Talk:Adam Taurus/@comment-24.91.16.210-20150330004641/@comment-25555436-20150424003603

Cliché means that the trope, or twist, has been used so much in fiction that it has become dull and uninteresting to the great majority of the audience of fiction in general. Used too much, it becomes also predictable which can ruin the effect except to the most blind members of the audience.

This can make some things difficult, because you may want to write X as Y, yet Y is a cliché trope, and as such you would end up making X be at least partially cliché, and as such dull and not too interesting in the eyes of the audience unless saved by other, less/not cliché tropes.

There is a way to make clichés "non-clichés" however. Trope subversion and inversion can help, along with their deconstruction in more dark stories.

In other words, you can make someone cliché and still be interesting if there are other tropes in play to make it interesting as long as these are not cliché either. However, make someone too cliché, you made a terrible mistake. Originality is the strongest weapon, in fiction.