[quote=@Silver Carrot]
I don't have a problem with cliches as a general rule. Some character archetypes are used a lot for a reason; they work.

But in RP, there's often another reason certain character archetypes are used a lot; they're easy.


Even when using cliches, they're just the base you need to build on. It's when people don't build upon cliches that you really notice them.
[/quote]


 Yes! I feel like this is true for writing as a whole. I had a creative writing teacher once who gave us all some pretty good advice - it's impossible to avoid characters who fall into one cliche or another, just like in life, it's impossible to avoid cliched behaviour in yourself. However, like a real person might fall under the umbrella of a certain stereotype, that's not all there is to them. The human brain [i]adores[/i] putting things into cateegories - it's the only way it can really cope with the crazy amount of information we have to process just to understand the world. The categories, 'cliches' in and of themselves aren't particularly interesting - theyre just a way of sorting information. What's interesting to us as writers is the variation [i]within[/i] those categories.

 Cliches aren't necessarily good or bad, or even, if you want to get meta, neccessarily a real thing. They're [i]literally[/i] just a relic of the way our brains process information - another strange facet of human ecology that wiggles its way into our writing.