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.
To piggyback on your first point: when the hero witnesses the evil bad guy do something personal to them and they still refuse to kill them and then the bad guy tries to stab them in the back and dies by mishap.
Example: bad guy just triggered the Innocence Bomb and blew up seventy orphanages of kids with cockney accents. He then stabs the loveable side kick/mentor. Hero screams in slow motion. Cradles their dying friend. Swears vengeance. Hero fights the bad guy. Epic swords and guns. Gains the upper hand. Has a knife to the throat, a gun to the head, and is standing on both of the bad guy’s balls. Hero says “this isn’t what Comedic Uncle Mentor would have wanted me to do.” Hero lets the bad guy live. Hero turns around. Bad guy leaps up with a poisoned Doom Blade of Death, the same one he used to kill the hero’s godparents in the flashback or intro! Bad guy slips on a skateboard and falls backwards over a rail into the giant magma-acid pit-reactor.
I hate that shit.
I honestly think that is part of a general psy op to discourage the poors from getting revenge on thr people that have wronged them as capitalism is based on wronging the poors. Pretty much every society had Norms around not harming your social superiors. We just try to hide it so it feels weird.
That can be expanded to any “the hero nobly denies doing something ‘unethical’ to get what they want/decides to sacrifice their own desires for the sake of someone else, only for reality itself to turn around and reward them with exactly what they wanted/were going to sacrifice as a special good boy treat for doing the right thing” situation, I think.
A lot of YA fiction seems to take that route. Then the kids who read it grow up and turn into adults who cry about the unfairness of Marie Antoinette getting owned.
One of the reasons i liked Enders Game as a weird outsider kid was that Ender, the weird outsider kid, just straight up killed his bullies and then they never bullied him again and I thought that was a very sensible way to handle matters compared to the saccharine bullshit in the other kids books i was reading.
