I would have been completely lost on this one if I hadn't had fabulous help from someone who is much more of a visual thinker. yue_ix was actually able to not only identify individual anime opening tropes for me, but also matched a good thirty (!) of them to potential scenes in Guardian. All I did was pick a song and stitch something together based on her storyboard. (And I'm so sad I couldn't use more of the suggestions - I don't think I even covered a third of them in the minute allotted.)

But it was interesting to see how extremely limited my own ability to see things like tropes is. Good to be aware of because tropes are excellent tools!