First, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates, and second, what are your favorite or most Hated Fantasy Cliches?

I honestly love the "standard fantasy" races of dwarves, elves, orcs, goblins, etc. I just feel like each setting has to make sure their versions of these races are really unique instead of just being Tolkien's versions with all the serial numbers filed off. Warhammer Fantasy is a great example of how you can make each one interesting and distinctive while still being the recognizable standard races.

Not necessarily a trope, but I also prefer when fantasy cultures/settings are based directly on real-life cultures, nations, and history as this usually ensures that the settings feel well-researched and thought-out instead being generic. A lot of people complain that many modern fantasy worlds are always based on Medieval Western Europe, and while I would also love things to be based on other parts of the world, I think the bigger problem is that these settings are just based on vague Medieval European things. Heavily researching specific locations, such as Medieval Italy/Southern Europe in general, would help a setting stand out.

As for hated tropes, I really hate technology/gun wank in Medieval Fantasy settings. Now, I'm not against guns or technology existing in a Fantasy world, but I hate when they only exist to show off how cool guns are and how they can easily kill anything in a Fantasy world. Again, Warhammer Fantasy has a nice balance where the humans and dwarfs that use gunpowder are powerful, but they don't instantly steamroll the other factions in the world, especially ones with strong magic.

I also hate game systems and mechanics canonically existing in fantasy worlds, such as how they often do in Isekai worlds. Game mechanics are only used to give accurate numbers representation of a character or creature for the players of a game; they do not and should not actually exist in the fantasy world itself as it feels contrived and completely destroys immersion. I legit don't get while so many East Asian authors are so obsessed with this stupid trope.

It isn't just another level of powerscaling (which rules like these are often used as an easy giveaway as most of this stuff like this is shonen), but it's also a failed attempt to recreate something out of a video game instead of the source material itself. Imagine in Castlevania, where Treavor bleeds, then in the next scene it shows his health bar from the video game almost empty, then he said, "Damn, I need to eat Turkey or else I fall off the platform!" It also ruins immersion too since it means that it's all fake unless you do it intentionally. It isn't just an East Asian problem; it just so happens since the Isekai genre is popular here. Like how most Kaiju movies have 2 monsters fight each other instead of other things, such as how Godzilla did in his debut as an example.

As to go on-topic, I really like the trope where the antagonist won and the world is already destroyed, but the protagonists never give up, and eventually they kill the villain, avenging the planet and rebuilding it for a better future or something else. It's like in FF6 and SMT1, better than the standard: stop the villain before it's too late.

As for hated tropes, this entire hypocrisy around that friends and humanity in general are good and virtuous, powerful, etc. Despite most of the time the conflict was done by them lol. And it's common in the JRPG scene which are dogshit. There's a place for it and it could had been executed well, but in the case of most JRPGs, it fumbles everything.

I can both blame and not blame Tolkien. Because what the man did was create a foundation for fantasy and templates for what the future would come to see as normal for elves and dwarves and shit.

Then every lazy fantasy hack fraud just copied it. It's like how when they need some kind of esoteric cosmic threat, people just run to use shit from the Cthulhu Mythos. Even Doctor Who did it.

My most hated is prophecies. It's the laziest fucking way to establish or advance the plot in a fantasy story. It's basically a cheat that allows characters to know things they otherwise couldn't possibly know to ensure the story goes as planned. Even worse when there's no explanation of who made that prophecy or how, just that "there is an ancient prophecy that the hero with a spiral birthmark, blablabla". And then it's used as a narrative crutch to ensure every character knows that this dude (or mcguffin or something else) is important even when there are no objective indication of such.
Subverting prophecies by playing with the wording has become a tired cliche on its own. So is having the prophecy be self-fulfilling (Sophocles did it 1500 years ago with Oedipus). The optimal option is no prophecies at all, or having the prophecy be bullshit.

Closely related is reincarnation. Commonly used to establish a character as the special chosen one by piggybacking on his previous incarnation's achievements.

And finally, time travel and multiverse when introduced in stories that were specifically about them to begin with. They break the thread of logic and raise too many questions. Time travel always turns into a headache to follow, and the multiverse effectively canonises any all fanfiction, which may leave the main universe feeling pointless.

Yeah, I'm pretty sick of alternate timelines/universes being so prevalent in pop culture, too. It was fun back when it was something only comic books were doing (and they were running it into the ground by the 2010s themselves) and stories featuring them usually only had one alternate universe alongside the main one, but now everyone is using the premise, and they always use several different universes at once. After the final Spider-Verse movie comes out, I won't mind never seeing alternate universe plotlines ever again, or at least for a few decades.

This is a very minor trope I dislike, but I've never been a fan of pig orcs (porcs?) that are common in Japanese fantasy. Now, most orcs do have some pig-like characteristics like having piggish noses and being omnivorous, but the moment an orc has a pig's head, you've lost me a little. But, I don't dislike this trope nowhere near as much as the first ones I mentioned hating; it's just a minor pet peeve of mine.

For a trope I like, I really like ACTUAL Conan-Inspired barbarians characters. One annoying problem is that while there are a lot of barbarian-style, wander-lusted characters in fiction, they usually are dumb as a sack of hammers and only get by through their immense strength and luck. Conan, while quite strong and mostly focused on the simple things in life, could get quite philosophical, speculative, and thought-provoking if he wanted to, and he defeated most of his enemies with a combination of brains, brawn, and luck. Great examples of well-done barbarians after Conan are Spear from the Primal Cartoon and maybe Guts from Berserk, depending on if you consider him a barbarian.

The "Sword and Sorcery" genre as a whole is pretty fun (though not my favorite cup of tea), but people often just reduce it to "Big strong warrior man save pretty, skimpy-dressed girl from scrawny evil sorcerer" when the original Conan stories were usually much more than that.

Shit, you've won. I wanted to say that I don't hate tropes because any trope can be executed well, but this, this here, is really abhorrent. This is always a clear sign that they have run out of ideas.