Formula Breaking Episode / Literature

• Brown's Pine Ridge Stories: Each of the tales in this Short story collection is about the autobiographical Slice of Life recollections of the author growing up in 1950s-1960s Georgia. The last especially when delves into Time Travel, angels, and... well that's quite an Out-of-Genre Experience. Though its worth noting that story, "My Trip to the Rome of the Ancient Past", was a contribution from another author altogether.
• The Chronicles of Prydain is a five-part series. Of the five, Taran Wanderer is the only one that doesn't have "The [Noun]" for a title, doesn't feature Princess Eilonwy, and (most importantly) is more of Coming of Age story than the others, which revolve around a Black-and-White Morality conflict.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The original gimmick of the series was that it was a cringe-inducingly nostalgic lookback on middle school. As such, Dog Days was unique because it was the first one that took place entirely away from middle school and instead focused solely on Greg's summer vacation.
• The first Dinotopia book was presented as a diary written by the protagonist. The next two books told the story from a third-person perspective.
• invoked Out of Terry Pratchett's widely acclaimed Discworld series, Going Postal is especially beloved for just how different it is from any of the preceding novels. For one, it introduced a never-before-seen and quickly beloved protagonist in the form of Moist von Lipwig (a former Con Man tasked with fixing Anhk-Morpork's Postal Service), which significantly aided in revitalizing the series and keeping it relevant. Going Postal is also rather notable in that, unlike previous Discworld novels, it's all built around making a dead-serious point about the dangers of privatization—While prior Discworld novels certainly had serious points to make, it can be reasonably argued that out of the previous 33 books, only Equal Rites (a Feminist Fantasy about Breaking the Glass Ceiling), Small Gods (a critique of religious fundamentalism), Jingo (a military satire taking jabs at neo-colonialism), and Night Watch (a Darker and Edgier analysis of Full Circle Revolutions, how people view the police, and the concept of justice) had made the humor take a back seat to the well-delivered Aesops in the same way that Going Postal did. And finally, Going Postal is also the first Discworld novel since The Light Fantastic to include chapters (which Pratchett did in part as a Take That! towards a literary critic who complained about the lack of chapters in his work).
• The Goosebumps series has had a few books that stray from the standard formula in some way
  • How I Learned to Fly: While most of the other books dealt with kids squaring off against monsters, vampires, ghosts, goblins, ghouls, and other freaky creatures, How I Learned to Fly doesn't have much in the way of supernatural elements (except for the book that teaches humans how to fly) and the real scares come from the downside of fame (Jack and Wilson become famous for their ability to fly and it cuts into their normal lives) and how greedy people exploit the talented (Jack's father is a talent agent who puts his son in local car dealership commercials).
  • Fright Camp, Are You Terrified Yet? and Scream School all end up having no supernatural events. Are You Terrified Yet in particular plays out more like like a slice of life comedy.
  • The Mummy Walks plays out like an espionage thriller about a kid who discovers he is the prince of a fictional Middle Eastern country and is forced to locate a treasure he has no memory of.
  • Slappy's Nightmare is a Villain Episode for Slappy the Dummy, as he is forced to do three good deeds, or he will be put to sleep forever.
• The Horse and His Boy is the only book in The Chronicles of Narnia that is set entirely within Narnia and its surrounding countries, with protagonists who are born there instead of visitors from our world.
• Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book are a collection of stories set in India, though each one has a short story that has nothing to do with jungles or India: "The White Seal", set in the northern oceans, and "Quiquern", which is about huskies and Inuits.
• Mog:
  • "Mog and Barnaby" is a lot less wordy and has no narration, only dialogue.
  • "Mog's Amazing Birthday Caper" (in addition to being a Dream Episode) has lots of alliteration, while most of the books don't feature wordplay at all.
  • "Mog's Family of Cats" doesn't have a plot. It just documents Mog's relatives.
• A More Perfect Heaven is a fairly typical biography of Copernicus (the astronomer). Two-thirds of the way through, right before the chapter where On the Revolutions was published, there is a sudden genre shift in the form of a three-act screenplay starting where the previous chapter's biography left off. This isn't a short thing either. The performance in audiobook covers a full hour and a half. At the conclusion of the screenplay, the next chapter picks up the biography right where the chapter before the screenplay left off.
• Pump Six and Other Stories is a collection of futuristic, sci-fi stories that tend to be either Bio Punk or set After the End (some of them both). And then there is Softer, which is a story of Jonathan Tilly, a regular, mild-mannered guy in contemporary world, who in a random fit kills his wife. He spends rest of the story dealing with the fact and his ever-growing realization that this is not the end of the world as the pop-culture have taught him.
• Roys Bedoys:
  • In one video, the family parodies the Baby Shark song and in another, Roys and his friends and teacher parody “The Wheels on the Bus”.
  • “Let’s Make a Rainbow, Roys Bedoys” doesn’t really have a moral like most of the stories, and neither does “Roys Bedoys’s Spectacular Halloween Party!”.
  • “Roys Bedoys & the Three Little Pigs” is just a retelling of The Three Little Pigs done with a school play. Similarly, “Roys Bedoys and Little Red Riding Hood” is just the kids reenacting Little Red Riding Hood.
  • “‘CAN’ You Play with Me?” doesn’t teach a moral; it just teaches the vocabulary word “can”.
• Spectral Shadows might end up having this if the other serials get written. It can especially be this if one were to read Serial 1, then skip forward to 11.
• Time Warp Trio: While most of the books are time travel adventures, "It's All Greek to Me" and "Summer Reading is killing me" has The Book taking them into fiction. The former has them going into the world of Greek myths, while the latter has them in a mash up of all the books on their summer reading list.
• You'd be shocked to learn that the first novel V. C. Andrews (Yes, that V.C. Andrews) ever wrote was Gods Of Green Mountain, a sci-fi novel taking place on another planet. It should be noted that it wasn't published until almost twenty years after Andrews' death, probably because it was so different from her work.