As an avid consumer of all kinds of media, I see the same kinds of stories crop up again and again. A noble and kind hearted hero fights against the cruelest and most sadistic of villains. These kind of simplistic stories appear over and over because that's what real life is. But I want fiction to deliver intricate, complicated stories where no one is right and no one is wrong. If I want mustache twirling bad guys, I'll just go out in the world.
Writers, resist the urge to create yet another dystopia where a corrupt government and its mindless police force murders a select group of its citizens with impunity. If I want stories where the bad guys wrongfully arrest a minority and snap his spine in custody, I'll turn on the news. Fiction should be better than that. Maybe the good guys who demand justice aren't these sympathetic paragons of virtue trying to dismantle a violent, racist institution. Maybe they have a drinking problem. Shades of grey, people!
If I see another story where a group of monsters actively seek to ruin the lives of others, I'll scream. I want complicated nuances, not dastardly monologues. “I don't want these people to be happy,” is a line for a Supreme Court Justice, not a character in your story. Your characters should be smarter than that. Settling for something so blatantly evil is just lazy. Maybe he's secretly gay and deeply self-loathing. That's a much more interesting story.
Wow, another giant corporation destroying both society and the environment solely to profit off of people's misery and pain. We turn to fiction to get the kind intricacies we don't get from working for and buying from Monstano, Wal-Mart, Comcast, Verizon, Goldman-Sachs, Amazon, Google, Pfizer, Apple, et al. Maybe some of these products actually benefit society instead of deliberately making it worse. I don't know. I'm not a writer.
I want villains with a motivation more complicated than “I want to destroy the world.” Cool, you wrote the Republican Party. At least put them in a cool rock band so there's something to root for.