User blog comment:William See/Cliche vs Trope: Big Diff?/@comment-24101790-20200210225606

An interesting take that I agree with on a lot of points. I tend to view tropes as a sort of literary shorthand like: the 'mad scientist', the 'loose cannon cop', the 'detective with a chip on their shoulder', etc. Most people when they hear those descriptors can likely give a few examples (Dr. Frankenstein/Herbert West/John McClain/etc.), but that doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing as a number of those cited sources are the progenitors of the trope or resulted in their popularity in modern culture. It is possible to take a trope and use it to your advantage to play with perceptions or give the audience more insight into a character they once saw as two-dimensional through their background, behaviors, or actions (one of the reasons I like Die Hard's earlier movies is how the protagonist isn't invincible and has their weaker moments). While originality is always preferred, sometimes an author can use tropes to their advantage in writing.

On the other hand, I tend to view cliches as tropes that fail to bring anything new to the table, often no insight/nuance, just come across as lazy due to how they're incorporated into the story. A trope can use these things as a means of shorthand for giving us archtypes without bogging down the plot with details about how the wizened figure got to that point without a lot of explanation so it can focus on how they influence the story/act within it. When you start to get into cliche territory for me is when you use those tropes and don't do anything with it.

To bring it around to creepypasta, the best examples I can think of are sleep paralysis or black-eyed kids stories. Both tend to follow formulaic plots (I was asleep and I woke up to something terrifying happening, but I couldn't move or do anything. / A child knocked on my door late one night that had black eyes and wanted to be let in.). That doesn't mean that both of those tropes can't be made into effective/engaging stories, but it does mean that work needs to be put into them to give readers a reason to engage in the story. If the story they're reading is going to play out like the dozens of other BEK/Sleep Paralysis stories they've heard before, what's the incentive for them to keep going? If the author takes the trope and does something new, is able to make the audience relate to the events on a visceral level, or is able to engage the audience in some way that makes their continued reader rewarding, then I tend to consider that the author using tropes to tell their story rather than resorting to cliches.