To be brief, while I do see many stock characters, more so with the way they are presented in art, I generally can only roll my eyes at it. They are archetypes and tropes for a reason, as unsuccessful as that may be. For my own characters, they all follow a central theme in many shades yet the largest issue is that they cannot be worked well into most settings or situations - their novelty or uniqueness would detract from the overall theme and setting or at the very least be worlds distracting. Because I am none fond of being that sort of player, I tend not to apply in the first place as a result. But when and where I do play purely outside my realm of comfort, I always envision those characters as average. Not ugly or repulsive, yet not attractive, at perhaps their best admirable in some caliber and capacity that way but certainly not because of appearance.

Yet while I do see a fair number of characters who are stock and bog standard in being individuals, as the "young but troubled master of the sword who is on an adventure" or the "mysterious creepy introvert" or "wacky, zany, 'funny' one", those tend not to last long or they tend to evolve with time. Not always, but it at least gains some ground as the plot goes forward. Likewise, characters with the dark, mysterious, unknowable and terrible past - the aforementioned likely orphan of some variety - contrarily do not because they lack interface with the rest. That leads me to believe there is more to do with how well they fit in, both with the character and writer, than what trope - irksome it might even be - they are. But I cannot say I definitively know that for certain, rather just solely from experience and observation that this outcome is more true than it is not.