ragnarök

Waitress taking my order: Such arrogance! Not only do you presume to boast under the guise of being humble, but your order employs the most decadent of linguistic excesses - the tautology!

My date, who until recently thought "tautology" referred to the study of tensile strengths and upon learning her mistake compensated by reading through its Wikipedia article: That would be more correctly identified as a "pleonasm".

The editor I hired to curate my posts who styles himself as a sort of scheming court advisor: My liege, this one is getting away from us. The punchline loses much of its impact when the rest of the joke is derailed by this increasingly self-indulgent meta humour. Were it up to me, your Grace, which of course it is not, I would cut the others and leave myself as the only supporting character. You need noone else, Your Majesty...

The author's proudly displayed fetish

The author's fetish you're pretty sure they don't realise they have

The author's fetish which they're firmly convinced everyone has and is just pretending otherwise

The author's non-sexual special interest which just sounds like a fetish because of their habitually unfortunate phrasing

The fetish the author is making a well-meaning effort to cater to in spite of clearly not understanding it themselves

The author's fetish that never quite makes it into the text because they keep getting sidetracked by the requisite worldbuilding

The author's utterly pedestrian sexual preference which the text treats like a bizarre fetish because they've got shit to work through

The author's seemingly innocuous recurring trope they're going to have a personal revelation about ten years down the road