Great post. I’ve been trying to wrap my mind about tropes in gaming for the past two years and you’re right.

Tropes are products of pop culture, so they’re both (a) awesome fictional Lego bricks to play with and build on, and (b) absolutely terrible and lazy conventions that restrain us from experimenting and innovating.

Tropes are best used when creating expectations that you can then reuse to mess around with the players.