Aggravating Fantasy Tropes and Clichés

The Onion AV Club recently ran a piece asking contributors what TV tropes aggravated them the most.  Personally I would have added the moderately unattractive, doofy man with the inexplicably hot wife/girlfriend.  It also made me think about common tropes in fantasy fiction.



I've recently finished, The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch, one of the best books I've read in recent memory, and a debut novel no less.  As excellent as the work is, I have a quibble with the presence of seemingly all-powerful mages in its world.  In so many fantasy stories, we're presented with sorcerers who cannot be defeated by any other mortal, with almost godlike powers, and yet they aren't using their powers to lord it over everyone when they have every incentive to.  Why is that?   Many of these mages appear as court magicians, but it's never addressed why they are merely a humble servant of a mundane monarch and not the monarchs themselves.  In the world of Locke Lamora, these sorcerers merely hire themselves out for exorbitant fees.  [UPDATE: I've been reading the second book in the series and the issue of how the powerful Magi have completely dominated society has worked its way into the plot.  Yet another reason Scott Lynch has rapidly become one of my favourite authors!]

It remains to be seen as I eagerly read the rest of Lynch's series if he addresses this question at all (no spoilers please!), but two other fantasy series where I think this subject is dealt with quite well are The Black Company stories by Glen Cook and Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher saga.

In Cook's world, the mages are in fact the people running things and the most formidable empire is also the one ruled by the most powerful mage.  Sapkowski, on the other hand, retains the court magician trope, but gives it a twist.  The sorcerers of his world do in fact run things, but their sterility means that they cannot establish ruling houses or dynasties and need their monarchical frontmen as much as the rulers need their services.

As I work on my own writing, I try to bear tropes like this one in mind, either to avoid them, or to put a new spin on them.  Now that I think about it, there's plenty of other cliches that bother me about otherwise enjoyable fantasy writing.  I may make this a regular post.  What are your own most aggravating fantasy fiction tropes?