worldbuilding

Basing a fantasy culture off of a real-life culture. Or even worse, basing a fantasy race off of a real-life culture - that's just dehumanization. It's very common, it's very problematic, and it's a remnant of racist 20th century fantasy. The Forgotten Realms has to be destroyed, sorry. Genshin Impact as well.

If you're going to be using a real-life culture, you need to seriously know your stuff and have respect for the culture you're writing about (this is why Liyue is good and Sumeru is racist trash, for instance). I'd say to most people that if you want to use someone else's culture cause it's cool, consider worldbuilding something unique instead and save us all a headache.

I hate seeing things like, "the royal court: words are sharper than daggers here and you must be more alert than on any battlefield." I like political intrigue, so I get it. But I'm 90% certain most aristocracy was people with seven toes on each foot from decades of inbreeding going to court to decide which son was going to marry their 13 year old first cousin.

I'd like to see it subverted from a left wing perspective.

I don't ever need to read another story where the protagonist is seemingly of humble origins but is secretly a VERY SPECIAL person, perhaps even the one FORETOLD BY PROPHECY

If it wasn't a compelling basis for a story, it wouldn't be used so much. But after the first thousand stories like that it's enough already

Just stay the hell away from time travel. It can be neat and thought provoking when done with enough thought put into it as a central conceit, but more often it's just a narrative ass-pull that causes more problems than it solves.

One of the most ruinously widespread propaganda messages is "changing society somewhat is hard and the people that try may have a point but go too far therefore trust in the status quo warriors to set things as good as they can be."

It's in capeshit of course, but it's also pretty much everywhere else, including P R E S T I G E T V trash, showing anyone that isn't a cynical murderfucker as a fool, or worse.

i'm pretty much done with any story about restoring the "correct" monarchy. be a bunch of communes with a defense pact or something like damn

There are two classes of tropes for me: the ones which serve as actual building blocks of worldbuilding and storytelling, and the ones which are cultural biases.

The former are just the usual patterns retold throughout history, like the hero's journey. They can seem boring, but it's because they are generic and need to be localized to the fictional world or a culture's mythology. Arguably, the way we identify these involves bias, eg. the hero's journey is mostly based on Indo-European mythology. But I hope my point can still be made.

The latter category are the tropes informed by biases. Or to put it another way, when you can create any possible world or write whatever story, why is it just medieval Anglo shit over and over? Ever notice how most fantasy maps are left-justified? Even hard worldbuilders who do all that meteorological calculation shit can't perceive a linguistic reality beyond the European sprachbund.

It's like learning the etymology of a word. Sometimes you find out the way we use words today is very weird, and we shouldn't assume it applies across all time and traditions ("man" used to be gender neutral, for example). Except some core words eg. "to be," "to go," "to come" are relatively very stable.