My least favorite non-romance trope in media is Life force as a non-renewable resource.
You’ve got all these stories where one character dies so another does magic/science shenanigans to transfer their life force into the dead loved one, and this always ends up with the previously dead loved one being perfectly fine and dandy while the previously alive one is dead.
Or those times where the hero “shaves off a few years of their lifespan” to do some heroic thing.
Or that one time a billion-year-old alien saved Captain John Sheridan but only gave him enough life force to last some forty two years or so.
Like… no. That’s not how life works.
Life isn’t some finite resource that you use up until it runs out.
It’s finite, sure, but to a certain extent it’s also self-perpetuating, fueled by food and water and oxygen and love, to be stopped only by an outside force or by one’s own cells dying or rebelling against itself.
You hear all these true stories about people waking up from comas and surviving near-death experiences and ding-dong-ditching Death with medical care, hope, and time. And fictional stories try to tell me that Life is a finite resource that you can take out the cosmic equivalent of a payday loan on? Call J.G. Wentworth 8-7-7 LIFE NOW? Save the world and get the girl for the low, low price of dying ten years early, 2-for-1 deal, order now?
No! that’s not how life works! Give me a fictional story where life is more like a car battery that recharges with the turning from the tires. Sure, it can get old, and sure it can die, but if you have the proper tools and a willing friend or a kind stranger, you can jump-start it back to life and with the proper medical attention to take care of whatever caused the death to happen, keep the wheels turning long enough for the battery to stand on its own two feet.
And maybe that person will never be quite the same again. Maybe the Life force donor will need life support for a while too. Maybe neither of them will ever be quite as strong as before.
But they’re both alive.
And that’s what matters, in the end.