[Malloriel]

When you really think about it, it's perfectly okay to be using these elements in you fantasy story, cliché or not. I mean, if you're going to write a modern story with modern themes, you set it in, say, downtown L.A. right? How many stories have been set in downtown L.A.? How many have used the Hollywood angle, or names of certain streets, or makes of cars. There's a finite amount of information you're working with as a setting. It's then all about how you TELL the story within that setting, so use your orcs and your elves and your fireballs and whatever else have you within your setting and focus on the telling of the story. Anything can be pulled away from the throng if it's approached properly, in my opinion.

Fantasy lends itself well to really exploring the depths of creativity, I think, in that it allows you to pull from your own imagination ANYTHING you want and no one can tell you it can't work that way, because you're working of your own set of rules that readers have to accept as admission into your tale(s). It means that you can use anything in any way you see fit, as long as you explain in some way the ways that something like an orc, to take from the other thread, is different in your world from the ones that most people expect. You can set up new physics, new ways to make magic work, races and beings. Heck, make it sci-fi fantasy with mechanics and science in a fantasy world, why not?

There's standard fare because it works. It makes writing easier in one sense because you can know it as well as your own home town, so that it takes as much thought to build the setting as going "okay, which way is the supermarket? Oh right. Got it." So it's convenient to work within the fantasy rules that are considered clichéd and lets you really focus on the telling and the content a little more, is my feeling.

I do personally like taking the established stuff as a launching point and morphing it into completely different items, or looking at magic from a different angle (at least I think I am), etc etc. But that doesn't mean what's been established is in any way bad or should be shunned entirely.