Once Original Now Common / Fan Works

• The Abridged Series phenomenon. When LittleKuriboh debuted Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, the format of re-editing a series into mini-episodes and the style of quirky, self-referential parody was original and amusing, and while Gag Dubs were certainly nothing new, YGOTAS massively popularized them. Nowadays, there are so many imitators that neither the format nor the humor seem innovative anymore, though this mainly goes for the older episodes, as LittleKuriboh has improved his craft since then.
• Even then, the Gag Dub and Affectionate Parody of many popular series was already a VERY old trope by the time LittleKuriboh started recording his voice over everything. With the advent (and subsequent popularization) of The Abridged Series, old Adobe Flash movies like "Dragon Ball Z in a Nutshell" and "A Mile a Minute Star Wars" (both considered quite popular and humorous, which use many of the tropes that The Abridged Series now use) now seem like imitators...of poorly done abridged series.
• Ever since its early years, Doom gained a wide modding community which is thriving to this very day. However, older mods which were acclaimed back in the day may seem downright primitive by today's standards, in part due to evolving mapper skill and programming software in general. Switch-hunting in particular, which was present in many older WADs, used to be innovative back in its heyday, but has since been considered more harmful than beneficial for level designing, especially if there's a notable lack of direction towards where or how to solve such puzzles.
  • The introduction of increasingly user-friendly level editors further made it a lot easier to add fine detailing to the otherwise barren rooms, while source ports added support for even more modern features, including custom weapons/monsters and level design quirks, such as bridges you can walk on and under and sloped surfaces, among others; to say nothing of ACS-scripting carried over straight from Hexen.
  • Speaking of user-made materials, as custom maps and map packs get more recent and advanced, it has become rarer to find ones that don't make use of at least a couple custom textures or soundtracks, to the point that nowadays a mod using nothing but the default textures or music is likely to be considered vanilla-oriented, with ways to play around with classic textures and/or emulating the standard Doom gameplay style usually being its primary gimmick.
• The first season of Dragon Ball Z Abridged is this. By 2008 standards, the production values were very good, the voice acting high quality, and the jokes often genuinely witty. But as time went by and the show continued to improve, the production now seems basic in comparison (as pointed out on TFS's 10th anniversary stream, Krillin being edited out of a shot was considered a mindblowing edit, but is incredibly simple in comparison to what the show does now), the voice acting suffers from poor audio quality and lacking future Vocal Evolution, and the humor is extremely hit or miss, with many jokes that are either groanworthy or downright offensive. It got to the point that TFS discussed remaking the entire season before they retired from abridging entirely.
• Evangelion: ReDeath, being the Ur-Example of abridged series, was hit particularly hard by this trope. When it was first released in early 2000, it was quite the phenomenon, being regularly played at anime conventions and spawning numerous memes. Now, its writing and voice acting are considered to be quite dry compared to the works of Team Four Star (the only group whose works still maintain the level of popularity that ReDeath had), and many modern viewers find it hard to believe how big of a phenomenon this 30-minute short film was over a decade ago.
• This is a notable problem with many old Redwall fics, particularly The Urthblood Saga, that deals with the theme of "noble vermin". When these fics where written back in the late 90s/early 2000s, the concept of including good foxes, rats and weasels in a story based on a series that is so strictly black-and-white was fresh and challenging. Nowadays however, it's rare to find a fic that doesn't include it, or that plays the Always Chaotic Evil mantra from the official books straight.
• A vast majority of Ranma ½ fanfics written after 1998 or so were built almost entirely upon Fanon established in earlier works by notable authors; the absolute worst case of this being the Flanderization of Akane into a brutally violent, abusive raging Jerkass with a hair trigger and no rationality whatsoever, which became popularized by the very dark The Bitter End, a story which painted a darker picture of the Ranmaverse and reconstructed this harsh portrayal in the process. After TBE, "psychotic Akane" became one of the biggest cliches in Ranma fanfiction.
• The early Total Drama fanfic, Total Drama Comeback popularized extensive reinterpretation of Ezekiel and pairings with no relation to canon, such as Katie/Noah. These elements have since become standard fare in Total Drama fanfics featuring contestants from the canon rosters.
• Harry Potter has inspired one of the most prolific fanfic communities ever. As a result, tons of clichés have formed over the years.
  • The Draco Trilogy is a classic example of this trope in action. A modern reader who is overly familiar with the concept (and often poor implementation) of Draco in Leather Pants stories, both within and outside of the Harry Potter fandom, may well find this story's concept relatively unoriginal.
  • My Immortal is known as possibly the Ur-Example of a Troll Fic. Back in 2006, it quickly gained notoriety for its seemingly intentional grammatical errors in every sentence of every paragraph of every chapter, its extremely Mary Sue-ish main lead Ebony “Enoby” Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way, deliberate defilement of established Harry Potter Canon, and the staggering amount of Author Appeal by including 2000s bands like Evanescence and My Chemical Romance in a book series which is supposed to take place in the 90s. At one point, it was the most viewed fanfic on Fanfiction.net. Naturally, it spawned a truck-load of imitators in other fandoms, all of which used the same tropes, parody topics, and instances of Stylistic Suck to death.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has numerous fanfics written early in the life of the fandom that were well-known and popular for being the first to utilize certain ideas, and now come across as rather unnotable in light of everything produced since then:
  • Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles) was the first major MLP Dark Fic with copious amounts of Gorn, and was generally considered the most disturbing thing in the fandom when it came out. Ever since then, there have been an awful lot of grimdark imitators that make Cupcakes look mundane in comparison (Example: Sweet Apple Massacre) and now some people don't find it as scary.
  • Fallout: Equestria was the first epic-scale, actionized, Door Stopper fanfic to gain real popularity in the fandom and easily one of the most famous Friendship is Magic fanfics out there. It has fan art, fan music, there are fan games being made for it including Fallout 3 mods, and it has inspired dozens of spin-off fics. Had it been written after the first few seasons, it would have simply been one among many other similar stories. According to an Equestria Daily mod, Fallout Equestria simply came out at the right time, when there weren't very many quality control restrictions on fics, to the point where it never would have passed moderation if submitted later.
• A Trekkie's Tale. Being the source of the term Mary Sue, people who seek the story out may be disappointed to find that it's extremely short and quite a basic parody. It was written in the early '70s, when even the idea of modern fanfic itself was in its infancy—the concept of a fanfic parodying other fanfics was unimaginably novel. The fact that it was parodying the very things that make up Mary Sue characters, which were already becoming common in Star Trek fanfiction at the time, adds to this. Additionally, the concept of a Mary Sue has changed a lot since the seventies—accusations of Canon Sue are far more common in traditional heroes and even of older works in The New '10s than they were in the seventies and eighties.
• There are whole rafts of Battlestar Galactica/Stargate SG-1 fics out there in which the Colonials are all portrayed as religious fanatic nutjobs who are offended...OFFENDED, I tell you...that the people of Earth don't immediately throw away their false religions and their stupid ideas of freedom and democracy and join with their ancestral brothers in the worship of the Gods of Kobol and step in line with the military dictatorship that runs the 12 Colonies. It all stems back to one particular story that has since been endlessly copied, in which the Colonials are religious but not quite that level of fanatic.
• Peter Chimaera in general. Since his debut, many tried to copy his signature style (mostly inspired by the Digimon trilogy and DOOM: Repercussions of Evil), making him seem unoriginal.
• The works created by Europa22, a writer for The Hunger Games, were once lauded for creating revolutionary submit-your-own character-stories with great depth and world-building. Now, the characters she submitted are beginning to show their age and seen as cliches (a girl who volunteers to escape an arranged marriage, an assassin, a career woman who falls in love in the arena, a more homophobic background, a pregnant girl, a pickpocket, outer district careers, etc).
• In the Digimon Adventure 02 fandom, there are stories in which Davis overhears his friends insulting him, driving him to leave them for some time and go on his own adventure. The first story of this kind was "Walkabout" from the early 2000s, but it worked specifically because, as the author pointed out, most stories of the time either bashed Davis or only made him a hero by having him die a valiant death. As time went on, the fandom began treating Davis more fairly, making the initial story seem unremarkable because the attitudes it was fighting no longer existed.
• The Legend of Spyro: A New Dawn is often credited as the first major adventure fic of the Spyro the Dragon franchise, be it classic, legend, or otherwise. When it was posted, it was often considered one of the best fics in the archive, trying a lot of things that have never been done before in the fandom. However, in this day and age where "post-DotD template" fics are so common to the point of being majorly panned by members of the fandom, A New Dawn doesn't seem even remotely groundbreaking.
• Happy Tree Friends: Specific fanfic-related trends suffer from being considering interesting or revolutionary at the time, but boring or overdone now. Of note are the fan character Ale and more elaborate takes on stories involving this show:
  • Ale, first and foremost, was a fan character so popular that fans tended to mistake her for a canon character. But then more fan characters with her basic template show up (often a female who wore a military outfit or at least more complex-looking outfits even compared to the fully-clothed canon characters, could flip out like Flippy, and were often made as a Self-Insert to be with Flippy), and the term "Flippy-sue" was coined as a protest against this practice^note her creator later considered her work an Old Shame and no longer allowed anyone to involve Ale in their HTF fanworks.
  • Back then, jumping on the hate bandwagon regarding "Flippy-sue"s was considered a "true fan" thing to do. But consider that the Flippy-sue trend won't die anytime soon. Eventually, even other fans have become sick of Flippy-sue haters as much as or even more so than the fans that made said characters. In their defense, hating on something that's already inevitable in a fandom is pretty much pointless. Expect "Fandom Nazi" argument when it comes to this.
  • Elaborate stories involving HTF. Back then, this was a popular way of expanding the show in fanworks (the now-retired zolrac3005's works are a good example, which incorporated the elaborate stories with his near-show-perfect Flash animations). It also helped that the show has a very loose continuity, allowing fans to have their freedom in developing their own HTF stories with their own OCs at the center. But Cliché Storm after Cliché Storm and a flood of poorly-made fan characters occurred, causing fans to complain that said stories made the show look In Name Only. Nowadays, the hatred of complex HTF stories has died down thanks to these types of stories being less prevalent, but it's rare for them to get any sort of praise, even the ones that involve exclusively the canon cast.
• Fanfictions of Neon Genesis Evangelion in which Shinji is a badass upon arriving to Tokyo-3 (Nobody Dies, Shinji And Warhammer 40 K, to name a few) have fallen out of favor in recent years due to over-saturation, as well as creator apathy later on, and many rebuttals to this trend try to make people realize how such fics miss the point of Evangelion as a story.
• Naruto:
  • Team 8 was one of the first Naruto Dark Fics of its kind, right when the English fandom was at its largest, and grew into possibly the most popular Naruto fanfic around. Some of the Fanon used in the fic is dated, and many ideas that the fic helped popularize (Naruto being on a team with Hinata, the Hyuuga being awful in general, Naruto getting a less "gawdy" outfit, etc.) have become very commonplace.
  • A few years after the debut of Dreaming of Sunshine, newcomers to this story came to criticise it for several overdone story elements of the Naruto Self-Insert fic: reincarnation-into-twin-of-canon-character, replacing Sakura on Team 7, not acting to more drastically change the timeline, first-person POV, etc. Fact is, Dreaming of Sunshine itself was the pioneer for these story elements, with most other stories playing Follow the Leader; while not the first story to use at least some of the elements, it was the first story to actually put them all together, and other stories with greater differences from canon are simply further evolution of the formula (leaving DOS newcomers to be spoiled for more original plotlines in the genre).
• When written in 2001 Immortality Syndrome was a jarring fic for being so dark and violent despite being based on a cute show like The Powerpuff Girls. In the years since, it's been surpassed by other far more violent fics, such as Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles). If anything, the cuter a series is, the more likely it is to spawn Dark Fics written for the sole purpose of being edgy.
• Discussed In-Universe in one chapter of the FTL: Faster Than Light fic Ghosts of the Federation. One crewmember states that he finds a certain mantis film to be cliché and hackneyed, to which the mantis crewwoman replies that it was the Trope Codifier for the whole genre.
• In-Universe, in Chapter 31 of Origin Story, Carol Danvers calls a Kryptonian superhero "presumptuous and arrogant" for using the word "super" in their hero name, as if they were the first superhero to ever walk the earth.
• Queen of All Oni was one of the first major Jackie Chan Adventures fics to run with the reemergence of Jade's Superpowered Evil Side, the Queen of the Shadowkhan, as its main premise. It proved incredibly popular and quickly spawned numerous other fics with the same concept, to the point that some reviewers of later chapters dismissed it as just being another Cliché Storm without realizing that it came first.

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