Hello Matthias,

Cont'd from page 1 ...

Story is based in whole or part on a D&D game or world.

A party of D&D characters (usually including a fighter, a magic-user,
and a thief, one of whom is a half-elf and one a dwarf) enters a
dungeon (or the wilderness, or a town, or a tavern) and fights monsters (usually including orcs).

Story is the origin story of a D&D character, culminating in their
hooking up with a party of adventurers.

A group of real-world humans who like roleplaying find themselves
transported to D&D world.

An alien or an AI/robot/android observes and comments on the peculiar
habits of humans, for allegedly comic effect.

The alien or AI is fluent in English and completely familiar with
various English idioms, but is completely unfamiliar with human biology
and/or with such concepts as sex or violence and/or with certain
specific extremely common English words (such as "cat").

The alien or AI takes everything literally.

Instead of an alien or AI, it's people in the future commenting on the ridiculous things (usually including internal combustion engines) that
people used to use in the unenlightened past.

Space travel is wonderful and will solve all our problems. [We agree
that space travel is pretty cool, but we'd rather that weren't the
whole point of the story.]

Man has an awful, shrewish wife; in the end he gets revenge on her,
by (for example) killing her or leaving her.

Man is entirely blameless, innocent, mild-mannered, and unobjectionable,
and he kills his awful, shrewish wife entirely by accident, possibly in self-defense, so it's okay.

Some characters are in favor of immersive VR, while others are opposed
to it because it's not natural; they spend most of the story's length
rehashing common arguments on both sides. [Full disclosure: one of our
editors once wrote a story like this. It hasn't found a publisher yet,
for some reason.]

Person A tells a story to person B (or to a room full of people) about
person C.

In the end, it turns out that person B is really person C (or from the
same organization).

In the end, it turns out that person A is really person C (or has the
same goals).

In the end, there's some other ironic but predictable twist that would
cast the whole story in a different light if the reader hadn't guessed
the ending early on.

People whose politics are different from the author's are shown to be
stupid, insane, or evil, usually through satire, sarcasm, stereotyping,
and wild exaggeration.

In the future, the US or the world is ruled by politically correct
liberals, leading to awful things (usually including loss of freedom
of speech).

In the future, the US or the world is ruled by fascist conservatives,
leading to awful things (usually including loss of freedom of speech).

Superpowered narrator claims that superhero stories never address the
mundane problems that superheroes would run into in the real world.

A princess has been raped or molested by her father (or stepfather),
the king.

Someone comes up with a great medical or technological breakthrough,
but it turns out that it has unforeseen world-devastating consequences.
[Again, this is a perfectly good plot element, but we're not thrilled
when it's the whole point of the story.]

It's immediately obvious to the reader that a mysterious character
is from the future, but the other characters (usually including the protagonist) can't figure it out.

Someone takes revenge for the wrongs done to them.

Protagonist is put through heavy-handed humiliation after humiliation,
and takes it meekly, until the end when he or she murders someone.

The narrator and/or male characters in the story are bewildered about
women, believing them to conform to any of the standard stereotypes
about women: that they're mysterious, wacky, confusing, unpredictable, changeable, temptresses, etc.

Strange and mysterious things keep happening. And keep happening. And
keep happening. For over half the story. Relentlessly. Without even a
hint of explanation.

The protagonist is surrounded by people who know the explanation but
refuse to give it.

Story consists mostly of surreal dreamlike randomness.

Author showcases their premise of what the afterlife is like; there's
little or no story, other than demonstrating that premise.

Hell and Heaven are run like businesses.

The afterlife is really monotonous and dull.

The afterlife is a bureaucracy.

The afterlife is nothingness.

The afterlife reunites you with your loved ones.

Brutal violence against women is depicted in loving detail, often in a
story that's ostensibly about violence against women being bad.

Man is forced by circumstances or magic to rape a woman even though he
really doesn't want to, honest.

The main reason for the main female character to be in the story, and
to be female, is so that she can be raped.

Evil people hook the protagonist on an addictive substance and then
start raising the price, ruining the protagonist's life.

Fatness is used as a signal of evil, dissolution, and/or moral decay,
usually with the unspoken assumption that it's completely obvious that
fat people are immoral and disgusting. [Note: This does not mean all
fat characters in stories must be good guys. We're just tired of seeing
fat used as a cheap shorthand signifier of evil.]

Someone wants to kill someone else, and that's perfectly reasonable
because, after all, the victim-to-be is fat.

The story spends a lot of time describing, over and over, just how fat
a character is, and how awful that is.

Physical contact with a fat person is understood to be obviously
revolting.

Protagonist agrees to go along with a plan or action despite not having
enough information about it, and despite their worries that the thing
will be bad. Then the thing turns out to be bad after all.

Teen's family doesn't understand them.

Twee little fairies with wings fly around being twee.

Sentient toys, much like the ones from Toy Story, interact with each
other.

In a comedic/satirical story, vampires and/or other supernatural
creatures come out publicly and demand (and/or get) the vote and other
rights, but people are prejudiced against them.

At the end of the story, one of the characters starts to write This
Very Story that we're reading. (Often, some or all of the opening
paragraph is repeated at the end.) [This is different from just
ordinary first-person narration; this kind of story is usually in
third person, and the Writing This Very Story is usually presented
as a surprise.]

An unnamed character turns out, in the end, to be God.

The toy that the character is playing with (or the project that
they've been working on) turns out to be Earth or the Universe.

Story consists of recipes for, or descriptions of, killing and eating
sentient beings (usually fantastical creatures).

There's a machine that cryptically predicts the manner of a person's
death by printing it on a slip of paper; the machine is never wrong,
but often it's right in surprising or ironic ways. [There's nothing
wrong with the Machine of Death anthologies, but we've seen a large
number of MoD rejects, and we're extremely unlikely to buy one.]

Story is set in a world in which some common modern Western power
structure is inverted, and we're meant to sympathize with the people
who are oppressed in the world of the story. [Such stories usually
end up reinforcing the real-world dominant paradigm; and regardless,
they rarely do anything we haven't seen many times before.]

Women have more power than men, and it's very sad how oppressed
the men are.

Everyone in the society is gay or lesbian, and straight people are
considered perverts.

White people are oppressed by oppressive people with other skin colors.

Kids with special abilities are kidnapped by the government and
imprisoned and tested in a lab.

Title consists entirely of a string of digits.

Baby or child is put in danger, in a contrived way, in order to
artificially boost narrative tension.

Someone encounters some magical or otherwise apparently impossible
phenomenon. In the end, it turns out that it's real!

A character says things that the other characters consider to be
irrational, paranoid, or obviously impossible, but in the end it turns
out that character was right!

The author attempts to lead the reader to think a character is going
to die, but instead the character is uploaded into VR or undergoes some
other transformative but non-dying process.

Someone dies and then wanders around as a ghost.

They meet other ghosts who've been around longer and who show them the
ropes, and/or help them come to terms with being dead, and/or explain
that nobody knows what happens after ghosts move on to the next stage
of the afterlife.

They're initially stuck in the place where they died or the place
where their body is. In some cases, they eventually figure out how to
roam the world.

Aliens and/or far-future posthumans think, talk, and behave just like upper-middle-class Americans from the 20th or early 21st century.

The story's main (usually only) female character doesn't have much subjectivity; we see her only (or at least primarily) through the
idealizing eyes of a male character.

Humanity's problems (such as war, mental health issues, disease, or bad political leaders) turn out to be secretly caused by aliens, demons, or
other inimical non-humans.

Return to main fiction guidelines page.


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story cliches) per se.

Oh, and thanks! We're glad you like the list.

Strange Horizons. Strangest collection of bad stories ever found.

I think that just about covers it.
Unless somebody else has something else to add.

--Lee

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