As always I
defer to TV Tropes when disseminating information. The article is shockingly exhaustive and is guaranteed to generate at least a little anger (and incidentally, as with everything to do with TV Tropes comes with the standard warning about how it will eat hours of your time). Personally however, there are a few that constantly enrage me from both their nature and their prevalence amongst humans:
Acceptable targets - Certain groups of people are allowed to be mocked, ridiculed, or even portrayed as inherently dispicable, but other groups aren't, for entirely arbitrary reasons. There is no reason why portraying the US as full of fat idiots or Japanese as racist perverts or Russians as drunk louts is any less offensive than portraying any African people as primitive tribals or any Arab people as towel-wearing warmongers. Either it's all acceptable, or none of it is.
Acceptable hobbies - Someone who obsesses night and day about Local Sports Team #14, following every game and learning every single facet of their history is perfectly fine. But if someone displays that same level of obsession for a book series or a game, then they're pathetic nerds that live in their parents' basement and will never have sex.
Crossdressing - Females are allowed to wear pants, suits, and other "traditionally male" clothing with little mention, but a male wearing dresses, high-heeled shoes or cosmetics is either a sexual deviant or mentally ill.
Femininity - Displaying
any conventional or typical feminine characteristics
at all instantly means a female character is a bad role model and reinforces negative sterotypes, regardless of anything else about the character
Sex vs Violence - Bare breasts will get a film or series a more restricted classification than killing hundreds of people on-screen, and bare genitals will almost
never get anything than the most restricted classification, while graphic torture can scrape past on the second or even thrid highest. This is only merely a well-understood example however, and I only use it because including more detail would keep me here all day.
Heterosexual romance vs homosexual romance - Every piece of fiction, ever, is required to feature some sort of heterosexual relationship, regardless of its inanity or poor writing. Any homosexual relationship is either shoved into the background (because gays are icky but we like their money), shoved into the
foreground as if two people of the same sex in a romantic relationship is supposed to be praised as something new and innovative, or completely ignored as even a possibility.
Rape - Holy shit, I hate this one so much I can barely even joke about it. For females, either rape is a compliment meaning that people find them attractive, simply a male "mastering" a particularly disobedient partner who "obviously" wants it, or even a perfect basis to begin a relationship (fortunately, this one has managed to recently fall out of favour). For males, either they can't be raped
at all, it's a subject of mocking and laughter, or just punishment for some discretion.
