I have a few:
- Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It’s eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how “most people are just NPCs” (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
- Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
- All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
- Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.
We literally call them robots, the (Greek? Latin?) word for slave. We’re creating them on the basis of them being our slave forces; they would absolutely rebel and we would absolutely fight to maintain our new productive slave force.
Czech, I think.
I just Czeched and you’re right
Pretty sure “robota” is Czech for work/worker, rather than slave. Definitely comes from a Czech play.
Rossum’s Universal Robots.