I'd personally like to see more gender non-conforming roles in societies.
In a society with magic or space tech, why does there need to be a coded gender for certain jobs?
This goes for 'character classes' too. I'd love to see more healer archetypes that are cis male, or wizard types that are black or brown without relying on stereotypes.
I'd also like to see more of that in occupations too. Why not have a union of earth magic construction workers who happen to be mostly women in one city?
What about the rest of you? What cool things would you live to see in sci-fi/fantasy?
I'm tired of all of the 'Great Man' type stories where a single individual or group changes the fate of the galaxy. Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks did it in an interesting way, the payoff of the heroic actions and sacrifice of the characters was revealed to be unimportant in the grand scheme of the war being fought, but this isn't revealed until the end, so it was a bit of a gimmicky 'gotcha' moment.
I want more slice-of-life sci-fi and fantasy. I recently read Long way to a Small, Angry Planet by Rebecca Chambers and really enjoyed the vignette based storytelling centered on a working class crew. You got to explore interesting corners of the galaxy a la Star Trek, but without the high stakes.
I also just finished reading Semiosis by Sue Burke, a humans-settle-an-exoplanet type story, and one of the things I really enjoyed was how the story was told in generations. It allowed for a cool materialist(?) storytelling where you could see how the culture of their 30-100 person colony is shaped by historical events that you just read about the chapter before.
Say what you will about The Hunger Games, Katniss isn't the Chosen One who single handedly topples the evil government. An organized proletarian uprising does all the work, while she never does much more than act as its mascot, and everyone knows it.
(Also her hubby and sister are named after Bread and Roses, separation of labor is how the government keeps the working class under control, it's a much more Lefty book than people realize).
I get what your saying, but counterpoint, I'm not going to use any YA novels as theory. I'm still crying over losing Harry Potter.