If you ask a random group of people, 90% of them will swear they were always the last ones chosen for teams during gym class, no matter how mathematically impossible this is.
That is startlingly true.
Speaking for myself, I clearly remember feeling isolated and ridiculed at school, and in a very cruel way; at the time it felt that I was singled out and I certainly never felt that I could relate to most of my peers in any kind of "neutral" fashion. They were either my friends (there were about three of those) or they were likely to say something cruel and crushing at any moment.
I now wonder how much of this was fact, and how much perception? What is undeniable is the taunts and rejection; what I am now mulling over is whether it was not me versus everybody else, but everybody versus everybody else. I always felt like I was near the bottom of the food chain, but maybe there was no food chain, just one big mob of piranhas chewing on each other.
I certainly struggle to identify with the classic "High School" setup and cast of characters. None of those characters or situations resonate with my experience at all. I don't remember specific "mean girls" or "queen bees", nor "jocks" (some people were into sports, others weren't, and it had no bearing on their personalities otherwise). I don't even recall there being "nerds" - I was not mocked for being into science.
So if I were to pick a YA trope that annoys me, it would be that whole "High School" thing because it seems to me to be a set of stereotypes that are being pushed onto the whole world in a kind of induced-memory way ("remember when school was like this? Yes you do! Yes you do! Admit it!"), when I'm not 100% convinced they even apply in America.
But I'm not an editor. Are there any replies here that are from editors? I don't know how to tell.