Favorite tropes:
Worldbuilding (especially dense and well thought out. Tolkien is pretty much the gold standard).
Maps. Love maps.
Eurasian modeled medieval settings, with more weight to the European side. This is the home setting of the epic fantasy...like Kabuki is rooted in the conventions of Edo period Japan. One can lift kabuki elements and put them in other cultural settings and get something clever and entertaining, but it's not quite the same.
Effective socio material monocultures, at least at the core...the normal world which is left to go exploring. That does not mean I want cookie cutter people, rather I want common cultural touchstones which can be used to reveal character and advance plot.
Magical beasts, including dragons. The only exception is Unicorns. I have only ever read one book that featured unicorns that was done really well, The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.
Magic trees and forests: Anything from Ents to trees that are doors/pathways to other realms.
Other worlds that impinge upon our own entered through secret doors in forgotten wardrobes, or paths or whathaveyou.
Magic/mysterious races: It's true Tolkien sucked most of the oxygen out of the room on this point. I don't want to see Tolkien knockoffs, but the house elves and goblin bankers of Harry Potter work well, as do the Fae of the Name of the Wind.
Good and Evil are clearly distinguished in theory, if not in always practice. I think Martin got the human struggle aspect of this right. No matter how terrible a bad guy is, there is still a foothold of good in his soul, and the same for the very good, who have a toehold of corruption somewhere in them.
Class systems that are believable and function. Rail against monarchies, and aristocrats, and all the evils great and small that can be laid at their doorstep, so can a lot of good, and like it or hate it, it's the most stable form of government we know, and generally does not suffer from the enormities and idiocies that emerge from fundamentally utopian political ideologies, like democracy or communism. Monarchs, at their best rule for the benefit and happiness of their people...who really are their people ethnically speaking, where the kingdom is an ancient kinship group. They aren't trying to change the world, just manage the huge task of getting along another day in the world we have got as it is. Kings and class don't necessarily mean feudalism. There are other model monarchical structures. This is one area I think Marin handles especially well, though he's a wee bit overkeen on the grit and suffering at the whim of one's life-careless betters.
Wizards, Sages and other mystical potent mentors. What would a hero's journey be without them? Just don't make them cartoon Gandalfs or Yodobewan doubles, "There is no try. There is only do, or do not, young padawa...apprentice."
Red Headed Magic users. Is there any more striking combination of hair, and skin...like a union of fire and ice? Relatively rare in the human population as a whole, but mesmerizing to behold in a well-formed human being (yes I will admit to having redheads in my family, and I've a few stray red hairs in my beard). It looks magic. Beautiful magic.
Hated tropes:
Barbarian Babes in (or out of )chainmail lingerie. I don't want to see warrior women as a rule just for the sake of it, especially in skimpy armor that is supposed to be both stylish and effective. Exceptions can be made if you can pull off a Brienne of Tarth, someone of skill, depth of character, and an acknowledged social oddity in her world which makes her life both sorrowful and rewarding in all sorts of unexpected ways. Otherwise to me it just smacks of left-handed male-bashing (intentional or not)...a projection of modern egalitarian mores in a fundamentally nonegalitarian age. Might as well have rock music at a medieval feast. It's anachronistic and incongruous in most contexts, though I will admit, not in all.
No Damsel in Distress Ever Allowed Anymore: I keep hearing about how this is a terrible trope, but when has it last been used successfully except in comedy or satire? Either the woman saves herself (and possibly her rescuers...what a clever turn around...not after it has become stale standard fare), or she is an integral aid to her rescuers. Fie! This trope just does not exist anymore that I've seen, and that's a shame. The two key problems it has as a story element it has, in my opinion, is the woman has limited agency and must be saved by the big strong man...oh horrors and a character with no purpose except to be the object of acquisition easily risks being a creature of mere cardboard. So, a story that is essentially over at the rescue is generally bad storytelling not a bad trope. Locked away in a tower, guarded by magic and monsters (maybe for good reason...prophecies and all that), the damsel is powerless. That much can be good storytelling to put a character in a situation where his/her competencies are useless. Rescue the damsel, get her back into court, the place where her natural competencies come into play, she may turn out to be a veritable Eleanor of Aquitaine...while her knight in shining armour remains a shiny knight with a few appended titles and manorial/monetary rewards...unless he's also a prince, then he is fair game and in a few years may need rescuing himself.
Evil Church/Noble Pagans: This is simply a childish cartoon that shows no respect for the role of faith/religion in a traditional society, nor any serious engagement with the complexities of human religious thought and practice. It treats "the church" as a repository of strawman religious tropes to be hauled out on cue and set ablaze. Nor does it speak to the real unsavory aspects of traditional pagan societies. Augeries with the entrails of prisoners (or kings)...well auguries in general, temple prostitution/slavery, human sacrifice (see Aztecs...who wants to preserve those practices as a point of indigenous culture), brutal caste systems, self-mutilation, hyper ethnocentrism (we are 'the people', others are just spoils of war). If the Church were so banal, evil and corrupt, and its leaders just venal charlatans and posers, who would ever believe it. There are good and bad in all human societies and their institutions. Noble enterprises can be subverted over time...and they can recover. Bad men can gain power but somehow do good. Good men with laudable intentions can make a muck of things if placed in power. Zealots can betray the heart of a faith, or they can hold the line against heresy and corruption. How could the Church so corrupt grow (except by conquest...assuming it actually convinced someone to believe in it that zealously to begin with)? So I find the cartoon evil of institutional stand-in churches of fantasy to often be both offensive and not remotely believable. Heretics are not necessarily good, and the standard bearers of Orthodoxy necessarily wrong. Pagans are not natural paragons of virtue (nor ignorant rubes to be religiously preyed upon), and priests are not universally preoccupied with money-grubbing, slut-shaming and boy buggering. It's a pet peeve. If you do religion, do it right, or don't bother.
Obligatory Sex Scenes/Romance: Yuck. I hates it. I don't want those images in my mind, and I sure don't want to put them in anyone else's. If it gets steamier than Rhett carrying Miss Scarlet up the stairs, I'm out...and even then I'm ambivalent. The whole notion of introducing brief pornographic butt flashing, and wall bumping just for a titillation break is just unseemly. The one area I have to distance myself from GMs storytelling. The first hint of it in a story is my signal to skim ahead until it's over and the actual story resumes again. Fantasy stories once upon a time did not need anything more than a coy smile and a furtive touch, maybe a ballroom dance, to say all that needed to be said on that front. Cut to wedding bells. Well, there is that one fairy tale where the hero has to behead his hostess (a cat) to free her from a wicked witch's spell...that's a little more than a furtive touch.
Orcs and hobbits. Those are Tolkein's and to an extent D&D's. Anywhere else they are out of place.
Unicorns. The only exception I'm willing to make is The Last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle.
Misandry I do not care for clever"subversions" of the so-called patriarchy in a Medieval setting. Everything bad is male or male associated, everything good is feminine (see evil church above). Male society is just a bunch of interlocking oppressions that need to be destroyed/overcome by a plucky heroine. I bore with it for a while in Wheel of Time, but eventually, the whole maleness is toxic/tainted thing got old, and I grimace in disgust wherever I run across it again.
Stew and Pie: I am weary of fantasy characters only eating some generic stew of analog potato and analog carrot and analog chicken/beef/lizard...or thanks to Martin: eel pie, lamprey pie, kidney pie, fish pie, trotter turnovers and gamecock blood aspic. It's either weak imagination, research overkill, or a calculated gross-out. Where's the braized lamb and leeks, the plate of fluffy scrambled eggs and pancakes, or just a nice fried trout?
Evil Villians who know they are evil and like it that way (mustache twirlers). Here I prefer a complex character whose "evil" is largely a question of context (whose side you are on). He/She is just the "hero" to the other side. Yeah, there' needs to be room for the occasional Ramsey Bolton...but even he liked his dogs.
Zombies and Werewolves: worn out, over done.
Given my stated tastes above, it's a pretty easy guess I'm pro-faith, pro-tradition, and for me, patriarchy is not an evil word...indeed my faith has actual patriarchs. Anyway those are a few of the tropes I like or dislike in the fantasy genre.