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HI folks, as a writer of mostly 40k fiction I sometimes find myself trying to come up with original ideas and getting tripped up by tired old tropes that are either so obvious as to be implicitly understood but without any real thought or so over done as to be a complete turn off for readers.

I'm thinking things like the Ork General who is actually a lot smarter than the dumb plodding incompetent human General gives him credit for. The practically immortal incomparably powerful one man army space marine super hero. The sorts of things that are sometimes just such an integral part of the DNA of the game that we just don't question 99% of the time but are sometimes the making or breaking of a good story.

Are there any tropes that you either totally love or love to hate? Or do these standard refrains help bring order to an otherwise chaotic and war strewn universe?

If you are writing in the 40k universe, literally everything is a trope of something more famous. Ignore it or embrace it. Write what you want or adapt something else. Simmons' Hyperion wasn't exactly a new idea, but look what he did with that. My recommendation would be to read as much as possible though, so at least you know what you are cribbing from.

I'm not clued in on what tropes really are, but 40K fiction suffers from a necessary evil of the main character (generally) being required to survive. Even more so if you're reading a series with a titular character.
There's a massive amount of books, even well written, where the threat of failure is immediately diminished by realising you're 1/3 through. Thus obviously the villain isn't actually going to give the character a lasgun haircut.

Fair enough, but in a universe of very squashy, mortal folks, you have to embrace it or work around it.

I do like to play with the moral greyness that surrounds the setting, and at the same time, often do my best to subvert the stereotypes in 40k. Making Xenos characters 'human' is very fun, as is moving away from the established standards of good and evil; Chaos Space Marines, for example, are fighting to survive in the face of religious persecution and (especially at the dawn of the Heresy) victims of circumstance as much as anything else. No, this doesn't make them good guys while they're sacrificing babies or burning planets for fun, but neither are they wholly evil. If a Hive Fleet or Waaaagh shows up, they're fighting to survive just like any loyalist, and it's possible to make them sympathetic characters in that regard.

The key, as with anything, is to make it read well. Yes, we've all seen the 'futility of war' story in everything from Blackadder to Star Wars, but that doesn't mean the message and value will be any less if tell it around a Guardsmen or a Fire Warrior. Similarly, the place between man and God has been explored since ancient Greek plays through to Superman comics, but you can still tell that story just as well with an Astartes as the lead character.

Tropes or not, a good story exists independent of its setting, and that's the important thing to remember. Who cares about using tropes if you can tell a good story?

Yes I suppose it's true that the whole 40k universe is a complete trope salad. There's plenty to pick and choose from so it doesn't always have to be the same story.

Let's take the Nids for example. The "alien" movies are an obvious source of inspiration for them but there's no point retelling Rippley's story with a sister of battle And a genestealer. That's not to say elements of the same story wouldn't work really well in a similar setting but it's the picking and choosing and the execution that make the work great or terrible I suppose, not the particular tropes employed. The skill of the craftsman more than the set of tools he uses.

Anyway, yes, survivability would appear to be a tricky one in a universe where you'd think the vast majority die young. I guess it's a symptom of playable characters to survie to be used in your own game too.