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Once Original Now Common / Literature

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  • Conversed in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. The entry for The Sound of Music notes that while the opening scene may seem banal nowadays, that's only because it has been imitated so much.
  • Indicating this trope is at least as old as feudalism, within the first few lines of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales are references to "sweet April showers" and to a character whose beard is "as white as the daisy." Six centuries ago, these were neologisms coined by Chaucer and not clichés.
  • Light Novels set in a Wizarding School (and usually the harem hijinks they feature) were a major critical whipping boy during the first half of The New '10s (and not without reason). Because of such a major backlash, series like A Certain Magical Index and Infinite Stratos look awfully tired today, when they were in fact some of the first to even establish that genre as a cash cow in the first place. Index, while it does love its harem shenanigans, is an action series first and foremost and largely drops the Fanservice when it's time to get serious, and its "school" backdrop is largely window dressing as most non-Filler arcs don't even take place in school. Infinite Stratos, on the other hand, is a largely light-hearted ecchi harem, with the titular Mecha really only used as window dressing, therefore all the Fanservice fits with its tone and doesn't seem out of place. However, due to the Critical Backlash, both have fallen victim to the same "hate on principle" as their predecessors, even though they were the ones that all the others copied in the first place.
    • Maburaho is even worse in that regard—any reader today would see the tired Wizarding School setting, the bland protagonist, and the harem of girls competing for his attention for rather flimsy reasons, assume it to be a product of the early 2010s and tune out quickly, but the novels began publication in 2000 and the anime adaptation first aired in 2003, well before light novels of this genre even became popular. It also has a host of character driven Story Arcs, which is more than can be said of those that follow it.
  • Amadis Of Gaul is the most important knight-errant Chivalric Romance of all time, but today it seems dated, to the point that it has been all but forgotten and replaced in importance by its Deconstruction, Don Quixote (although Amadis of Gaul is saved from the fire for its merits in the chapter where the library of Don Quixote is being burned, indicating that Cervantes himself was aware of this trope to some degree).
    The first that Master Nicholas put into his hand was "The four books of Amadis of Gaul." "This seems a mysterious thing," said the curate, "for, as I have heard say, this was the first book of chivalry printed in Spain, and from this all the others derive their birth and origin; so it seems to me that we ought inexorably to condemn it to the flames as the founder of so vile a sect."
    "Nay, sir," said the barber, "I too, have heard say that this is the best of all the books of this kind that have been written, and so, as something singular in its line, it ought to be pardoned."
    "True," said the curate; "and for that reason let its life be spared for the present. Let us see that other which is next to it."
  • Annie on My Mind. The villains are one-dimensional, the romance develops in a short time (a month or so), and the heroes, Woobies or not, make some stupid decisions. These tend to turn people off the book. They forget that this was one of the first books to portray lesbians in a positive light, without having them turn straight or die.
  • Animorphs, despite having aged much better than other examples of this trope, still does show its age:
  • Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. is seen as a pretty tame book by today's standards, but its frank discussion of puberty and religious issues were controversial in the '70s when it was written, and resulted in it being banned from many schools.
  • The Art of War by Sun Tzu seems like nothing but simple common sense when read today by anyone with an interest in military strategy; however, at its time it most certainly was not. For example, Sun Tzu's claim that spies were just as important to warfare as soldiers and generals was considered highly controversial, especially since it was put alongside a declaration that fortune-tellers and waiting for divine intervention were useless.
  • While Isaac Asimov is still widely respected for his massive influence on the science-fiction genre, his works can seem pretty dated and hokey today—largely because almost every subsequent sci-fi author has made use of the speculative concepts that he helped to popularize. Strangely enough, though, easily the most groundbreaking aspect of his work is also the one that can seem the least remarkable to modern readers: most of his sci-fi works also incorporate elements of other genres (e.g. mystery, comedy, political thriller, romance, etc.). Asimov was one of the first sci-fi authors to argue that sci-fi didn't necessarily need to be a genre unto itself, but could be combined with elements of other genres in order to appeal to a more broad audience. When The Caves of Steel was first published in 1953, the very idea of a whodunnit murder mystery set in the future was practically unheard-of.
  • The Bad Seed chilled readers to the bone back in 1954. Its story of a cute, doll-faced little girl who manipulates her peers and ruins their lives was at the time pretty much unheard of. It was also important in making people realize that parents aren't always to blame for a child's misconduct. With the advent of later novels like 1962's A Clockwork Orange and 1993's The Good Son, modern readers are less likely to be impacted the same way as the 1950s generation was. As psychology has marched on, the novel's implication that "some people are just born evil" has also become highly debatable, and—since this was before the second wave of feminism in the 1960s—its depiction of several mothers as doting housewives has not helped its cause.
  • Beverly Cleary's Henry Huggins and Ramona Quimby series were unusual in several ways:
    • The Ramona series was a spinoff of the Henry Huggins series, being something of a perspective flip: Both series took place in the same neighbourhood and followed the same characters, just that the perspective flipped from Henry and his family to Ramona and her family. The series were both able to stand on their own, and one didn't need to read the other books to understand what was going on (but it sure helped since the characters regularly referred to people and events from each other's respective series). These days, a Spin-Off novel series isn't anything to write home about, but at the time it was an extremely novel idea.
    • The books themselves were intended to be humorous and depict Parents as People. Despite some of the wacky hijinks that ensued, the Ramona series actually had the characters talk about issues young children would face—such as needing to take on responsibilities for housework themselves, moving to a new house, starting at a new school, parents losing jobs, and facing a reality of simply getting older and how things will change. A modern reader who grew up on series such as Diary of a Wimpy Kid might see these books as almost unrealistically tame.
  • Ball Four, a 1970 book by Major League Baseball pitcher Jim Bouton, was so controversial that MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn called the book "detrimental to baseball" and tried unsuccessfully to make Bouton sign a statement saying the book was fictional. Today, its revelations about the behind-the-scenes activities of major league players, which made Bouton extremely unpopular among many in the baseball community for violating the "sanctity of the clubhouse", don't seem nearly as shocking. One particular example is the book's revelation of widespread amphetamine use by major league players, which seems quaint compared to the steroids scandals of recent years.
  • When The Belgariad first came out, Ce'Nedra, the "spoiled brat" who becomes "a little tiger when the chips are down" (to quote the author himself) served as a Spiritual Antithesis to the damsel types that previously littered the high fantasy genre. In the years since, with the advent of high-fantasy works like Circle of Magic and A Song of Ice and Fire that offer a variety of major female characters in various roles, Ce'Nedra's distance from the kind of damsel characters she was intended to parody has shrunk.
  • Carrie, a 1974 novel by Stephen King, is this for the way it depicts religion. For years, many horror stories centered around religion, like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, portrayed God-worshippers as the good guys who fight back heroically against the forces of the Devil. In the case of Carrie, the religious individual, the title character's mother, is a villain, depicted as abusive, delusional, and downright insane. These days, with the growing acceptance of atheism and controversies regarding religious extremism, the character's arc almost seems like an annoying, parodic tract.
    • Carrie was also remarkable in the way it depicted the title character's bullies as psychopathic predators. It was truly shocking and outrageous when it was first published, but in the 21st century, with stories of vicious bullying permeating the headlines and anti-bullying movements in full swing, their behavior becomes less unlikely and eerily reminiscent of reality.
  • J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye started an Angst revolution in literature. Angst has been a part of literature ever since Wuthering Heights, Romeo and Juliet, and even The Iliad (Achilles sitting in his tent and sulking, anyone?), but Salinger presented the topics in such eloquent (and contemporary) language that it struck readers as being more legitimately emotional compared to the dated and hard to read. As a result, those who have read similar-style books before reading Salinger's book often write Catcher off as okay at best, and a poor man's Chuck Palahniuk at worst. The use of a casual, first-person writing style also contributes heavily to making it seem dated, as does the heavy use of slang and turns of phrase that are alien to a modern reader. On top of that, almost everybody admonishes Holden not to swear when the worst thing he says is..."goddamn". This leads to modern readers, who hear far stronger curse words on a daily basis, seeing Holden as more of a Rule-Abiding Rebel when he was, for his time, quite a potty-mouth.
    • This is parodied in the South Park episode "The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs", where the kids are required to read The Catcher in the Rye for school and, after hearing so much about how controversial it was, are disappointed by how tame they find it to be. Cartman even claims the book was a conspiracy to get kids to read by making it seem a lot edgier than it was.
    • You could argue that not only was Salinger groundbreaking, he was also way, way ahead of his time. The sarcastic first-person narrator he pioneered has become so popular in fictional media involving teenagers that people tend to forget it only really took off as recently as The '90s.
  • A Certain Magical Index: Touma's absurdly broken power, seeming inability to lose, and constant moral preaching can quickly get on a reader's nerves, but he was one of the Trope Codifiers for the Stock Light-Novel Hero and in fact, in the modern day where Showy Invincible Heroes are the norm for light novels, looks downright subversive. Both his incredible power and his incredible goodness are given concrete, in-universe explanations and are noticed, pointed out, and played with, which is far more than most light novel heroes in this day and age get.
  • The Chronicles of Narnia nowadays seems like a lot of other books you have probably read in your life: Kids discovering a mysterious pathway to another world, finding their arrival to this strange new world to be predicted in prophecy, meeting some residents who are pleased to see them while meeting others who want them all dead, and later embarking on a large adventure to save the world. Many, many later fantasy novels for kids and even adults follow this format, with Japan even having an entire genre dedicated to it, making it seem less interesting.
  • Conan the Barbarian was a huge influence on fantasy, arguably contributing just as much as The Lord of the Rings. While most people are unfamilair with the stuff written by Robert E Howard and are more familiar with the movie, Howard's works can seem flat out generic or boring by a modern standard due to its slew of imitators and successors.
  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) has fallen victim to this. It was one of the earliest Time Travel novels, and the protagonist's efforts to introduce "modern" technology and values in The Middle Ages was groundbreaking in its own right. However this idea was followed in (among others) Lest Darkness Fall (1941), which was itself influential in the Alternate History genre, Conrad Stargard series, the 1632 series, and Timeline. While The Man Who Came Early (1956) by Poul Anderson served as an influential Deconstruction of the concept, nowadays it's hard to realize what was unique about the original novel.
  • The Count of Monte Cristo is often hailed as one of, if not the greatest revenge stories of all time and remains a classic to this day. However, with the number of stories that have popped up to ape the plot of the novel since then (including many a poorly-written Revenge Fic), it can be hard to see what makes this story so great.
  • Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Their hard-boiled detective fiction broke the mold and introduced just about every trope in the genre, which unfortunately makes their novels come off as cliche and boring to modern readers.
    • The same goes for the inventors of "classic" detective fiction, Arthur Doyle and Agatha Christie in particular. Many of the stories and novels by both are stuffed with clichés and twists that are no longer effective on a modern-day reader due to overexposure.
    • While the works of Conan Doyle may seem extremely dated today, so do the works of the mystery authors that succeeded him—though hugely successful at the time, many of their works are almost unreadable today due to how many of their once-innovative mysteries have been imitated by their successors. And unlike the authors who remain popular today, such as Agatha Christie, their writing wasn't good enough to survive when their plots ceased to be novelties.
    • Once discussed by Isaac Asimov: when he set out to write some mysteries of his own, he soon reached the conclusion that Christie had already used up nearly every twist in existence.
  • The Death Gate Cycle are considered to be some of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's best work. Unfortunately, describing them (A Feudal Future long after nuclear war destroyed it all) today comes off as an almost Avatar level of Cliché Storm.
  • Dennis Wheatley was a British thriller writer who began his career in the 1920s and died in 1977. Many of his otherwise conventional adventure stories contained elements of black magic and Satanism, which (at the time) were considered highly cutting-edge and daring. Many of today's cliches of such fiction were originally invented by him. Since many of his works feature characters astral travelling, it might also be said that modern cyberpunk also stems from his ideas. Today, however, due to the racism, homophobia, sexism, class-consciousness, and Anglocentricity of his ideas, the novels appear quaint at best and extremely offensive at worst.
  • The Discworld novel Equal Rites was originally a subversion of the "witches = bad, wizards = good" trends in fantasy. However, the conventions used have since become so commonplace that today the book just sounds preachy.
    • Terry Pratchett was amused to be told he was "following in the grand tradition of J. K. Rowling", given that he had been writing and published for two decades longer than Rowling.
  • Don Quixote is this to Western literature. The first part of the novel had a Random Events Plot, a Romantic Plot Tumor, and other common tropes, but the Even Better Sequel had almost none of the tropes under the Writing Pitfall Index. Imagine a world where everyone ignored literary techniques. If it looks like nothing special today, that's's because everything after it followed the techniques that made it successful.
  • Dr. Seuss. When he started producing books for children featuring nonsensical word usage and surreal art, he was considered both genius and highly controversial. Nowadays children's books regularly employ Rhymes on a Dime, Perfectly Cromulent Words, and all sorts of different art styles, making Seuss's books blend right in.
  • Dracula, being the ultimate vampire Trope Maker, has been so thoroughly ripped off, parodied, retooled and revamped that even many Goths are sick of him.
  • Dragonriders of Pern started the Dragon Rider trend in the 1960s, and you would be hard-pressed to find current fantasy writers who don't make dragons a Bond Creature in some way.
  • The Dungeons & Dragons books. People new to it (and in particular the Forgotten Realms novels) and who scoff at Drizzt being the emo badass rebel from an evil society don't realize just how influencial those books were in the early '90s—and that they inspired a lot of the clichés people now deride the books for using. Author R.A. Salvatore has even had readers come up to him at conventions to say "A good dual-wielding Drow ranger? How cliche!"
    • Dragonlance suffers from this trope as well. It was the first series of books set in a gaming world to achieve popular acclaim. Today, uninformed reviews exist of the original Chronicles that tear them apart for having such a cheesy/overdone/cliched setting and cast of characters.
  • Ernest Hemingway. Read any novel or watch a movie on wartime experiences before reading A Farewell to Arms, and it'll end up looking like just another run-of-the-mill war story.
  • It's probably fair to say that these days most people approaching Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser for the first time will be quite familiar with Dungeons & Dragons or related media like Baldur's Gate. Viewed from this perspective, the stories and especially the Standard Fantasy Setting can often seem like a writeup of someone's D&D sessions. The episodic short story format exacerbates this because each time our heroes are dealing with a new job or quest. Except, of course, that most of the stories were written decades before the first roleplaying games, and it was these stories perhaps more than any other source which informed the kind of archetypes on which D&D leans so heavily.
  • The Fighting Fantasy series made Gamebooks well-known among the general audience and brought the peak of the gamebook craze during the 1980s and 1990s. Nowadays, while still remembered fondly by those who lived these glory days, some books are critisized for their weak characterization and weak story, as well as their Fake Difficulty. It's especially true in the case of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the very first book of the series. It *is* the book that started it all, but compared to later installments, its gameplay seems standard and its story is practically non-existant.
  • The Flame and the Flower. A romance novel with explicit sex and a Reformed Rake falling for The Ingenue? Isn't that basically all of them? Well...for those not in the know, The Flame and the Flower all but invented the modern bodice ripper. Prior to this book's publication in 1972 romance novels tended to be very chaste, while this one was significantly Hotter and Sexier. Its popularity led to it having a huge influence on the genre, with many subsequent romance novels taking inspiration from this one. It's worth noting that parts of the plot haven't aged particularly well (mostly the issues surrounding consent in the romance, which unfortunately got imitated a lot as well), but for better or worse it was hugely influential to the romance genre.
  • The Great God Pan (1894) was a prototype Cosmic Horror Story, notable for "the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds." It was cited as a major influence by H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. But part of the suspense is killed for the modern reader, who knows exactly what to expect from the genre.
  • Harry Potter, while not the first to come up with its concept, was a pretty big influencer of young adult literature:
  • Haruhi Suzumiya:
  • Many novels and stories by H. G. Wells contain what seem like very dated, unambitious and dull uses of sci-fi devices. For example, in The Time Machine, the time traveller simply goes to the future, has a look at what it's like... and then comes back home again. However, Wells one of the earlier examples of an author who wrote what we would now consider to be scifi, to the extent that the term 'science fiction' did not exist - Wells himself invented the term 'scientific romance' to describe his works. This can be applied equally to many other early sci-fi works. Also, Wells is famous for inventing nearly every other sci-fi trope and inputting them in his stories. Said devices are now part of nearly every novel, comic, video game, movie and anime that has science fiction elements.
    • The Time Machine may seem rather rote today with its dystopian future, but at the time, this idea that the future could be anything but progress towards utopia was rather shocking, especially with its depiction of humanity degenerating into two rather more primitive subspecies. This spoke directly to fears of degeneration of the human species after Darwin's theory of evolution became current.
    • When it was first published in 1898, The War of the Worlds, arguably the first alien invasion story, was heavily criticised for portraying the aliens as shockingly brutal and cruel, destroying things that had no strategic value and slaughtering civilians. The argument was that alien or not, no civilised culture would behave so barbarically. These days, with almost every alien invasion story including a mandatory scene where the aliens destroy buildings that have no strategic value and slaughter people just to show how evil they are, the Martians come across as rather tame in comparison. Additionally, Real Life conflict showed that "civilised" humans were more than capable of committing far worse atrocities.
      • In the novel, the humans are shocked at the Martians producing on the spot enough aluminum to build machines from. With the price of the stuff back then, a modern analogue would be stamping coal into diamond windows.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: This book heavily influenced geek humor during the 1980s, but by more or less codifying the genre, doomed itself to this category. It also suffers from a degree of Python syndrome.
  • Howard P. Lovecraft, widely recognized as the founder of the Cosmic Horror Story and the Eldritch Abomination trope. Certain stories of his can now come across as charmingly old-fashioned and not necessarily all that horrifying. Or, in the case of his obvious racism, not-so-charming.
  • The Hunger Games is set in a dystopian future 20 Minutes into the Future, inspired by coverage on real life terrorist events and reality TV. It's largely credited with starting one of the trends of Young Adult literature - dystopias and rebellion. These days, it seems largely tame - but it was one of the darkest books available on the "Young Adult" shelf. Additionally, it made several other series like Uglies (Which predated Hunger Games by several years) seem relatively tame by comparison, or even be mistaken as Hunger Games clones.
  • Jack London's The Iron Heel is arguably the first Futuristic Dystopia novel ever written. The central premise of the story - an evil MegaCorp takes over the government, takes control of the media, violently oppresses all free speech and thought, etc. - was novel and topical (and quite scarily plausible) at the time London was writing, but it has since been done to death and back so many times over that the original seems tame and dry by comparison (YMMV on the continued topicality).
  • Lady Chatterley's Lover, which places sexual passion and pleasure on a pedestal, can consequently come off as quite teenage-like now, but in 1928 caused a scandal and was banned for thirty-plus years in several countries, and when published in the UK in 1960 became the subject of an obscenity trial which, remarkably for the time, ended in the publisher's favour. It also proved very influential in the sexual revolution.
  • The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper not only put America on the literary map, but also pioneered a positive portrayal of Native Americans in adventure fiction, which got Cooper quite a bit of flak from contemporary American politicians, who at the time were pursuing an active policy of driving Indians from land that white Americans wanted. But since The Leatherstocking Tales are written in the style of Romanticism (which dramatically fell out of fashion with the rise of literary Realism), since the "Noble Savage" is now often viewed with suspicion, and since so many of Cooper's plot elements were reused by other writers of Western and general adventure fiction, he is now often viewed as trite, at least in his native America. Even before the 19th century was up, Mark Twain was excoriating Cooper as an overrated hack writer in his famous 1895 essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses".
  • Jane Austen and to a lesser extent the Brontë sisters suffer from this. Their novels have had a massive influence on the Romance Novel to the point that they may appear hopelessly clichéd and even a bit low brow because of the countless imitators.
  • John Carter of Mars launched the Planetary Romance genre, and has been hugely influential on creators of fantasy/science fiction media, including the minds behind Star Wars and Avatar. This influence created problems for John Carter, in that while it was faithfully adapting the original novels, for those not familiar with the source works, it came across as a massive Cliché Storm.
  • The Joy of Sex and Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex, but were afraid to ask weren't trite when they were published.
  • Imagine this; a low-class creative-type young man is secretly in love with the one of the richest, most popular girls around, along with most of the upper-class boys, who she keeps turning down. Her peers sneer at him, behind his back, but she invites him to her big fancy house in the country. He knows he doesn't have a chance, but goes anyway. They spend a lot of time together, getting to know each other. He overhears her remarks to one of her many high-class suitors about how she'll marry someone high-class, gets upset, and dresses her down for snobbery. When he cools down, he's so embarrassed that he decides to leave. She shows up and whoops, turns out it was just a misunderstanding. She was referring to him, metaphorically, and the story ends. Clearly this is some sort of wacky teen romantic comedy film. Except it's the poem Lady Geraldine's Courtship, from the 19th century. Just put the narrator in a band, put the protagonists in high school, and set it during a weekend at her parents' house, and you'd basically have a Disney Channel Original Movie.
  • Lensman. E. E. "Doc" Smith's classic saga can seem like a Cliché Storm of Space Opera tropes, but, of course, it started most of them.
  • Lewis Carroll:
    • When Alice in Wonderland was released, it was considered very innovative for not having a clear moral to the story. Nowadays, when it's not considered necessary for every children's book to come with a moral, few readers even think about the fact that the Alice books lack one.
    • It can be hard to see "Jabberwocky" as a brilliant bit of nonsense poetry when many of its Perfectly Cromulent Words (most famously "chortle" and "galumph") have since become recognized as real English words, and are no longer "nonsense". Also, divorced from its original context in the 19th century - when published translations of Old English poetry were first becoming widely available, and were widely read by English intellectuals - it can be hard to recognize the poem as an affectionate send-up of Beowulf.
  • Lost Souls (1992). While Poppy Z. Brite's novel probably didn't originate of a lot of vampire clichés - bisexual, seductive vampires, New Orleans, Goths, Ho Yay - these tropes were a lot fresher when he and Anne Rice wrote their books.
  • J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: This book popularized most of the cliches found in fantasy today, but modern readers may well find it unspeakably boring, purely because everything in it has since been subverted, inverted, parodied, and otherwise done to death. Aside from that though, it also has lots of Unbuilt Trope which are actually not like what non-readers think the book contains. He gave the first definitions of the stock races as mostly used today. Elves existed in many different forms in different mythologies, from little wingy tinkerbells to modern fantasy dwarves; now, everyone thinks "pointy ears", archery, and intelligent beauty. Orcs were a new name, and possibly didn't exist in that form in folklore except in general as orcneas, ogres. The elf-dwarf hostilities began in Tolkien. Dwarfs as bearded miners, while that did exist before, was codified. "Dwarves" was also a Tolkienism, as was the adjectival form "elven"; before Tolkien, the most accepted plural for "dwarf" was "dwarfs", and the adjectival form of "elf" was "elfin".
  • Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert was shocking and controversial at the time, because it was a deconstruction of the Romanticism genre and eventuallly led to the Modernism movement. Nowadays, it is mostly looked as a mundane story about an adulterous woman.
  • Maria Watches Over Us is gradually getting there; the series had a huge influence on the Yuri Genre, but it's also been copied and especially parodied mercilessly, to the point where viewers suspect it to be a parody itself. Admittedly, the romantic entanglements between the girls of the depicted all-girl school do get rather fluffy and melodramatic at times, but it's mostly kept in check by the tight storytelling and outstanding voice-acting in the anime adaptation.
  • The Marvelous Land of Oz can come off as this - In the early 20th century, these books were the fantasy books enjoyed by a Periphery Demographic, before Harry Potter came around in the late 90s. Nowadays, the books seem quite cartoonish.
    • They also are perhaps some of the earliest examples of Worldbuilding and Trapped in Another World, amongst many other tropes. Reading them today, they can come off as very simplistic, sometimes hard to digest due to how Baum wrote, and full of inconsistent logic, Deus ex Machinas, and a load of characters who never seem to struggle to get what they want. However it's important to note that these books were written in the 1900s to the 1920s (by Baum at least) - long before many of the books that popularised fantasy were written. (The last one predates The Hobbit by a decade.)
  • Michael Moorcock. A good bit of his work falls into this, especially The Elric Saga. Like The Lord of the Rings, he created or expanded upon many fantasy tropes that are commonplace now. Hell, even one of the introductions to the new paperback collections of Elric's tale states this. Also, all that crazy-ass, sexually deviant, creature-of-their-time, lone wolf super spy stuff (different from the way James Bond does it, mind you)? Well, that's Jerry Cornelius, possibly Moorcock's second most famous creation.
  • Nancy Drew can suffer from this. When the books about her first came out, a female detective as the protagonist of mystery novels for young adults was almost completely unheard of. Post-feminism, it's kind of hard to realize how influential she was (lots of prominent female politicians cite her as an inspiration). She precedes Ellen Ripley and Wonder Woman, and has been called one of the first feminists in American fiction. Not to mention she was headstrong and adventurous, something that wasn't encouraged in children's literature (same goes for The Hardy Boys). The sheer amount of imitators that have sprung up over the years Nowadays, You Meddling Kids is a cliché in itself, and the books are seen as nostalgic at best and a little hokey at worst, while her utter perfection would have her written off as a Mary Sue if she were to appear for the first time today, especially if we're talking about the revised Nancy from 1959 and onwards.
  • Neuromancer by William Gibson was hailed as a radical departure that overturned science fiction with its noir mood, gritty realism, and dystopian outlook. Now Cyberpunk looks old-fashioned and passe to some, and Shiny-Looking Spaceships are back in vogue as unironic extensions of modern consumer products.
  • The Neverending Story. Similar to The Chronicles of Narnia, it can seem an awful lot like a rather standard read, albeit a long one for children. A child finds a mysterious book that appears to be a gateway to another world. He appears to have found himself written into the story of this mysterious new world, and finds himself embarking on all sorts of adventures in a realm of fantasy powered by human imagination, becoming part of it all along the way, then finally departing home at the end after almost losing himself to his own fantasy and defeating the Big Bad. Even if the entire story wasn't replicated too much (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance comes close, however), a lot of the book's themes seem a bit... well, cliché. The plot itself doesn't seem to be anything new either.
    • Its length as well - after Harry Potter, it's hard to believe that this was probably the largest book that you would find in the children's section that wasn't an omnibus of some kind.
  • Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson is a particularly notorious example of this. Back in 1740 when the novel as a genre was still fairly new, it revolutionized the genre by introducing psychological analysis i.e. it focused on thoughts and emotions, rather than just actions. Since then, it has fallen victim to Values Dissonance so hard that it might as well be considered Condemned by History, with the unfortunate combination of having a main lead who's more or less completely perfect and being extremely preachy. Oh, and it throws in extremely dated ideas like how women must always obey their husbands for good measure. Heck, Richardson himself said he wrote it to persuade people to act more virtuously. When the author himself admits the entire novel is a morality lecture, you have trouble.
  • Paul Clifford, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's fifth novel, was an immense commercial success when first published. Today, it is remembered only as the origin of the notorious "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night".
  • Robert Sheckley's stories "The Prize of Peril" and "The Seventh Victim" detail a Deadly Game in which players are trying to compete for popularity and life-changing money. To do so, the protagonists are put in life-threatening peril. While plenty of others have come up with the various ideas, the idea of the Deadly Game was something quite surprising and shocking to viewers. After works such as Kaiji, Would You Rather, As the Gods Will, Gantz, and Squid Game, the premise might seem quite tame!
  • Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe is one of, if not the first English novel, as well as the novel that established realistic fiction (i.e. novels that are fictional but whose events and characters feel plausible enough to be able to happen in real life) as a genre, and with that comes great significance. However, it reflects the religious and racial views of its time, and for modern readers can be downright uncomfortable to read as a result.
  • Science fiction in general. Technologies that used to be completely fantastic tend to become Truth in Television decades later. See also Technology Marches On.
  • A Series of Unfortunate Events:
  • Sherlock Holmes. Some argue that he qualifies as a "stock character", arguing that even though he was the origin of various clichés, to a modern reader, they are just clichés, while conveniently ignoring that later series wouldn't exist without Holmes.
  • The Snow Crash physical manifestation of the internet can come off as either a brilliant, eerie prediction of the future or a "I know this already" unsurprising setting depending on whether you read it before or after Second Life proved everything.
  • Sister Princess seems to be an incredibly cliche series nowadays, particular if one is already familiar with other series from the Harem Genre. However, it's one of the Trope Codifier of "otherworldly harem" series.
  • George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire:
    • For about ten years, it was considered the ultimate in subversive epic fantasy. Little to no magic, no elves or dwarves (at least, not fantasy dwarves), profanity, uncensored sex, graphic violence and no Plot Armor for anyone. But it was also a heavily character-driven piece with genuine heart, even if that wasn't always recognized. By the 2010s, it had spawned so many imitators who mainly copied its surface qualities (extreme violence and death, explicit sex) that it no longer feels like anything really different, and is primarily thought of as "that series where everybody dies" due to its at-the-time-unheard-of tendency to kill characters that would usually survive to the end of similar books.
    • The violence and sex weren't the only things copied - the "mundanity" of its setting was also one of the most copied elements as well. Unlike a lot of fantasy settings at the time which were often heavily fantastical, Westeros only had fantasy elements and tried to be more realistic with its magic being heavily limited. Whilst this has always been a thing in fantasy (Low Fantasy thrives off of this), it's become so prevalent that including more fantastical elements front and centre is actually seen as somewhat subversive in The New '20s because there are just that many fantasy books that brush aside most fantastical elements
  • A Sound of Thunder, a short story by Ray Bradbury, was about time travelers who went back to prehistoric times, killed a butterfly, and accidentally caused a fascist candidate to win the presidential elections. Which was a really original plot, when it was written. However, those story elements are so trite now that when the movie loosely based on the story was made, it was criticized for using old, tired cliches.
  • The Space Trilogy was one of the earlier science fiction works to portray aliens as being morally superior to humanity, as opposed to most other works of the period, which treated aliens as hostile invaders. Nowadays having aliens be better than or comparable to humans in a moral sense is far more common.
  • Stephen King's books have fallen into this due to so many modern horror writers copying his style. When he first published 'Salem's Lot and Carrie, the idea of bringing horror out of gothic castles and into average New England towns revitalized the genre. Now, between King and the rediscovery of H. P. Lovecraft, merely setting a piece of horror fiction in New England is seen as a cliche.
  • While 'Salem's Lot is still considered to be one of King's best books, after almost fifty years of Stephen King novels, the way he brings a whole community to life and weaves them into his horror plot can feel less novel and unique.
  • Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein features a Jesus-like human from Mars who can perform telekinesis, telepathy, and miraculous healing simply by meditating. He spends most of the novel trying to "understand Earth behavior" and ends up bringing his followers sexual liberation. Most people nowadays tend to forget that Heinlein wrote the novel in the '50s but that it was only deemed publishable in 1961, when the hippie movement was just getting started. It ended up having a huge influence on the counterculture mentality of the '60s and '70s, predating Jonathan Livingston Seagull by over a decade. Many attitudes in modern New Age philosophy are taken directly from Heinlein's work, often disguised as ancient Eastern wisdom.
    • A lot of Heinlein's works have ended up as this simply due to the sheer amount of influence he had on science fiction at the time. Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters are two especially good examples.
  • The Tale of Genji. It's considered one of the first modern novels, if not the first. Nowadays, it can be quite hard to get into.
  • The Thrawn Trilogy can get hit with a big dose of this by the Star Wars fandom today. By now, we've had a long time to get used to living in a world with over 100 published Star Wars Legends novels, a whole trilogy of official prequel films, and - at long last - an honest-to-God seventh episode that actually brought back Luke, Han and the rest of the gang for more adventures. In 1991, there was just the Original Trilogy, and a paltry handful of licensed comic books and young adult novels to content the hardcore fans. With that in mind, you can understand why it was a pretty big deal when Lucasfilm announced that Timothy Zahn would be writing an all-new trilogy of novels that actually attempted to continue the story of the Star Wars saga after the Battle of Endor - complete with a love interest for Luke, babies for Han and Leia, and a new Big Bad Duumvirate who were explicitly written to contrast Vader and Palpatine in every way. Case in point: the only reason it's known as "The Thrawn Trilogy" today is so fans can keep it separate from all the other Star Wars novels (including several trilogies) that came after it; at the time, it was just marketed as "The Star Wars Trilogy", because it was the first new trilogy that fans had seen since 1983.
  • Uglies might seem like it fits all the familiar YA dystopia cliches to new readers- a love triangle, a teenage girl who has to save the world, a society divided into strict groups and sub-groups, etc. But it was published before the genre became massively popular, and helped create some of the tropes people would later get sick of.
  • Uncle Tom's Cabin: The characters seem incredibly stereotyped to modern eyes because the popularity of the book - and the minstrel shows inspired by or at least named for it — established those very stereotypes.
  • Valley of the Dolls was a scandalous read when it was released - some book stores even resorting to selling it under the counter. It wasn't the first to explore the Horrible Hollywood trope - Sunset Boulevard and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? had done so already. But Jacqueline Susann had spent her previous career as an actress and used details from her own experiences to create details that shocked the public. Modern readers wouldn't find anything too shocking or surprising.
  • Nowadays, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan is considered a horrendously cliched example of how all fantasy books are too long, with series that go on seemingly without end and yet little happens in them. When the first volume was published, in 1991, most fantasy novels were actually quite short, and/or tended to be trilogies or quintets at the very longest. However, he inspired so many other writers to pad out their volumes and stretch their stories over ten or twelve volumes that by the 2000s he gets lumped in with those he inspired, often cited as the Ur-Example, but rarely acknowledged as the man who started the trend.
  • William Morris (1834-1896) attempted to revive the Chivalric Romance genre with novels The Wood Beyond The World (1894) and The Well at the World's End (1896), creating "an entirely invented fantasy world" as their setting. These works and his earlier Historical Fantasy novels influenced writers such as Lord Dunsany, Eric Rücker Eddison, James Branch Cabell, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis. Problem is that they are among the founding works of Medieval European Fantasy. They had a noticeable influence in the development of Heroic Fantasy, High Fantasy, and even the Cthulhu Mythos. There is now nothing innovative about creating an invented world, and his works were considered dated by The '70s. His books and those of the other authors mentioned here were among those reprinted by the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series starting in the mid-70s, founded by Lin Carter partly as an attempt to prove that Tolkien did not singlehandedly invent fantasy literature or Worldbuilding or even the Standard Fantasy Setting.
  • When they were originally published, P. G. Wodehouse's early school stories were innovative in that they were intended as stories for schoolboys to enjoy, rather than badly-disguised religious propaganda. After more than a century of school stories in that style, Wodehouse's just come across as generic.
  • When the 2017 Live-Action Adaptation of The Worst Witch premièred, a lot of people wrote it off as a blatant rip-off of Harry Potter. Turns out that the first book was published in 1974, and the series was one of the most direct inspirations for Harry Potter.
  • Zorro certainly qualifies. In the original novel, Don Diego Vega's Secret Identity is patently obvious to anyone familiar with basically any superhero comic book at all, including by Pop-Cultural Osmosis, even if they're not familiar with Zorro as a franchise. Many of those comicsnote  were inspired by Zorro in the first place. Also, some people think Zorro was inspired by The Scarlet Pimpernel, Robin Hood, and the like.

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