TwilightBard: Tropes are building blocks, if you look closely enough. Sure we subvert them, tweak them, and try to avoid others, but they're there. The bigger problem is if you look too closely, you start seeing the blocks, but not the way they interact, the way they come together to form unique characters and people.
Vestin: No. I used to be afraid of that, but further understanding hasn't really impaired my enjoyment of art. As long as one makes sure to leave the ordinary world behind and enter [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Circle_(virtual_worlds)]the "magic circle" of make-believe[/url], the magic should still be there. Sure - there are things capable of breaking immersion, either pet peeves or failures by devs, but with the exception of extreme cases - it's perfectly possible to snap back in.
Some people choose to remain "outside", uninfluenced... Some titles focus so heavily on being parodies that they lack content to enjoy, merely being criticism incarnate... I try to avoid both.
I could go on about this for a while, but the gist is that it all boils down to willful suspension of disbelief. Circumstances can help or hinder it (noise, stress, tiredness...), the material can be more or less convincing, the person in question can have a mind more or less flexible... but the possibility should always be there, I think.
I've just read pages upon pages on reductive explanation (and supervenience and such)... Just because you can break something down into many simpler objects, it doesn't mean it stops being the thing you approached initially. On the contrary - the smaller things HAVE TO be possible to reassemble into the original object, or your reduction has failed.
It also works the other way around - just because you can generalize something particular into an instantiation of something more general, it doesn't change the fact that the particular thing is still there and is its own thing.
In the words of Max Payne - "nothing is a cliche when it's happening to you". When you build something fancy out of Legos, you may fixate on the Legos, but the thing build should probably be more prominent. It's a matter of seeing the forest and not just the trees...
That's the thing, when you sit down, when you feel engaged, when you enter that Magic Circle, you don't see the building blocks, you see the whole. When you sit down and play say, a Mario game, you don't always see the cliches, you don't see the characters that are a bit off, you're here for the show, to enjoy it. You become focused on the movement, the platforming.
It's when we get jolted out that sometimes we have issues, or when someone is looking at things a bit too critically, it becomes very easy to forget what we're looking at and just start seeing the parts instead of how it all comes together. I'm guilty of it when my family tries to control the TV to stuff I don't care for at the holidays, or when I've seen some things a bit too much. And when we're looking for something, we tend to find it to the exclusion to the rest of the stuff coming together.
That's the kind of stuff I mean when I say that Tropes are a Trap. And it's a very easy one to fall into when you don't realize you're stepping over the line of being too critical.