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.
Honestly I could fuck with a Terminator film where the future war timeline has evolved to the point that it’s Skynet and the resistance cooperating against an evil capitalist AI. Make it kind of spooky because Skynet is on humanity’s side but always encourages everyone to get cyberized in to a cyborg terminator and it’s an open question how much the people who take that oportunity change once they’ve got an integrated link to Skynet’s network. Like the cyborg terminators removedthe baseline humans because they always use wireless and radio to silently talk among themselves, and they use constant flow fans instead of lungs so they don’t breath and whirr very quietly. Like there’s nothing wrong with the cyborgs, they’re still people, but the war is clearly changing humanity in fundamental ways and there’s no going back. Have someone from one of the preceding future war timelines around who remembers when Skynet was the enemy, and have them get drunk and talk about how deeply unsettling it is that we’re merging with “the enemy”, but worse than that, it’s working and people seem to like it. Like the character accepts what happens, but struggles because it upends his whole view of his life and what he was fighting for. Have a scene where he perceives one of the cyborgs as an enemy terminator and has a ptsd episode, and has to leave the room because his instincts are screaming at him to fight.