What are some storytelling cliches?

It was all a dream.....

A lot of story ideas will contain tropes though I'm never annoyed by them as long the novel or whatever it is is good on the whole

Protagonist is a straight white male

foreshadowing anything

also one of the worst

People repeatedly denying a fact that is later made obvious.

>According to an ancient prophecy...

Dropped

Hey! That's a good one! And not only that, but the very clichasis of a major western religion! As a result, two others come to mind: the scrawny, cowardly kid who through some odd principle or other ('wax on, wax off') is ultimately able to bewilder some unredeemable bully; and the one that concerns the weird outcast kid whom no one rightly understands (the elf who wants to be a dentist in Rudolph comes to mind)-- who 'runs away' but after a series of conversations and adventures with a mythical beast of some sort is magically welcomed back with a kind of adulation that rolls him toward what later becomes known as his 'destiny,' be it (as) prophet, king, or dentist.

Time skips.

foreshadowing can be very beautiful and literary, but only if it's done well.

a good story should be complete and tight and should also function like a fractal. so if you've got no foreshadowing, all you've got is one deus ex machina after another and that sucks

You should all be required to post examples, if you're going to claim that these are cliches. And don't just give me YOU KNOW THAT PEOPLE DO THIS AND IT'S BAD SO I DONT HAVE TO CITE EXAMPLES bullshit.

I do think it is somewhat situational

>so if you've got no foreshadowing, all you've got is one deus ex machina after another and that sucks

but this is wrong
avoiding foreshadowing is a great way to make a story feel highly realistic as of course there usually is no foreshadowing in real life either

the damsel in distress

But why bother making a story realistic? that's cheap and lazy.
I do agree that foreshadowing isn't realistic, but neither is most dialogue or skipping the parts of everyday life like shitting and pissing multiple times every 24 hours.
so the muh realism argument doesn't really hold up

every great literary work doesn't necessarily strive to be entirely realistic however they do strive to relate as much as possible to reality in their themes and how the narrative is presented

in this sense realism is in fact one of the most desirable traits in a literary work and virtually a prerequisite to even enter that category

Sex

Bad writing

Relying on the external world.

Avoiding cliches or deconstructing them.

>characters