Do you have any guilty pleasures when it comes to reading or writing? Tropes or cliches that you know really aren't good, but you enjoy them so much that you use them anyway? For me, I love "Dark Lord" villains when they're done right. Too many authors use them as faceless boogeymen who never actually appear in the story. Whenever something bad happens, the heroes raise their fists to the sky and curse the name of the Dark Lord Not-Appearing-In-This-Book, but their lack of physical presence in the story leads to the reader never forming any sort of connection with them, good or bad. But when they're written effectively, a Dark Lord villain has a certain feeling that I absolutely love. They're not a person, not even a character really. They're a force of nature. Even if you don't meet them, you can feel them. They're like a mass of dark storm clouds hovering just over the horizon. You might faintly hear the thunder, see the occasional flash of lightning, but the fear and anticipation comes from knowing that this enormous, unstoppable thing is heading straight for you, and there's nothing you can do about it. All you can do is run, hide, and hope it passes over you without causing too much destruction.
Nothing comes to mind with reading or writing, but I do love the Tremors movies and the Ernest (Jim Varney) films.
This probably isn't what you had in mind, and I hadn't thought of it as such, but I guess this is a guilty pleasure: I write graphic erotica scenes into my stories knowing that I'll just have to remove them later. They just come so naturally, and they're fun to write. In the end though, entire pages get reduced to "They made love in the glow of the television," or something like that. It's ridiculous, but apparently it's part of my process. Some of those scenes are good though. Maybe I could publish some anthologies on Kindle under a pseudonym or something. Who knows? Maybe they won't be a complete waste.
I started reading Damnation Game, and Barker manages to squeeze little erotic snippets in just for some extra flavor. And that just in the first 14 pages.
Love it when things are morally grey. Also enjoy it when powerful entities use everything in their arsenal. All their troops, all their technology/magic.
Someday we may return to a world where sex is written of as openly as anything else in fiction, and we can throw out all these modern puritanical taboos..
The ancient Greeks were all about insouciantly saucy sauce plates. I think this one is called the "Demetrius Gets Spit-Roasted" pattern. Very popular. Spoiler: There be sex in here. Be ye warned.
Lost Colony trope has seen better days, but it remains a perennial favorite of mine. Give me Pern (minus McCaffrey's penchant for saccharine preciousness and tweeness) or Darkover (minus Bradley's pathological fetish for sexual repression) and I'm a happy boy.
Gather 'round young'uns, for a history lesson... Once upon a time there was this thing called the 60's,which contained a Sexual Revolution. Sex was actually cool, and all over movies and lots of other things. Of course this has happened many many times throughout the past, it's an ongoing cycle—periods of Free Love followed for a few decades by periods of Victorian-style repression, mostly because of all the diseases and issues free love causes. Through the 70's and 80's sex in movies and stories became gratuitous and very overdone, and then it disappeared. However, meanwhile a thing called the Internets appeared and it had something called Pron, which is supposedly taboo and illegal and all that, but it's actually the secret second mainstream, making at least as much money every year as Hollywood. Wait around another decade or so and you might catch the next sexual revolution—it just keeps on revolvin'.
I was just pointing to the most recent example. Apuleius seems to be an ancient philosopher I was unfamiliar with, and all I've found so far are accusations of using magic—do I need to dig deeper?
My reading guilty pleasure is books from movies and TV. I've read fifty-four Star Wars books and I'm two books into the Firefly series right now. It's pretty good so far.
I'm pretty shameless about what I like, but the closest I have to guilty pleasures are terrible 80's action movies (e.g. Death Wish 3) and cheesy new age music like Enya. In reading, maybe excerpts from Warhammer 40K novels (I've never played the game nor read any of the books in full, but I find the lore interesting).