Cliché Storm

Parrot: Squawk! Aye-aye, Cap'n!
Black Jack: Don't you just love clichés?

— Charmed (1998), "Charrrmed!" [sic]

You are watching something, and it strikes you that you have heard every single line of this somewhere else. Every trope is presented without irony or acknowledgment. All the situations and setups are clipped out of another story and pasted in as-is.

You are in a Cliché Storm. Do not worry. The pain will soon pass. A bug will soon scrag the inept Lieutenant. Security will soon come to the perimeter. The line will soon be held. It will be over, soon.

Remember, this is not a bad thing; originality and greatness aren't necessarily intertwined, and as such, many Cliché Storms are good in quality, as good stories, characters, humor, action, or whatever can produce a high caliber book regardless of originality. You can also see from the examples that people can intentionally create as big a Cliché Storm as possible... and then start having fun with all of the Clichés. Oftentimes, they may not start around deconstructing or playing with the cliches, as so much play it for laughs. It's very common in an Affectionate Parody — most of the time, they start poking fun at these Cliches. Very often, something may be intended as an homage, and it may be wise to look at them as such. In addition, an audience needs to be familiar with a trope before they understand variations of it. As everybody needs a place to start, many works aimed at young children, particularly educational ones, are designed with tropes mostly played straight.

See also A Space Marine Is You, a specific form of a Cliché Storm; see also Deconstructor Fleet, for works that take all the cliches and play them realistically. Compare Strictly Formula, Reconstruction. Compare and contrast Troperiffic, which is a more fun version of this trope, although the lines between the two are blurry and kind of subjective. Related to Speaks in Shout-Outs, when a character's dialogue extensively uses direct quotations from a specific work. And see Taste the Rainbow for when this is done with character types for the purpose of meeting every viewer's taste.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga

This is a big reason for the divisive reception of Akame ga Kill!. For the most part, it's a pretty standard fantasy adventure manga, with characters who fit directly into classic archetypes of the genre. Even the settings and concepts have rather unoriginal names (i.e "The Empire", "Danger Beasts"). The only real difference is that Death Is Cheap doesn't apply.

Black Clover is a highly derivative work that has been accused of this a lot. Asta being the hyperactive Stock Shōnen Hero seeking to become the strongest, alongside his more serious and talented Stock Shōnen Rival Yuno, are frequently dubbed copies of Naruto and Sasuke, despite the two pairs being vastly different in terms of their dynamic. The Black Bulls, the general setup of the magic system, and the Magic Knights gets the story called a Fairy Tail copy. Asta lacking conventional powers, but then being granted an unusual one has been compared to Izuku Midoriya's origins in its contemporary rival My Hero Academia. The overall tone of the manga has even seen it called "the new Bleach".
Cross Ange has this as one of the main complaints given by detractors. It's about a Fallen Princess who initially is cold and mean but undergoes a Defrosting Ice Queen process, thanks in part to a male Love Interest who is essentially the generic harem protagonist except he’s just comic relief, complete with her acting Tsundere and beating him for being an Accidental Pervert. She joins the all-female La Résistance against the Evil Empire that exiled her; said empire is a clear Nazi-analogue, displaying Fantastic Racism against Norma, and is populated by an Always Chaotic Evil race (the Mana people). The heroes are forced to also fight dragon-like monsters (creatively called DRAGONs), before finding out that they were Human All Along and that Humans Are the Real Monsters. The initial Big Bad is a generic evil emperor with no redeeming qualities, before it is revealed that he is a Disc-One Final Boss being controlled by a generic evil god who also has no redeeming qualities and tries to brainwash and rape the heroine and various other female characters to show how evil he is. He is eventually beaten by The Power of Love and a happy ending is had for all- except the “evil” race, who are left to die off.
The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, a spin-off manga from The Haruhi Suzumiya, is based on the Alternate Universe seen in The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, is a relatively cliché rom-com series that plays most of its tropes straight, albeit reimagining most of the cast in an AU without the supernatural elements of its parent series.
The Disastrous Life of Saiki K. has a character named Hiroshi Satou, who is perfectly average in everything and has the power to attract clichés. One episode is about a baseball game that follows a cliché plot. Saiki lampshades every single cliché or generic line. However, Nendo and Kuboyasu pull the plot away from clichés, and Saiki has to enforce the plot. Nendo's pure skill leads to victory anyway.
Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai is a shonen manga series done as though it were a Dragon Quest game. Thus it does not just use cliches, it beats them down, makes friends with them, and then watches in amazement as they come out of nowhere and tell it to go on without them. It's part of its charm.

GaoGaiGar plays every single trope of the Super Robot genre as straight as an arrow. However, this doesn't detract from how awesome it is.
See also Gekiganger 3 from Martian Successor Nadesico which is even more of an example. Practically every attack and character is lifted from some famous Super Robot series, mostly Mazinger Z (for robot design and attacks) and Getter Robo (the characters and everything else).

The Guardian Hearts OVA series manages to cram in each and every cliché of anime Fanservice and the Unwanted Harem. To the seasoned viewer, viewing it for the first time feels like seeing it the second time.

Harem Royale - When the Game Ends - has many of the cliches of the Harem Genre (Marshmallow Hell, Thanks for the Mammary, eating lunch together, going on a vacation together etc.), because its main premise is that a demon is forcing most of the main characters to act as the harem of her (the demon's) contractor. It does this while playing the premise for horror as the twist is that the “losers” of the harem will be sent to hell.
Pop Team Epic:
- Hoshiiro Girldrop, a Show Within a Show from the manga's second season, is deliberately designed to be as much of a standard Idol Genre romcom as possible: its introduction features the start of a Childhood Friend Romance, and previews of it in the anime pit the Drop Stars' growth and rivalry with other groups against the main couple's kindling feelings. Of course, Pop Team Epic being Pop Team Epic, it can't go more than a chapter (in manga) or an 5 minute segment (in the anime) before Popuko hijacks it, and a late-game preview indicates it uses cliches from completely different genres as well (the main heroine making a Heroic Sacrifice during a devastating battle). The only aspect of the series that takes itself seriously is its anthology, which appropriately looks like any anthology series for an established manga.
- In the anime, all of the Space Neko Company shorts are genre spoofs played straight. "DONCA SIS" in particular is a Flirty Stepsiblings Shoujo romance with a rivals-to-lovers plot, with Popuko and Pipimi playing the Abusive Parents by changing nothing about themselves.
- "Emotional Documentary: Hellshake Yano" is all about a rock star holding the line for his band via Epic Rocking. This deliberately contrasts its very nontraditional presentation: two guys recording themselves flipping through sketchbooks kamishibai-style.
This is the entire point of Kujibiki♡Unbalance, which started out as a fictional manga/anime within Genshiken and intentionally uses numerous tropes that were popular in manga and anime at the time Genshiken was first published, particularly those related to the Moe boom of the early-to-mid 2000s. Despite its heavily tropey nature, it became popular enough on its own to be spun off into its own small franchise.
A Manga With Too Many Premises is a Yuri Genre manga with this Played for Laughs. A high school girl named Ryou and a young woman named Yuna meet by chance and realize they played together when they were young. At that point, a man shows up, someone Ryou and Yuma both recognize as their father, and he reveals that he has two separate families, making the women half-sisters. Ryou collapses, and when Yuna helps her, they realize they can both read each other's minds by touching, and then fall in love. They then kiss, which causes them to switch bodies. All this happens in the span of four pages.
Mirai Robo Daltanious does nothing original in terms of the Super Robot genre. Pick a Super Robot trope and Daltanious plays it straight every time. You even have character designs ripped off wholesale from Mazinger Z.
Mobile Suit Gundam AGE showcases every stock element common to the Gundam franchise. It tends to dance on the line between this and Tropes Are Not Bad.
My Hero Academia has a positive version of this. While the basic of the plot and much of the aesthetics of it have been used and reused before, the manga gives a new spin on and depth to these clichés, particularly related to the characters and their interactions (such as making The Hero's best quality being a quick-thinking strategist, instead of his brute strength and make the stoic ace one of his close friends instead of an Aloof Ally).

Nisekoi is one of the most cliché shounen rom-com manga series in recent memory. Despite this, it has a pretty big fanbase and an anime adaptation, proving that, at least to some, Tropes Are Not Bad.
Done deliberately in the final episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, in which most of the cast acts out a stereotypical High School anime^note in a scene apparently taking place in Shinji's mind (or it may be an Alternate Universe).
Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan: The premise is fairly original on paper (boy raised by Yōkai becomes clan heir and sets out to both prove that Dark Is Not Evil and make sure it stays that way, while fighting against a Yokai-supremacist clan led by a badass Dark Action Girl Big Bad) but the execution quickly falls into this between the Stock Character cast and the inevitable segue into Shonen tropes (to the point where the dark action girl is being manipulated and gets usurped by a hideous, uncharismatic Fat Bastard and an Aizen expy).
Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! does this on purpose as part of an Affectionate Parody of Dating Sims in an episode where the cast gets trapped in an old game console and has to play out the game to its completion (Mahiro, cast as the Player Character, has to find a girlfriend by the end of the school year) if they want to get back to the real world. Pretty much every single Dating Sim trope is either used (like Meet Cute) or at least paid lip service (Mahiro's mother warning him that if he doesn't pick a girl soon, his best friend might confess instead).
The manga Otomen is an intentional example of this. Being an overall parody of shojo manga and a satire of Japanese gender roles, the author has pretty much stated that she goes out of her way to do every shojo manga cliche in the book.

It seems strange, but it seems that the manga Seitokai Yakuindomo manages to use all the most stereotyped themes for dirty jokes, including regular jokes about masturbation, dildos and blowjob. In each episode and almost every scene.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann likes breaking the laws of physics and its own setting in increasingly awesome ways. It embraces and revels in its cliches, and you can't help but get swept up in its pure enthusiasm, proving once again that Tropes Are Not Bad.
To Love Ru is a pretty cliche fanservice-y shonen romcom series, but that hasn't stopped it from being insanely popular (mostly due to how over-the-top the fanservice can get, going far beyond ecchi and straight into borderline hentai).
The dream RPG Episode at the start of The Tower of Druaga parodies every Heroic Fantasy trope in 20 deeply confusing minutes.
"I was going to go back to my hometown and get married!!"
The Vision of Escaflowne shows that despite playing nearly every single anime trope to the tee, Cliché storms can really work. It's a very beloved series in the Americas, Korea, and parts of Europe (though Italy hates Hitomi). Despite being seen negatively in Japan, it obviously inspired a lot of people who did like it.
Yosuga no Sora In stages, reproduces virtually every Brother–Sister Incest trope. Responsible elder brother and extremely jealous younger sister tsundere. She masturbates, fantasizing about him, while he is trying to build a relationship with a childhood friend. Other characters reproach the main character for being too close and affectionate with his sister. And so almost to the very end, not to mention the arcs of other heroines.
Uwakoi and Aki Sora, both by Masahiro Itosugi, collectively take the most infamous tropes associated with ecchi and harem titles - All Women Are Lustful, Fetishized Abuser, Brother–Sister Incest, Unwanted Harem, Yandere, etc. - and plays them all for serious drama (although Uwakoi takes a Darker and Edgier approach).
YuruYuri seems to be trying to cram every single possible characterization trope pertaining to the Yuri genre into a single universe^note. It didn't stop it from being extremely popular as a slice-of-life yuri comedy, spurring beyond the original manga 3 seasons, several written spin-offs, and a few OVAs.

Comic Books

Well Spoken Sonic Lightning Flash from Super Young Team briefly notes that "they thought of everything! No cliche left unturned!" when he sees his team's new headquarters in Final Crisis Aftermath: DANCE. The series itself doesn't exemplify the trope, however, nor does the team.
Rob Liefeld's infamous Youngblood featured a team whose only non-powered member was also its leader, several Wolverine rip-offs including a Proud Warrior Race Guy, characters layered in pouches and shoulderpads, names like "Darcangel" and "Badrock," gun-toting anti-heroes with religious-sounding names (the hot new character when the book debuted was Marvel's gun-toting antihero Bishop—Youngblood gives us Chapel, Cross, and Prophet), and buxom women in skimpy outfits. And they had "Home" and "Away" teams.
MAD likes making fun of these kinds of movies.
- The parody of Dirty Dancing made fun of how many cliches were in the movie, with a caption for every panel describing the cliche in that scene.
- One series of cliche movie scripts provides snippets of key lines for scripts, from war movies to love stories. From what you can gather of the lines, the stories are rather cliched, from an unknown singer becoming an opera star until she retires to marry the man she loves to a working class young man managing to win over his wealthy girlriend's parents.

Fan Works

The Bolt Chronicles: invoked Bolt and Mittens trade off a string of hackneyed sayings in-universe at the end of "The Kippies." This descends from the cat's lampshading herself as a midlife crisis cliché.
Mittens: [shaking her head and smirking] Sheesh — look at me, Bolt. Who’da thunk it? I'm a card-carrying midlife crisis cliché. If I were a bank CEO, I’d have bought myself a shiny new red sports car and dumped you for a studly tomcat half my age.
Bolt: [chuckling] I guess so. Funny thing about clichés, though — they’re old and moldy, but they're usually true. Y’know, like "A stitch in time saves nine?"
Mittens: Or, "There’s no use crying over spilled milk."
Bolt: Uh-huh — and, "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."
In-universe in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series: Evil Jack has nary an original bone in his body. Given the Better than a Bare Bulb nature of the fic, this is lampshaded with no mercy by the heroes.
Parodied in The Coolest Evil Dumbledore Ever which mixes together practically every single Fandom-Specific Plot used in Evil!Dumbledore fanfics and takes all of them up a notch – from Dumbledore doing Evil Gloating complete with "Hahaha!" to Harry becoming Headmaster of Hogwarts, Minister of Magic and King of England in the end.
In Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Freeza has "heard these heroic speeches so wearily often, [he's] started counting how many times [he's] heard certain phrases."
Namekian Warrior: Yeah? Well...we're going...to f**k your face!
Freeza: [laughing] Oh-hohoho! Twelve!
Parodied in A Generic Fanfic, which "makes fun of all the generic and cliched plot devices that are often used in Shippy" Pokémon fan fiction. It includes Character Derailment, grammar errors, and Gratuitous Japanese.
A Perfectly Ordinary Day in Ponyville is a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfic that sees Twilight Sparkle being largely unfazed by a number of cliched pony fanfiction plots hitting her at once: Twilight turning into an alicorn, a human getting teleported to Equestria, Rainbow Dash getting severely injured and Celestia turning evil. Which is Hilarious in Hindsight, since as of now Rainbow Dash has been seriously injured TWICE now, Princess Celestia has been revealed to be able to use evil magic, and Twilight actually HAS become an alicorn... all in the canon of the show itself! And the "human in Equestria" plot? Well, the events of an entire spin-off franchise were kicked off because Twilight and a main character to that franchise did the exact opposite.
In This World and the Next boasts generically!evil!Ron, submissive!damsel!Hermione, "fix the books" time travel, pureblood supremacy as the Ultimate Evil™ and the Ancient and Noble House of Potter complete with marriage law. All in the first two chapters. As one review put it:
I'm guessing that later in the story, Harry will be framed and sent to Azkaban, allowing his hitherto unknown twin who's the actual Boy Who Lived to take his place, get adopted by Snape and become Head Boy, upon which he hooks up with Hermione (who turns out to be really a pureblood) at the annual Yule Ball and they have lots of rampant sex in the Head Boy and Girl's private quarters, and meanwhile Draco discovers that he's part-Veela and hooks up with an American exchange student who's a newly discovered species of super-witch with an anachronistic taste in clothes and music, and they go off and fight the resurrected Salazar Slytherin together.^note
The Last War also boasts abusive!Ron and damsel!Hermione, with bonus slut!Ginny.
My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic. Let's see... The villain is an Obviously Evil wizard who lives in a dark castle in the dimension of darkness. His minions are a Terrible Trio consisting of a shallow Vain Sorceress, a schemer, and a brute, none of whom possess any redeeming or positive qualities. On the other hoof, we have a realm of good where the unicorns live happily without any personal conflict between each other, are ruled by a wise king and protected by a group of Super Sentai/Magical Girl-inspired good guys, whose leader has a fairy sidekick, defeats monsters with Sailor Moon-based moves and has to learn to believe in himself.
drconichero's Soul Chess is full of them. What's worse is that it's intentional (the only time it isn't is the character design for the expy of Jeremiah "Motherfucking Loyalty" Gottwald).
The Introduction Arc of Soul Eater: Troubled Souls feels like this. It features an Original Character with a preference for working by himself that is the Last of His Kind through genocide and seeks revenge against the killer. His partner is a haughty rich girl with a fangirl crush on Soul. The former’s Character Development revolves around him learning to trust others again through the Power of Friendship. Thankfully, it's just a starting point and doesn't last long.
Parodied in When in Doubt, Obliviate when Snape takes exception to several standard cliches during a teacher's meeting.
Snape: I'm not going to start off irrationally hating Potter because of his parents even if he did make a pained face and cover his eyes the minute he saw me.
Dumbledore: That's certainly big of you, Severus. I feel inspired already.
Snape: After that doesn't happen, I'm not going to be forced to spend time with him in my classes and as the head of his house and start to see a new side of him. Particularly as I'm not going to find out that he was abused or neglected or had some other tragic problem growing up other than his mother's death...
Dumbledore: ...What won't happen then?
Snape: I'm certainly not going to see a side of him that I hadn't before and see some of myself or any random relatives of his that aren't his father in him. I'm not going to be drawn to his modesty, intelligence, kindness, or any other virtue you can think of.
Dumbledore: Well, now I think you're just limiting yourself. Would it really be so bad if that did happen?
Snape: It doesn't really matter if it would or would not be since it won't. And finally, I will most certainly not become his favorite teacher and or his mentor. I simply will not do it and this will not become an inspirational story. It will not.
In the first four chapters of The Vanishing Cabinet of Time you find the following: Ron betrays Harry on orders of Dumbledore. Dumbledore maneuvered Hermione Granger into the way of the troll during first year in an attempt to murder the girl. Dumbledore's been dosing both Harry and Hermione with love potions — created by Molly Weasley, of course — to further his control and to make sure that the vast Potter Fortune goes to the Weasleys when Harry is ineveritably killed by Voldemort. Dumbledore's plan is to let Harry get murdered and then swoop in to save the day after the Dark Lord's last horcrux is gone. Harry and Hermione go to Gringotts, where not only are the goblins friendly to Harry, but they get him emancipated, bestow upon him his full fortune, proclaim him a lord, tell him about multiple marriage contracts, list all the ancient families he's related to, and give him a list of homes he now owns. The rest of the story is just as bad.

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.
Defied by Codex Alera. Yes, it is a story about a Farm Boy who becomes a sword-wielding badass, learns the magic system, gets a hot girlfriend, saves the world from an Always Chaotic Evil nonhuman menace, and is secretly the incredibly magically powerful heir to the throne. But it isn't. Perhaps this is due to the Cool vs. Awesome. Or the unique magic system. Or the fact that all the races have been replaced by completely different and awesome things. Or that the main character is the Defied Trope of the Marty Stu. Or maybe because it was written by Jim Butcher.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 cahracters themseves live up to them fully, from the perfect hero (who lives for heroism) to the protagonist, who is such a dadbeat 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 realised 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.

Live-Action TV

The A-Team is an example of an effectively fun Cliché Storm. You know the show's basic formula after an episode or two, but the characters, explosions, and A-Team Firing make the plots entertaining.
The Charmed episode "Chick Flick" parodies all the typical slasher movie cliches when a demon releases psycho killers from horror movies and sends them after the sisters. Since their powers don't work on the killers, the sisters have to follow the typical cliches. And there's a nice little shout out to Psycho.
Piper: "I'm being stalked by psycho killers and I hide in the shower?"
Of the three installments in the Chouseishin Series, Genseishin Justiriser is the one that sticks closest to the standard Sentai formula (e.g. teenagers being chosen to stop an Evil Overlord who was sealed in the past). It's still an enjoyable watch for having excellently shot fights (as is a given with anything produced by Toho), a cast that's decently characterized and for basically being "Power Rangers vs Godzilla kaiju."
Gilmore Girls has an episode in which Rory is moving into her college dorm and another student has lost a bet against his girlfriend and must only speak in cliches. Naturally, a cliché storm follows.
Cruel Summer zig-zags this trope. It has the usual cliches of Girl Posse, Alpha Bitch, Lovable Alpha Bitch, jock characters bullying other kids, bullying in the hallways, and The '90s stereotypes, but on the other hand, it goes far more darker than many high-school series are prepared to go as part of its This Is Reality theme, and has researched into what life was really like in the 1990s in order to provide authenticity.

In How I Met Your Mother episode 3x04 "Little Boys" Robin breaks up with a kid. She realises that he has never been dumped before and she takes advantage of it by using "every cliché in the book":
Robin: We need to talk. I just think, um, we both could use some space right now. It's not you. It's me. Look, I know this hurts, but you deserve someone better. I'm just really trying to focus on my career right now. You know? I just hope we can still be friends.
Alton Brown's commentary in Iron Chef America has been this from the start. The Chairman's conversations with the challenger have turned into this.
La CQ plays more like a stereotypical US high school series, only set in Mexico and with (juvenile) comedy cliches thrown into the mix, while the characters are unrelatable due to being high-school stereotypes.
Legend of the Seeker is a fantasy cliche hurricane. However, many of its fans cite this as why they love the show so much.
In the season 3 finale of Leverage, the team writes a speech for a politician that is intentionally made up of nothing but political speech clichés. The public eats it up. Granted, it was a small country with a one-party democracy, so the public wasn't yet disillusioned with political cliches, and the team took advantage.
Col. Blake of M*A*S*H attempted to give a Rousing Speech in "Crisis" but ended up giving the speech version of this trope. Lampshaded by Trapper:
Trapper: Welcome to the Henry Blake Cliche Festival.
The Musketeers was praised by Barry Shitpeas in Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe for being this:
Barry: Wot I like was, because it had all the things you expect, like a bit where someone hides from a husband, and a bit where a young bloke earns the respect of a slightly older bloke, and a bit where someone's framed for murder because someone's picked up a knife and put a fingerprint on it, and a bit where one of the main characters is going to die, and you're like "oh my god, one of the main characters is going to die!", but then the person who was going to kill them gets shot, and it pulls focus and it's someone surprising who saved them—because it had all of that stuff, you already know. You didn't have to waste time figuring out what it is or what you thought about it, or who these people were. You could just sort of look at it while your mind went into screensaver mode? And that proves it's good drama.
Perfect Disaster. A short Mockumentary-styled Documentary series that focuses on horrible natural disasters—ice storm, fire storm, but the most notable is the cliché storm. While the narrator and various experts explain the science behind the phenomenons (sometimes in cut-away scenes), each episode tells a fictional story about how the citizens and the local government of a given town/city would react to them. The set-up of these stories borrows everything from clichéd disaster movies—mediocre (but decent enough for a TV series) effects, overused character archetypes and interactions, even the camera angles can be guessed if you are savvy enough. While this may undermine the intended realism for some viewers, others enjoy it.
Pitch (2016) zig-zags this trope. On one hand, it's a Jackie Robinson Story about a female entering a male baseball team (the show has some Artistic License – Sports anyway) and has a lot of sport cliches in, but that doesn't have to mean the show is bad because of it.
Prison Break — Okay, maybe it's not quite a storm, but just too many of the characters are overly familiar—the ominous, shade-wearing government guys, the oblivious warden, the brutish guard captain, the aged Mafia guy with an Italian name, the sweet-yet-daring female leads...doesn't have to mean it's a bad show.
Similar to Justirisers up there, Seven Star Fighting God Guyferd (which was also made by Toho) borrows a lot of Henshin Hero cliches, but marries them with a well-rounded cast and great suit designs to make for an entertaining show.
Star Trek developed its own array of cliches which could be reliably trotted out whenever they were short an interesting script. Holodeck malfunctions, transporter malfunctions, The Main Characters Do Everything, Planet of Hats aliens, attack scenes where the camera is shaken around while consoles explode, and usually at least one character who is trying to sort out their relationship with humanity.
- Of note is the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Our Man Bashir", which is mostly an Affectionate Parody of early James Bond movies, which manages both a holodeck malfunction and a transporter malfunction, which can only be sorted out by main character Julian Bashir remaining within the holodeck to save the rest of the crew!
- The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "This Side of Paradise" includes a brief all-cliche speech from Kirk:
  Maybe we weren't meant for paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can't stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums.
Stargate SG-1:
- The characters would occasionally indulge in volleys of cliches. O'Neill in particular had a tendency to refer to the Goa'uld as having "very clichéd" behavior, and the last scene in the series is of the characters reciting various proverbs and cliches.
  "The probe indicates a sustainable atmosphere. Temperature 78 degrees Fahrenheit. Barometric pressure is normal."
  "No obvious signs of civilization."
  "P4X-884 looks like an untouched paradise, sir."
  "Appearances may be deceiving."
  "One man's ceiling is another man's floor."
  "A fool's paradise is a wise man's hell."
  "Never run with... scissors?"
- In the very last episode of Stargate SG-1, at the end, the team use a large amount of cliches to describe what they've learned from their experiences. "Beggars can't be choosers. Better late than never. Look before you leap." "The best things in life are free."
  Vala: Let me guess, beauty is only skin deep?
  Daniel: Silence is golden.
  Cam: Jack of all trades, master of none.
  Sam: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
- Then Vala says "Life is too short", a statement repeated throughout the episode (and Daniel and Vala's time-erased relationship) but supposedly forgotten when the Reset Button was hit. Suggesting, interestingly, that somehow Vala remembers what happened.
The Supernatural episode "Monster Movie". Every classic horror movie cliche you can think of—because the bad guy, a shapeshifter, is deliberately invoking them. The entire episode is an Affectionate Parody of the old Universal monster movies, right down to the way it's shot.
T.J. Hooker is very guilty of being this for cop shows. Every storyline, you've seen before. All of the character types and stereotypes are here. The villains tend to have no characterization, largely being inhumane monsters. The show is such a Cliché Storm, that you might think you're watching a parody of cop shows rather than the real deal.
On The West Wing, when Bartlet debated his Strawman Political opponent Robert Ritchie, we hear a snippet of one of Ritchie's responses that goes like this:
...and the partisan bickering. Now, I want people to work together in this great country. And that's what I did in Florida, I brought people together, and that's what I'll do as your president: end the logjam, end the gridlock, and bring Republicans together with Democrats, 'cause Americans are tired of partisan politics. (Applause)
The X-Files: "The Post-Modern Prometheus" is one giant, spiral-sliced, and deliciously smoked ham.
Every single Mexican and Brazilian soap opera (and most Korean ones that is over 40 episodes long) is this in spades. You always have the poor girl, who gets beloved with the rich guy, who also falls in love but has a scheduled marriage with another woman (which usually is only interested in his money only), the Corrupt Corporate Executive who is the good guy's rival and wants to get his fortune (and sometimes teams up with the evil woman to do so) and so on and so on.
The Mysteries of Laura is a crime show that hits all the typical crime show clichés. Laura is a divorced single mother of Bratty Half-Pint twins who are out of control and constantly getting into trouble. Her boss is her ex-husband with whom she has large amounts of UST. She's a wise-cracking, tough as nails woman with a heart of gold who does everything despite the presence of other detectives who would be expected to help out. She regularly breaks rules in the course of an investigation, up to and including doing illegal searches and breaking the chain of custody for evidence (and not collecting evidence properly) in a way that would almost certainly get the evidence thrown out of court in any other show. The show plays this completely straight.
Red Dwarf: Lampshaded in series XI when a bunch of evil simuloids use Time Travel to conquer the Earth's past, and Lister calls them horribly cliché. This continues later in the episode (paraphrased):
Simuloid: Well, well, We Meet Again!
Lister: Smeggin' hell, you boys really are walking cartoons, aren't you?
Simuloid: I think we are not so different, you and I.
Reboot The Guardian Code hits this hard. While the original series would often affectionately parody various cliches about video games and cartoons, this one plays it straight. The heroes are ordinary high school students who find that the video game they like playing together was really meant to Recruit Teenagers with Attitude to stop a Generic Dooms Day Villain who doesn't do anything but menacingly spout threats about his Evil Plan.
Emily in Paris: The series has been criticized by reviewers (especially the French) for being this, and not in a good way. Basically, they feel it's portraying every French stereotype including the French Jerk stereotype, and pretty negatively too.

Music

Brad Paisley's "Then". Could there be a more cliché chorus line than "And now you're my whole life / Now you're my whole world / And I just can't believe the way I feel about you, girl"?

Carrie Underwood's "See You Again" is four minutes of "you're dead, but I'm not sad" clichés that have been done a million times. It also sounds like all the "sad" songs you always hear on movie soundtracks (it was written for one of the Chronicles of Narnia films). It's telling that, out of all the "story behind the song" entries in the now-defunct Country Weekly magazine, this song had by far the shortest—it barely took up half a page!
Also from Underwood is "Something in the Water", which is full of religious redemption clichés about how the narrator is "changed" and "stronger". It even resorts to the ultimate religious cliché—ending with an interpolation of Amazing Freaking Grace.

Dschinghis Khan: Their music is pretty cliché, but "Moskau" really takes the cake.
Céline Dion's albums are a veritable clichefest. Her first seven albums (not counting her Christmas Album) feature no fewer than 27 songs with the word love in the title. That's about 1/5th of the songs she recorded. She outdid herself on "The Colour of My Love" where half of the songs (and the title of the album) feature the word love.
- Toto are pretty similar; about half their songs follow the formula of 'I love you very much <insert female name as title of song>.' It got so bad, they named one song (admittedly a good one) 99. On their second album.
Nearly anything written by Diane Warren, including Céline Dion's "Because You Loved Me" ("You were my strength when I was weak / You were my voice when I couldn't speak...") or LeAnn Rimes (or Trisha Yearwood's) "How Do I Live" ("How do I live without you? I want to know / How do I breathe without you if you ever go? / How do I ever, ever survive?). Also, count how many times she used the phrase "in this moment" in Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing".
"The Radio Is Broken" by Frank Zappa is basically just Frank and Roy Estrada reading a laundry list of 1950's, Sci-Fi, Space Movie clichés, and it is hilarious.
The charity single "Just Stand Up!" Justified in that the song was written so that sales could go to the cause (Just Stand Up For Cancer) and for inspirational purposes, and therefore wasn't intended to be original.
Practically every line of "Roar" by Katy Perry is a well-worn cliché. Special mention goes to the fact that the chorus ("I've got the eye of the tiger/The fighter, dancing through the fire/'Cause I am a champion/And you're gonna hear me roar") uses lyrical concepts from three other famous songs.
Kelly Clarkson's "Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You)", as Todd in the Shadows points out in his review of the song:
Todd: Let me try and explain. So in case the title didn't give it away, apparently Kelly has been dumped again, but she's okay, because you know what always makes me feel better after a breakup? Cliches. Lots of them.
Kelly: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger / Stand a little taller / Doesn't mean I'm lonely when I'm alone / Just me, myself and I
Todd: When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. Nice guys finish last. Knowledge is power. Winners don't use drugs. My God, the pain of being dumped is already fading.
Symphonic metal band Edenbridge's "Place of Higher Power," replete with such turns of phrase as "it's a jungle out there," "beauty's only skin deep," "what a tangled web we weave," and "working like a charm."
The reaction many had to Linkin Park's Meteora, mainly because the lyrics are all about the narrator and how everyone else is wrong.
Michael Jackson could fall into this.
- His last large-scale video, "You Rock My World", is a rehash of elements from his Bad/Dangerous-era videos: 1930s/'40s gangster motif ("Smooth Criminal"), Jackson having to prove he's tough ("Bad"—the phrase "You ain't nothin'" appears in both), celebrity appearances ("Liberian Girl", "Remember the Time", etc.), and Jackson pursuing a sexy girl ("The Way You Make Me Feel").
- It has a tearjerker reputation, but "Gone Too Soon" is really just a list of tired similes ("Like a perfect flower/That is just beyond your reach/Gone too soon").
Almost eveything ever released by Ronnie James Dio... although, to be honest, rocking like this when you're around 70 is still pretty damned awesome.
- "He has songs of/ Wildebeests and angels/ He has soared/ on the wings of a deeee-mon!!!..."
Thompson Square's "If I Didn't Have You" is stuffed with clichés: "Sometimes, sunshine gets lost in the rain", "I couldn't live without you, baby, I wouldn't want to", "You are my heart, every breath I breathe…" etc. Even worse, they already used "every breath I breathe" only two singles prior on "I Got You".
Van Halen's song "Why Can't This Be Love", also overlapping with redundancy:
Only time will tell/ if we stand the test of time
The careers of many pop-punk bands—most notably Screeching Weasel, The Riverdales, that sort of thing—could be called this, due to their fanboyish emulation of The Ramones. This doesn't mean it's not still awesome. In some cases, pop punk bands do get really generic and cliched in a bad way.
The story of the Mannheim Steamroller album and TV special The Christmas Angel: A Family Story seems built from a list of Christmas and/or winter fantasy cliches: living toys (a cat, a teddy bear, a snowman, and a toy soldier); a monster who hates the holiday, wrecks the town square and steals the eponymous angel (which represents the spirit of the season) from the top of its Christmas tree to ruin everything; a trip by the heroine and toys to the icy north to confront him; and a happy ending wherein the villain is reformed by the power of goodness.
The lyrics Cosmos' (and Chaos') themes in Dissidia Final Fantasy might as well have been a long list of cliched fantasy phrases run through a computer algorithm and edited by a non-native English Speaker. The songs are still catchy, though they owe far more to the kickass score and excellent performance than the written content.
In the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Iolanthe, the song "If You Go In You're Sure To Win" is made up of clichés. The first verse and chorus go
Lord Mountarat: If you go in You're sure to win—
Yours will be the charming maidie:
Be your law The ancient saw, "Faint heart never won fair lady!"
All: Never, never, never, Faint heart never won fair lady!
Every journey has an end—
When at the worst affairs will mend—
Dark the dawn when day is nigh—
Hustle your horse and don't say die!
The songs of Rhapsody of Fire are mostly grandiose fantasy stories with every cliché played with emotion and seemingly totally seriously. "Go, mighty warrior! The kings of enchanted lands are awaiting your victory. Ride on the wings of wisdom. Ride beyond the Middle Valleys to defeat the master of Chaos in the name of cosmic justice!"
Most of the output of Electric Light Orchestra is a cliché festival, but "Tightrope" (from A New World Record) compounds it on the opening line with Shaped Like Itself:
They say some days you're gonna win,
They say some days you're gonna lose,
I tell you I've got news for you,
You're losin' all the time you never win, no.
Tom Waits's "Step Right Up" is mostly a collection of advertising catchphrases and cliches.
Invoked and parodied by Bruce Springsteen with "My Best Was Never Good Enough," where the lyrics, except for the title and "Come'on pretty baby, call my bluff" are nothing but clichés, including a Take That! to Forrest Gump.
"Now life's like a box of chocolates
You never know what you're gonna get
Stupid is as stupid does and all the rest of that shit."
Most of the output by the Power Metal group Twilight Force falls into this, deliberately so as it is an Affectionate Parody and a celebration of many classical High Fantasy tropes from things such as Dungeons & Dragons and Heroes of Might and Magic which served as a mayor source of inspiration for the group.
Most of Taylor Swift's country-pop output seemed to be nothing but "fairy tale" (with lyrics like "you a prince and me a princess") and "being in a movie" clichés with a bit of outsider-vs.-popular cheerleader thrown in. And how many songs have there been that incorporated Superman in its lyrics?
Shania Twain's recorded library is full of estrogen-soaked cowgirl-on-the-prowl cliches with lyrics like "You're a fine piece of real estate and I'm gonna get me some land" (I'm Gonna Getcha Good!) and "I'm gonna put some 'up' in your 'giddy'" (Giddy Up).
Irene Cara's "starring me" platitudes from the themes from Fame and Flashdance are what young showbiz wannabes considered to be their anthems. "I'm gonna live forever/I'm gonna learn how to fly" were just 80s versions of standards like "You Ought to Be in Pictures" only changing second person liberally to first person.
Bad Company's "Shooting Star" is an oft-told story (not necessarily musically) about a kid who cuts his musical teeth on the Beatles, gets a guitar, leaves home to seek fame and fortune, becomes a superstar, and at the pinnacle of his stardom is found dead from sleeping pills and alcohol. With "Don't you know" thrown in the refrain many times.
Take Jay & the Americans' "Come a Little Bit Closer," add Jim Croce's "Bad Bad Leroy Brown," mix with a generous helping of redneck, and you have Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Gimme Three Steps." All three tell of a guy at a bar trying to score with a jealous man's girl/wife. Kip Adotta's "Wet Dream" plays this for laughs.

Newspapers

All the reviews for The Princess and the Frog seem to be loaded with glowing, poster-ready clichés:
- LA Times
- Entertainment Weekly

Podcasts

In Chapo Trap House, Will, Felix and Bryan all praise Mayans M.C. for this, calling it a "Facebook show" and recommending it to anyone looking for 'fire in the blood', anyone who is sick of shows where you can't guess exactly what will happen, and where there aren't scenes of gun violence set to Mexican rap music.

Tabletop Games

Official Dungeons & Dragons publications intentionally play to every fantasy cliche imaginable with the understanding that if a DM doesn't like the standard way of doing things, s/he can always change it for his/her campaign.
Magic: The Gathering set Innistrad is this for Gothic horror. Zombies, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, curses, mad scientists and their stitched-together, Frankenstein's-Monster-esque creations, all present and accounted for. Even Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde put in an appearance! (It should be clarified that this is the point; Innistrad was developed top-down as a flavorful horror-themed block). Cliché Storms are often a deliberate goal when designing new cards. There's only so much space on each card to communicate what it is supposed to represent, so leaning into familiar tropes does more with less. For example, if they want you to feel like your piece of cardboard is a dragon, you're more likely to see mechanics representing a Dragon Hoard, a Lazy Dragon, or a Breath Weapon than Our Dragons Are Different.

Theatre

Cirque du Soleil's KÀ, their only show to put its Excuse Plot front and center, is a conventional heroic journey: royal twins are separated when their kingdom is attacked and their parents killed by evil forces; they and their sidekicks (some wacky, some serious) go through a variety of adventures to be reunited and help defeat the army. Each finds romance along the way, the Twin Brother with a villain's daughter and the Twin Sister with a Tarzan-like forest hero. The pleasure of the show is watching it unfold without intelligible dialogue and with oodles of Scenery Porn and acrobatics.

Visual Novels

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony invokes this trope with the culprits who fall for Monokuma's traps.
- The protagonist, Kaede Akamatsu; although not before the detective, Shuichi Saihara is convicted.
- Kirumi Tojo, the maid, playing into The Bulter Did It.
- Korekiyo Shinguji, the serial killer with a trepidatious aura.
- Gonta Gokuhara, the Nice Guy of the group.
- Kaito Momota, the astronaut with the Awesome Ego.
- As it turns out, the first case was a trick. The real culprit was the cosplayer.

Web Animation

The fourth installment of Bunnykill is chock full of various anime clichés, including over the top violence, super modes, ninja jutsu, and the Disposable Woman. Word of God states this was intentional.
Dusk's Dawn. Obviously Evil Generic Doomsday Villain (who doesn’t even have a name), an Ensemble Cast mirroring the Mane Six, the villain tries to convince the heroes that he's changed, only to be hatching another plot, and several others.
Manga Soprano: Later chapters revolve around the protagonist having an evil sister who wants to ruin them. Said sister's schemes appear successful until the protagonist points out that whatever she seeks to take from them is still safe, prompting the evil sister to realize she picked the wrong person. Depending on the story, she might have a change of heart.
Refreshing Stories: Almost every story involves Hiroshi being cheated on, or other bad things occurring to him. Hiroshi will sometimes lampshade this in some episodes.
RWBY's first few episodes immediately call into mind familiar anime narrative devices found in the classroom setting and characters. There's a cute, optimistic fifteen-year-old Action Girl who dreams of being a hero. There's a mysterious Ninja, clad in black, who likes to read and initially shies away from the protagonist's attempt at befriending her. There's a wealthy, arrogant Ice Queen who isn't as cruel as she seems. There's a Hot-Blooded Cool Big Sis who enjoys punching evil in the face. They are all the equivalent of college students (with the exception of Ruby, who is High School aged, but was pushed up 2 years due to her skill) in a Hero Academy. It also has a horde of mindless, ugly creatures preying upon humankind, and the main characters are explicitly said to be based off fairy tales or mythological characters. However, the creators revealed they did this intentionally in panels and interviews, so they can use the setup as a jumping-off point to later subvert, flesh out, downplay, or deconstruct those same tropes in later seasons.

Webcomics

Invoked in 1/0—it's the only way to summon the Running Gag.

Electric Wonderland has a comic featuring a superhero who was a farmboy, who was nuked into space, hit by cosmic rays, then told by his parents he was an alien, and then woke up with superpowers.
Erma has so far featured just about every horror cliche known to the genre. All done intentionally, however, as the comic is supposed to be a G-rated Affectionate Parody of the horror genre.
Catch a Mad in Narbonic not spouting off every Mad Scientist cliche ever and you will find a Mad letting the side down. If you can't rant for at least an hour about THOSE FOOLS THAT CALLED ME MAD!, then you are sane and don't belong.

An in-universe example was done by Real Life Comics during a dimension-hopping adventure where they wound up in a world where "everything is a Sliders cliche!". Naturally, this involved their dimension-traveling device fizzling out, a doomsday scenario, joining and fighting a rag-tag resistance group led by a double of someone they knew, getting involved with and solving the world's problems and a last second escape. Well, almost all their problems.
Alt Dave: That's great, but what about the huge freaking asteroid about to hit the planet?!
Tony: Sorry, pal! You're on your own!

Late in Concerned, a group of rebels who embody various war movie clichés, from the Wide-Eyed Idealist to the Jerkass who undergoes Redemption Equals Death, join Gordon Frohman's squad, only for Frohman to accidentally vaporize them all with the secondary fire mode of his pulse rifle before the cliches can happen.

Web Original

The most cliched pasta in the history of Creepypastas, Crappypastas and Trollpastas.exe is a parody specifically written to use every single cliché listed on the Creepypasta Wiki.

Web Videos

Western Animation

Whether intentional or not, The Fairly OddParents! feels like an example of this right from the start. There are scenes after scenes and jokes after jokes that one can almost guess the outcome, or ask oneself, "Why have I heard of this before?" At the worst one will emit an inner groan at the overused joke, but also at times one can find it charming.
- In many ways, the show is just a faster-paced, more manic, more joke-dense version of standard "middle class suburban grade school kid" animated shows. Many characters, particularly the parents, are almost absurdist caricatures of cliches.
Everything in Final Space, from the plots to the characters to the dialogue. Naturally, it's all an Affectionate Parody, or at the very least Tropes Are Tools and/or Narm Charm.
The character of the Archmage on Gargoyles was a deliberate Cliché Storm—indeed, his primary weakness is his love affair with villain cliches, which prevents him from utilizing his godlike magical power to the fullest possible extent.
LEGO's BIONICLE and Hero Factory both started out playing all their tropes very, very straight in their first few years, although still managing to be enjoyable. The former became more subversive and ascended to Troperiffic in its later years, while the latter branched off a little in later years but was still pretty cliched.

I Am Weasel had an episode which parodies almost every cartoon cliché as part of its plot of Weasel and Baboon making a new cartoon show.

Kung Fu Dino Posse has everything you'd expect to find in a Ninja Turtles knockoff: Five-Man Band fighting the Monster of the Week sent by the Generic Doomsday Villain and his Bumbling Sidekick.
The Mega Man (Ruby-Spears) animated series specialized in giving its viewers a sense of familiarity, from plots such as "I wanna be a real boy" and "shrunken protagonist" to "hypnotic hard rock."
Miraculous Ladybug. Aside from the Paris setting, the heroine's powers, and its aesthetic, it's a fairly run-of-the-mill teenage superhero series with Magical Girl sensibilities, what with a thematic Monster of the Week every episode, B-plots involving typical school issues, the leads romantically interested in each other's alter egos, an incredibly hammy Obviously Evil villain, and archetypical characters. The show was originally meant for teenagers and young adults, but took a Lighter and Softer tone because networks weren't interested in the original pitch. Comments from the creator suggest some of his originally darker ideas would've made characters unlikable, as he seems to have more fun with the campier approach.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: Equestria Girls has a new girl adjusting to school! Bumping into a cute Nice Guy! Who plays guitar! And is the former boyfriend of a popular girl with a snotty attitude! They share a Third-Act Misunderstanding! A school dance! Clique drama! A cheesy pop song (which isn't even in the movie)! All these high school tropes, and more! Averted by the end, however, when it has a Genre Shift.
Pepper Ann and Braceface were this to the Slice of Life genre; the latter's theme song even sings about this trope.
The 2010 reboot of Pound Puppies. While not a bad one, there's nothing really new about it and the plots are fairly predictable.
- And there are some worse examples. The 1980s version, for instance, gave us The Legend of Big Paw.

A common criticism of Storm Hawks is that you're not likely to find much in terms of "original" ideas for plots or characters; you could call it "Cliché Storm Hawks" and no one would argue. However, many will also say that's one of the show's strengths as it plays its cliches to the hilt and just has fun with them.
Thunder Cats 2011 trots out well-worn clichés by the dozen, but uses the pretext of its planet-wide Fantasy Kitchen Sink and Schizo Tech to play Genre Roulette with those it employs. Stock plots from High Fantasy, Wooden Ships and Iron Men, Space Opera and Western all get their turns at bat, often while mashed up with two to three other genres.

The point of Total Drama is to be a Category-5 Cliché Hurricane, especially for Reality TV tropes. Played for Laughs.
What's New, Scooby-Doo? was full of this, playing all the usual frequently-pointed out Scooby-Doo tropes straight (such as Let's Split Up, Gang!, Scooby-Dooby Doors, You Meddling Kids, etc.) or lampshading them.
- Every Scooby-Doo expy Hanna-Barbera made were full of Scooby clichés.
Batman Beyond during its second and third seasons. Clichés common to superheroes, high school, and in general were rampant, with some even being used more than once. Technically the first season had plenty of such clichés too, but they weren't the focus of whole episodes as often as in season 2, after the series basically abandoned its Myth Arc in favor of an episodic format, which resulted in a myriad of filler stories centered on standard plots.
Every competitor in Wacky Races was a cliché: the macho hero with a Lantern Jaw of Justice (Peter Perfect); a burly lumberjack (Rufus Ruffcut and wisecracking animal sidekick Sawtooth); A gung-ho Army sergeant and his ineffective private (Sgt. Blast and Meekly); a gang of Damon Runyon-esque mobsters (the Ant Hill Mob); a crackpot inventor (Prof. Pat Pending); a girly girl (Penelope Pitstop); two hirsute cavemen (the Slag Brothers); a pair of monsters, one short, the other hulking (the Gruesome Twosome); a German WWI pilot adorned in red (Red Max); a lazy hillbilly (Luke and his nervous wreck of an animal sidekick Blubber Bear), and a Harmless Villain (Dick Dastardly and his wisecracking animal sidekick Muttley).
BoJack Horseman's Show Within a Show, Philbert, is remarked on being this In-Universe, being a generic 'gritty' Detective Drama with pompous Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane and Kudzu Plot elements, a nauseating Rated M for Manly and Darker and Edgier tone, and degrading treatment of women. Despite this, the first season ends up being a hit, due to having the feminist Diane in the script editing room, who is well aware of how bad the show is, and does her best to turn it into a Deconstruction of what it is while adding in Meta Casting elements to Catch the Conscience of BoJack. The cast also end up elevating it, with one reviewer noting that BoJack's performance turns "a generic bad boy detective into a barely scabbed-over wound". The second season nosedives back into generic gibberish due to the absence of Diane, which both BoJack and his costar Gina notice and complain about.

Real Life

Bernard Montgomery's address to the British Eighth Army◊ shortly before the battle of El Alamein was filled with cliches, and he was known for being fond of using them in general.

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Sound Waves of the Heart

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Cliché Storm

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