things that I do, not really attached to any individual story.
Keeping:
Combat plays major role- half the fun for me is designing new martial arts and choreography. Plus violence is one of the worlds oldest and greatest problem solvers, it's rather hard to keep it out of a story given how prominent it is in reality in various forms. I usually find stories without at least some fighting boring. Although knowing me I'll branch out later just for practice.
Most if not all major characters are conventionally attractive- partly as per above, It's rather hard to have someone be physically capable of being a fighter while not turning out attractive, beauty is basically just how physically fit you look so yeah. There's a few niche cases where this doesn't apply but they typically seem forced. Non fighters or people who don't have physically demanding roles get away with it more, and in some cases it makes more sense for them to not be attractive. Personality reasons, health reasons, etc. It's rare to have a cast made up of only fat, ugly people work but it can be done, Wall-E is one such example.
Happy or at least bittersweet endings- if someone's invested hours, days, or years of their time and emotional energy into something I've made and they come away depressed, I've failed as a creator. People aren't interested in investing so much into something only for it to fail in the end, They could've just done nothing and gotten the same result.
"Workplace" romance- It's pretty hard to imagine that two people, especially a man and a woman, who go through some incredibly long, arduous, high stress, dangerous journey together where they are both helping each other out and saving each other multiple times wouldn't end up as a couple. This depends on many other factors like how long, hard, dangerous, etc this journey was. But the idea that these two would just part ways like nothing happened or just end up being "friends" afterwards is pretty ridiculous. The only time it works is if each person already had a prior romantic partner that is still alive and waiting for them , then yes it makes sense. But otherwise, a single man and single woman are more than likely going to fall in love by the end unless there's some pretty big personality conflicts between them.
Most if not all characters are heterosexual- I could see some niche cases where this wouldn't be the case but I'm not just going to start shoving in random gay characters for no reason. I like creating evolutionary reasons for things and unless I'm going really sci fi or fantasy or specifically writing a story about perceptions of sexual orientation there's really no reason to include gay characters. Their gayness doesn't add anything meaningful to the story. It's just going to be some random background thing, so why even bother?
Sexy armour- Although this would be a little niche, there's absolutely times where this works for men and especially women. Combat is a very complex thing, taking into account a large amount of physical and psychological factors on both sides. I would very much expect an experienced or at least competent female fighter to take full advantage of every asset she has, understanding her own limits, and turning weaknesses into strengths as best she can. Therefore, unless magic, cybernetics, or something else are involved, I'm not going to load up a 5'3" girl with over 75kg of equipment and expect her to do well just to be "Progressive". Likewise, even if it is feasible, I'm not going to force a female character to wear platemail. She'll wear whatever she personally feels comfortable in balanced with practicality. The same as a male character would. People might think it's odd that I'm talking as if the characters are real people who have their own agency but that's just how I do things.
Happy go lucky fighters that love fighting- If someone's going to be a fighter, especially a competent one or one who makes their living off of it, they're going to have to have a certain worldview. One that doesn't place nearly as much weight on staying alive. As a result I expect you'd see a lot more happy go lucky joking fighters who think fighting is fun at higher and higher skill levels, there's just no way to get to that level otherwise. There would certainly be many other personality types at that level too, but all of them would have to share the trait of not valuing their life as much as something else. Or that they define "survival" differently in their minds. I know the Goku personality is considered cliche but realistically it's going to be some goofy asshole like that that's sitting at the top of the leaderboards, not someone who faints at the sight of blood or who sees all life as equal and valuable. Attitude is everything.
Breaking:
Plot conflict comes from people being conveniently incompetent - This is among the dumbest of them all, even a lot of stories heralded as legendary do this (Looking at you, "Alien(s)") and it's the hallmark of a writer that doesn't know what they're doing as far as I'm concerned. So I guess I can't say that I'm breaking it but I certainly try to. Other people may be better judges about whether I've succeeded or not.
Non human characters more or less look human- Although the humanoid form is incredibly adaptable and the type of thing I'd expect other sentient races to have, it doesn't mean it's the only thing. I think it's fun to experiment with many different skeletal structures and traits. I admit I use the humanoid form most of the time because it's just that good, but even within that I try to take care to redesign it to allow for other features. Half the fun is then taking a new design and trying to build a martial art for it. Figuring out the strengths and weaknesses of the anatomy and sensory processes.
Non humans are better than humans- A really dumb trope that I hate. Everything should have strengths and weaknesses based on what it evolved to be good at. Maybe those individual traits make it appear objectively better in environments other than it's native home, but it's all relative. If something's intrinsically better I'm going to expect it to be genetically engineered or built with magic or something. Even then I'd expect some degree of specialisation so who knows.
Morality- Morals don't exist, this is a long established logical fact, to the point that it's its own logical fallacy. No one does things because they're "good" or "bad" people. good and bad are just interpretations made by others based on their own self interest. I never want to write a character that's doing things for such simplistic reasons. Unless of course they eventually find out just how hypocritical and judgemental their reasoning actually is. I suppose if a story is rather short it wouldn't be possible to fully explain the reasoning of every character so it might appear to be a simple good vs evil trope anyways. Still, I try my best to display some reasoning beyond it.
The chosen one- There's literally nothing good about this trope, I don't think there's much else to say about it. I can't imagine a scenario where I'd ever genuinely use it right now. But who knows maybe I'll find some merit in it later.
These are the ones I can think of for the moment.
