How Tropes Cannibalize Creativity
Ask any ten authors why they started writing, and you’ll get answers along the lines of “I wanted to tell the kinds of stories I couldn’t find anywhere else.”
It’s true that we’re storytellers first. But sooner or later, every writer who wants to share his work with the world runs up against the walls of genre tropes.
For a brief moment—if you’re lucky—you’ll believe you’ve found your niche. You’ll think you’ve stumbled onto a hidden pocket of publishing that’s eager to reward originality. Then you’ll watch that same niche congeal around you, hardening into a set of expectations that has little to do with reader taste and everything to do with marketing convenience and algorithmic slotting.
This pattern has repeated so many times that by now, no one should be surprised. But every generation of writers is caught off guard by the same seductive illusion: If you just squeeze your story into the right-shaped box, you’ll find your audience.
But what no one tells you is that by the time the label on that box has been printed, sealed, and approved by the gatekeepers, the contents have already passed their sell-by date.
Related: Why “Science Fiction” and “Fantasy” Are Dead
Let’s be blunt. Leaning on genre tropes and labels isn’t just creatively lazy. It’s spiritually bankrupt. And it’s one of the main reasons why the publishing industry keeps choking on its own output.
Author Lidiya Foxglove’s reflections on the rise and fall of cozy fantasy are the perfect case study in this process of creative decay. In her video, she describes how thrilling it felt to see a genre she longed for finally catch fire with readers—only to watch that fire smother itself under a damp pile of tropes and self-referential “must-haves.”
Screen shot: The Cozy Creative
At first, cozy fantasy sounded like a dream: slice-of-life comfort reads, warm settings, stakes so low you could step over them in slippers. But almost overnight, the possibilities collapsed. In place of experimentation, you got a checklist:
Tea shop? Check.
Cinnamon roll romance? Check.
World building so nonthreatening it might as well be shrink-wrapped? Check.
And so a genre that was supposed to be a refuge for imagination quickly calcified, marketed to readers as a commodity rather than an artwork.
The fate of cozy fantasy is what happens every time authors collectively chase a hot label. The first breakout book feels revolutionary. Everyone in the business scrambles to find more material just like it. Within eighteen months, the novelty has been strip-mined, and every new release is a warmed over retread.
It’s not that readers can’t tolerate familiarity. As Foxglove points out, everyone who has ever finished a fantastic book has gone in search of more fiction to scratch that same itch. The trouble is when the itch becomes the entire purpose, and the genre becomes a product line engineered for pandering to the lowest common denominator.
Image: Warner Bros. Pictures
This hunger to pin down genres is not natural to readers. It’s an artifact of marketing and logistics; an expedient tool for publishers, distributors, and, currently, the algorithms that dictate more about what gets read than any acquisitions editor ever could.
The late Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey practically codified this process in the twentieth century. In an act of brand building that should have been recognized for the cultural catastrophe it was, they decided fantasy should be defined in narrow terms: Tolkien-lite trilogies with male farm boys, wise old mentors, and a comfortable epic arc. For science fiction, the approach was similar: sterilized space opera, adventure with just enough pseudoscience to keep the nerds engaged, without straying too far from the status quo.
Those guardrails were justified as a way to “give readers what they want.” In truth, they were about giving bookstores and magazines an easy way to shelve and sell books by their cover art. They were about inventory control, not artistic exploration.
Related: Why Vulcan Morality Isn’t Enough
Fast forward to today, and the same cycle repeats itself in newpub, only faster. Instead of shelf space, the gatekeeper is the recommendation robot. Instead of a literary agent asking if you have a blog, you have a soulless algorithm deciding whether your metadata hits the right thresholds.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing about space wizards or monster boyfriends. By the time the genre label has been affixed, the boundaries of acceptable content are already narrowing. In the rush to define what works, all the weirdness and human unpredictability that make stories memorable get squeezed out.
Foxglove notes how every fresh genre feels limitless at first. She describes her own experience jumping into Reverse Harem—a concept with roots in anime and manga. At first, it felt liberating. But as the genre gained popularity, it too collapsed into a set of obligatory tropes: enemies to lovers, dark brooding love interests, an unspoken checklist that publishers, readers, and algorithms all began to enforce.
The same pattern played out again with cozy fantasy. Legends & Lattes set the tone, then everyone else was expected to follow it. You could practically see the boundaries forming: no trauma, no real darkness, and certainly nothing too challenging. The genre went from promising to predictable in less than two years.
That is the tragedy of tropes. They start as touchstones—shorthand to help readers find their bearings—and end up as handcuffs. Because once an audience is conditioned to expect a fixed set of ingredients, authors must comply or risk irrelevance.
You can tell yourself you’ll be the one to break the mold, but as Foxglove’s experience showed, genuinely breaking the mold means you will almost certainly fail commercially—at least at first. Because the system isn’t designed to reward creativity. It’s designed to reward predictability.
“So,” you may be saying to yourself, “the way to succeed is by writing to market within a hot genre while making sure to use the accepted tropes.”
And you’re not the only one.
Writers often tell themselves that playing it safe is the smart move. If you just pick the right label, the right subgenre, and the right set of tropes, you’ll hit the sweet spot.
But the reality is that there is no safe option. Trends die. Algorithms change. Readers burn out.
When your work is built on a foundation of marketing conventions rather than your honest vision, you’ll always be the last to know when the game has changed. The supposed rock you clung to for stability becomes a millstone dragging you down.
On the flip side, the writers who endure are the ones who build their careers on foundations dug deeper than genre tropes. They pour their tastes, sensibilities, and irreducible humanity onto the page. That’s what readers connect with; not the label on the back cover.
You can see this dynamic at work in the lasting popularity of Tolkien himself. He didn’t sit down to write “fantasy.” He set out to create a mythos. And he did it not by skimming popular tropes, but by inventing languages to tell the stories he needed to tell. The label was slapped on later by marketers.
If your highest aspiration is to fit perfectly inside a genre box, you are building a mausoleum for your imagination.
So, what do we do instead? If the labels are a trap, and the tropes are a dead end, where do we look?
The answer is deceptively simple: We look inward. We write what we love, and we do it with ruthless honesty. We trust that the readers will find us, not because our book was slotted into the right category, but because it speaks to their humanity. That is the fundamental truth most publishers are terrified to admit: Unique voices are unpredictable, and therefore unmanageable.
Yes, there will always be readers who want more of the same. But there are also readers starving for what they haven’t seen before: a story that feels alive, not engineered. And when you write to satisfy them, you stop manufacturing product and become a maker of art again.
It’s past time to stop treating genre as a life raft. Because it’s not; it’s a plush coffin that guarantees creative suffocation.
Whether you’re a writer or a reader, the question you should be asking isn’t “Does this fit the label?” It’s “Does this story feel true and alive?”
Neither the marketplace, the gatekeepers, nor the algorithm will make that change for you. Only you can decide that labels don’t matter; that you will not be confined by the dead comfort of tropes. The choice to create art that can’t be reduced to a product code lies with you.
If you want to rediscover the joy that first brought you to stories, there is only one way: Tear up the label, smash the mold, and write like nobody’s watching.
Because the truth is, despite all the noise, readers don’t care about genres, tropes, or trends. They care about human connection. They want a story that evokes a genuine emotional response, not a hazy secondhand memory of Hey, that’s familiar.
So bury the tropes, and get back to work making stories worth remembering.
You can watch Lidiya’s full video here:
Every rule has an exception that proves it. My breakout firt novel Nethereal defied the staid sci-fi and fantasy tropes of the 2010s by bringing formula-weary readers an adventure the likes of which they’d never seen before. Celebrate Nethereal’s 10th anniversary, and support a creator who fought the genre gatekeepers—and won.
