Story Likes and Dislikes Meme

There is a paragraph from Chris Baty's book No Plot? No Problem! going round on LJ in meme form.

"Before you sit down to write a novel, you make a list of everything you love to see in novels. When you write your own novel, you should put the stuff from your list in there. Then you should make a second list of everything you hate to see in novels. When you write your own novel, you should make sure none of the stuff from that second list creeps in when you’re tired."

I'm not immediately planning to write a novel, but anyway...

Likes

• Language that's fun to read. Banter. A narrator or viewpoint character who doesn't take things all that seriously. I liked Raymond Chandler's stuff on that alone, and love it in Discworld, Vlad Taltos, Bartimaeus, Vorkosigan...
• Weird aspects/concepts. It can go too far when the story-world is all out wacky and nothing else, but if it's just some elements, or the story is somehow else "anchored" so I can relate to it, it's great. Examples:
  A magic orb circles the Empress of Dragaera. It protects her from harm, enables her subjects to use magic - and also enables them to check the time "telepathically", and changes colours according to the empress's mood.
  Skullduggery Pleasant is a sixgun-toting, undead sorcerer detective.
  In The Warrior Apprentice, Miles Vorkosigan builds a space mercenary fleet of respectable size with himself as commander in chief - by accident.
• People I can root for. Being good, at least for a given value of good... For example, so, yeah, Vlad Taltos is a murderer and gangster boss, but he does pay the family of his underling crooks if said underling gets killed in the line of duty... Also, see first Like.
• Well-developed, strong characters who happen to be female are a plus.
• Antagonists I can sympathise with, or whose motivations I can at least intellectually understand. This does not include "being evil is awesome!"
• Friendship. Loyalty. Trust.
• Optimistic basic mood.
  Despite how often I've heard them compared, that's the difference I see between Discworld ("hey, even Death is on our side!"), which I like, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ("Humanity sucks, has always sucked and will suck as long as it exists."), which I did not like at all.
• For fantasy settings including magic (which in itself is a "like"): Creatively used magic. "Whoever can fling the biggest fireball wins" is boring. Oh, and magic used for useful things, too, rather than only destruction.
• A bit of information on how magic works/what rules it follows feeds my inner geek. <3

Dislikes

• "This story mostly exists to carry a MESSAGE!" Worst example I encountered being Lord of the Flies - the version I read had a preface which gave away the ending to explain its symbolic meaning. Disgusting.
• All characters are male, apart from the trophy bride(s) (e.g. Ocean's Eleven or Lord of the Rings). Or female characters only existing for the benefit of male characters (and/or assumed-to-be-male audience).
  For fantasy races: males are monstrous, or at least unattractive, females attractive by human standards.
• Strictly/overtly patriarchal societies, unless they're depicted as ridiculous (e.g. in Ethan of Athos) or otherwise criticised in the story. I already live with being considered a second class person, I don't need to have that shit shoved into my face in my escapism.
• Villains. People who consider themselves evil and are proud of it, and/or are evil because they like being evil... It's insane or stupid, and on top of that lazy writing in all instances I encountered so far.
• "All X are good, all Y are bad". Or generally splitting the world into good and bad.
• Doom and gloom and nothing else. For example starting off a story with a list of the hardships a character went through in their life so far will most likely mean I don't read the rest, unless the tone is un-serious enough to cancel it.
• Male dwarf considers human woman (or elf attractive by human standards) gorgeous. Different species should have different standards of beauty, and I can think of three instances of that particular constellation offhand, making it way over-used for something so stupid.
• "You are the Chosen One of the Prophecy, so you must do this to save the world, even if you have no idea whatsoever about anything."
• Gushy romance making up most of the story.
• Detailed sex scenes. I really don't need to know how and how often which tab goes into which slot.
• Sloppy writing and inconsistencies. For instance saying outright and showing through multiple examples throughout the book that technology stops working or breaks as soon as anything magic comes near, but having a major magic ritual accompanied by background music from a CD player. Writing like Wolfgang Hohlbein.

I realise that the "dislikes" list is way longer than the "likes" list. My impression is that I have more relatively specific "hot buttons" that will annoy me, and mostly wide "likes".

A small addendum to the "all characters are male, apart from the trophy bride(s)" dislike in the case of movies or comics, rather than prose: Men come in a variety of different shapes and ages, but women are all young, slim, "conventionally attractive", as if made in the same plastic doll mold.

I have less trouble liking a story without any female characters in it (even though that is likely to cause some annoyance, unless the cast is extremely small) than ignoring cardboard-cutout female "characters", or women inserted for male readers to drool over, or other nonsense like that.