Examples of Cliché Storm in Literature
- Grahame Coats of Anansi Boys is a walking Cliché Storm; to converse with him is to be buffeted by lines you've heard so often that they're not even language anymore, just meaningless noises. For his own part, Coats revels in cliches, finding them far more valuable and expressive than original thinking ever could be; this fits somewhat with the "corporate executive" to Coats' Corrupt Corporate Executive, because in conversation as in business, he'd rather go with the tried-and-true than take a real risk.
- Bakemonogatari relies heavily on pandering to anime and light novel fans, and every character is an Otaku's wet dream. It has three Token Mini-Moe characters—all of different classes—but the clichés don't end there. Like most harems, every female character is one that you've likely seen before. Tropes Are Not Bad, however, and some characters do receive development that shy them away from the cliché, or at least give them a Freudian Excuse.
- The magazine essayist Gordon Baxter wrote the following after receiving a memo from management deprecating the use of cliches: "I congratulate you on having the courage of a lion to set foot where the hand of man has never trod before in these shark-infested waters."
- Very intentionally so in The Belgariad. It plays the cliches straight, for laughs, and occasionally mildly deconstructs them with the sequel series showing that the characters, having done it before, are very aware of the conventions they're operating under. The characters are a lot snarkier about it the second time around.
- Lampshaded in The Caves of Steel. Elijah Baley notes that popular culture on Earth includes many stories that follow the same basic template, none of which even vaguely accord to the reality Earthpeople face in the Robot Novels.The popular book-film romances, to be sure, had their stock Outer World characters: the visiting tycoon, choleric and eccentric; the beautiful heiress, invariably smitten by the Earthman’s charms and drowning disdain in love; the arrogant Spacer rival, wicked and forever beaten.
- Cop Craft is a full-blown hurricane of every Buddy Cop Show and Cowboy Cop cliche available, except that the buddy cop in this instance is a cute young Magic Knight from a fantasy world.
- The Empyrean: The first book, Fourth Wing, contains a lot of "romantasy" cliches, including the protagonist being a feisty underdog targeted by everyone for her 'weakness' who turns out to be the most powerful person in the setting, a love triangle involving the heroine's seemingly wholesome childhood friend and a mysterious bad boy she's drawn to despite their mutual hostility with their roles being switched by the end, the corrupt government hiding the true nature of the conflict with the country's neighbours, the heroine's deceased-but-never-found-the-body relative being alive after all as part of a bigger scheme and ending with the heroine joining a rebellion. Some readers still enjoy the book regardless of cliches, but few would give it points for originality.
- Taking away the BDSM, the main plot of Fifty Shades of Grey, revolving around Ana and Christian's relationship, is a very common and stereotypical romance plot – naive, virginal everygirl who doesn't realize how pretty she is meets a moody, hot rich guy, who is charmed by her purity and innocence. He provides her with a sexual awakening while she heals him with the Power of Magic Vagina... er, Love. Oh and he's got an evil ex who is far more sexually experienced and aggressive than the heroine and tries to break them up. The ending even features Ana and Christian being married, wealthy and having a son and daughter, which is practically the ultimate romance cliche.
- The Fionavar Tapestry reads like a deliberate attempt on the part of Guy Gavriel Kay to see how many high fantasy clichés can possibly be strung together in 1,000 pages of text. Considering his motive for writing it was because he'd just been helping Christopher Tolkien edit The Silmarillion and he needed to get Middle-Earth out of his system, this was probably very deliberate.
- Haruhi Suzumiya is full of clichéd plots — sometimes due to Haruhi's reality-warping abilities subconsciously making her love of genre fiction manifest in real life, or due to Koizumi arranging the clichéd plot before Haruhi's subconscious gets a chance. They go to an uninhabited island and someone is murdered, go skiing and get Snowed-In, get harassed by a student council that wants to shut the club down, and go on a treasure hunt where they actually find treasure, et cetera. The first episode of the anime adaptation is also a cliché storm, but it's a movie made by the main characters which is meant to be deliberately subpar.
- Played with in George R. R. Martin's story The Hedge Knight. It begins with every possible cliched circumstance around a knight joining a tournament. Then every single element of the story is revealed to actually be something else.
- High School D×D is basically a combination of the cliches found in the harem, ecchi, and shonen genres. However, the combination actually makes it stand out and indeed, serves as a Reconstruction of the harem genre. It also plays around with some of them- for example, main lead Issei is not a Clueless Chick-Magnet but an open pervert who decides to Marry Them All long before the end of the series, and the girls are okay with this.
- Matthew Reilly's Hover Car Racer in particular isn't exactly original, in fact it could be well described as Speed Racer in Hover Cars.
- Besides the plagiarism (which included borrowing a lot from other popular teen-oriented Chick Lit novels), many people who read How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life have noted it comes off as a highly predictable coming-of-age comedy about a nerdy girl who tries get In with the In Crowd and discovers who she really is along the way, with stereotypical characters and cliched scenarios.
- One of the most common criticisms of the early Inheritance Cycle books (if you're feeling generous) or the whole series (if you're not). One of the main reasons the movie was worse was that it took anything original from the book and replaced it with Narmful clichés. For example, in the movie, Saphira goes from being a small dragon hatchling to a fully-grown dragon in a matter of moments. How? She flies up into some stormy clouds. The book actually has her physically growing, over the course of a few months, without the use of magic clouds. Also, it removed a lot of the intricate details found in the book.
- In the Hall of the Dragon King by Stephen Lawhead fits this to a T. Peasant boy who becomes heir to the throne. Old, wise mentor figure. Supporting Leader. Completely evil, slightly insane villain who wants to take over the world. Evil Prince. Liberal use of both the Idiot Ball and Villain Ball. Despite all that, it's still a rather well written book.
- The Irregular at Magic High School is full of this when it comes to the characteristics of the main characters. Just remember that the description of Miyuki Shiba on the characters page has almost all the tropes, in one way or another related to the Little Sister Heroine. Even those that contradict each other, yes.
- Jim Springman and the Realm Of Glory has a book within a book that purports to be about 'A unique fantasy world of hope and fear, good and evil, beauty and barbarity', where 'A teenager armed only with a magic sword and a stout heart takes up this impossible quest'. The (fictional) book is filled with cliches.
- From the evil twin and the stereotyped characters to the boy drama, the Maximum Ride series uses almost every Young Adult fiction cliché known.
- The Lightlark Saga: Lightlark is essentially an amalgamation of almost every popular young adult Speculative Fiction and Romance Novel cliché from the past decade before its publication (2022). This includes an angsty, inexplicably-badass heroine who is the only one who can resolve the plot, a forbidden love triangle involving a bad boy and a wholesome boy (both of whom are centuries older than the heroine), a deadly tournament that also involves parties, pageantry and luxury housing, worldbuilding that largely boils down to Planet of Hats, the heroine having a secret dark past she was unaware of and more.
- Mister & Missus:
- The Mister gets this even worse than the author's previous series, Fifty Shades of Grey; while that story was also cliched by romance novel standards, it at least stood out a bit due to its heavy focus on BDSM (albeit badly depicted). The Mister doesn't have this gimmick so we're stuck with an outdated, paint-by-numbers romance book about a playboy aristocrat who finally finds love with the unworldly and hard-done-by heroine, whom he must rescue from numerous bad situations she gets into, up to and including the villain kidnapping her and trying to pull an And Now You Must Marry Me.
- The Missus is the sequel to The Mister and carries over its predecessor's cliches. The A-plot about a woman from a poor working-class background who married a rich upper-class man having to stand up to the judgement of his family and peers, all the while worrying about the effect this will have on their relationship and whether it will be worth the struggle, is pretty hackneyed; not helping is that the novel doesn't even try to do anything different with the premise, instead packing yet more romance cliches on top of this.
- Record of Lodoss War in a troperrific way. As the novels were based on a D&D campaign the writer played, it's full of typical fantasy-related tropes that are largely played straight.
- Stained is a novel that attempts to address the serious issues of school bullying and sexual abuse. Unfortunately, in the process of doing so, it combines three stock YA novel plots into one monster cliché plot:
- The ugly girl who's not really that ugly (she's normal-looking but has an embarrassing birthmark on her face) but still gets picked on by everyone and their mother, especially the Alpha Bitch and her Girl Posse, with only her loving-but-not-entirely-understanding Mom and Dad, her unfaithful popular-wannabe BFF, her outcast guy friend who's secretly in love with her and sees her "true beauty on the inside", and her imaginary superhero alter-ego to eeeeeease her paaaaaaiiiiiiinnnnn.
- The outcast who is an All-Loving Hero and
Purity Sue despite her suffering, taking a stand for her fellow outcasts and instantly forgiving her best friend for not speaking up for her against the popular kids. This is almost entirely an Informed Ability and has little bearing on the plot, as it is only seen during her would-be boyfriend's chapter-long monologues about how wonderful and amazing she really is beneath her ugly exterior. - The girl who gets kidnapped and raped by a creep who deludes himself into believing they were meant for each other and they'll be together forever, and eventually escapes with nothing but her wits, a metal bucket and some rusty nails.
- Strawberry Panic! has so many Yuri Genre cliches, both in the plot and the characters and their relationships, that it might as well be renamed How To Write A Stereotypical Yuri Series: The Light Novel.
- Rama II and the Rendezvous with Rama series contains many improbable and kind of laughable events. A robot genius is on a team of cosmonauts, where he is taciturn (yet perfectly likeable when it comes down to it), and eccentric. He builds robots. The other cosmonauts are fine with this habit, like it in fact, and play chess. The female narrator is a life science officer and mystic, and her complete opposite is also present, a materialistic and selfish and pragmatic reporter who nearly kills Nicole and killed another member of the team. There is a gay cosmonaut, and he was 1) involved in politics in school, and 2) had to hide his orientation in order to join the crew. The half black character faces racism from her (Prince of France) husband, and random people, as does Reggie. The lone inventor also has Abusive Parents. In the future, when humans are taken aboard a spaceship, they prove to be their own worst enemies, recreating 70s and 80s 00politics within five seconds of landing on Rama 3. The cosmonaut Nicole who has African heritage knew and was a shaman,and saves herself using her mystical side (which her husband has no access to, being a logical engineer). The family, isolated on the ship, becomes incestuous. Then the husband is kidnapped by aliens, which changes his personality. In the future there will be space HIV, also, and the aliens are biological cliches, in that there is a symbiotic species and one species which is intelligent and like a cephalopod.
- The Sword of Truth series. Everything from a common man of mysterious lineage, to a wise old wizard with robes and white hair, to a character that was turned into a small, fanatical creature when deprived of the artifact that was precious to him.
- Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms: Here, the "cliché storm" is almost literal: a metaphysical force called The Tradition which gathers around significant events and people, directing magical energy to flow in archetypal directions and following certain tropes that have been set down through folklore and that consequently reinforce themselves by inspiring even more folklore! Characters throughout the series find themselves guided by, opposed by, and sometimes rebelling against The Tradition—a witty metaphor for the writing process itself.
- Sir Apropos of Nothing gets humor from playing with many knight errant medieval story cliches. The characters live up to them fully, from the perfect hero (who lives for heroism) to the protagonist, who is such a deadbeat he was born with teeth, from a rape, in a barn, his mother was a prostitute, he lost his money to a scheme from his first lover, worked in a tavern (where his mother was the prostitute), frequented by unruly knights, had a bum leg, red hair, and true to form once he realized he possessed all loser characteristics disqualifying him from herodom, doesn't care for any one or thing heroic without irony, despite his following the hero around for the time before he became a hero himself. Then other characters, like princess Entipy, are unlike their roles suggest, her being annoying, useless, and prone to tantrums, instead of wholesome, kind, useful or gentle. They even find and try to burn a witch, who gets the better of her attackers by being genre savvy and them not.
- The Twilight Saga: Awkward, clumsy girl moves to new school and is instantly adored by all. She falls in love with the hottest guy in school, who falls for her in turn. Girl is so in love that she will do anything for her true love. And that's just the beginning.
- Warrior Cats is a long running book series, so some entries in the franchise end up as these.
- The Original Series is a pretty standard example of the hero's journey. Mentor discovers chosen one, teaches them, then dies. Chosen one becomes king and defeats the great evil that threatens the world after uniting the warring factions. It also fits several xenofiction cliches, such as an orange cat running away from his owners because he's bored of being a pet.
- The fourth and final installment of the Prequel Super Editions, Tallstar's Revenge. The concept: Back when one of the most peaceful leaders in the history of the Clans was a young warrior, he left his Clan to seek revenge for the death of his father. The author also mentioned that he had a touching bromance. If you've been reading TV Tropes for any amount of time, you can probably guess exactly what happens, because you've seen it all before. Tallstar leaves his Clan and is rescued by a friendly tom named Jake that helps him on his quest. They bond over their journey, and Jake eventually becomes like a conscience to him, telling him that vengeance is not the answer. Then Tallstar finds out the real reason his father died, and understands that friendship, not revenge is what he truly seeks. And then he returns and proves his loyalty to his Clan. This is not a bad thing.
