Some tropes are of such long established availability that they are, of themselves, self-mocking. The quest is one such, although I think you have to avoid slippage in calling everything a quest, like the great epics of Archaic Greece, for you cannot quest, or look for, something whose qualities are in some part already known, … More How could we do without the most annoying and ubiquitous of all the tropes in fiction; ‘the quest’.