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Genre Savvy / Anime & Manga

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Examples of Genre Savvy in Anime and Manga:

  • A Certain Magical Index: Various characters point out certain things, including making references to dating sims when talking about Touma's harem, among other ways.
  • Ayakashi Triangle: The Gogyosen attempt to make their mind-controlled Matsuri clone seduce Suzu to transfer a lethal curse to her by setting up romcom situations, including a Sexy Soaked Shirt and Wall Pin of Love.
    For the sake of vengeance, us Gogyosen will even make use of this "romantic comedy" trope!
  • Black Clover: Yami Sukehiro, The Mentor to the protagonist's Ragtag Bunch of Misfits acts like a retired Stock Shōnen Hero, aware that genre convention calls for a power up in desperate times and fully expecting his protegee to learn a new skill on the fly during combat (which he does).
  • Daily Lives of High School Boys:
    • Hidenori is quite savvy in gaming tropes, and in some cases, tropes in anime storytelling (such as Comic-Book Time or Late for School).
    • Yanagin at least aware of gender perceptions as portrayed during the previous decade's fiction.
    • Yanagin's sempai, at the very least, knowing most girls in last decade's fiction are ditzy to an extreme.
  • Deadline Summoner: Mamoru Onodera, the main character, was a video game obsessed Otaku before getting sucked into an RPG. He is very much aware of how the world works and how to avoid getting seriously injured and/or killed. Not that the universe allows him to, though.
  • Delicious in Dungeon: Downplayed to one scenario — when Chilchuck describes his marital problems, Marcille gives an incredibly detailed breakdown of what he did wrong and how it looked from his wife's perspective, all based on her favourite romance novel series.
  • Digimon Universe: App Monsters: In addition to his insecurity about being a 'side character' whilst desiring to be more like a protagonist, the main character Haru intuits the connection between the App Drive he mysteriously received and the appearance of his Appmon partner Gatchmon, siting 'that's how these stories usually work'.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist: Roy Mustang, who knows How to Survive a War Movie, loses his cool in a flashback to the Ishvalan War when his buddy Maes gets all excited about a letter from his girlfriend Gracia, because he knows that's an indicator that the person will die in war novels. Maes survives the war, though he does not learn from his mistakes.
  • Haruhi Suzumiya:
    • The title character sees everything in terms of TV and anime tropes, even where they might not otherwise have been. She borders between being a wrong and being an accurate Genre Savvy. Since she is an all-powerful Reality Warper with unstoppable willpower, she actually makes herself become accurate.
    • Koizumi himself is a Genre Savvy character too, using it to his advantage to convince Haruhi of certain things. Sometimes it does work, sometimes it backfires at him.
    • Kyon also is a pretty Genre Savvy guy, usually expressing it with snarky remarks.
  • High School D×D:
    • Nearly everyone is at least at some level of this. It's to the point where Azazel and the Maous outline the motivations of the Hero Faction in video game terms.
    • Sairaorg is well aware of Issei's Determinator and Chivalrous Pervert behaviors and uses this to snap the Occult Research Club out of a Heroic BSoD after Issei dies. By pointing out that Issei wouldn't stay dead because he hasn't had sex with Rias yet.
    • Azazel manages to motivate Issei into fighting harder by pointing out that Vali's Half Dimension attack can halve the size of Rias's breasts.
  • Ikki Tousen: The series is basically "Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Gender Flipped and as a High School AU". Well, the teenage fighters know they're the reincarnations of these heroes, and several of them use such knowledge to their advantage as they fight their ways in the story, searching for a way to either fulfill or screw their fates. Even the Idiot Hero Hakufu shows savviness in these regards.
  • I'm the Main Character of a Harem Manga, but I'm Gay So Every Day Is Hell for Me: Touge is well aware that everyone around him is behaving as if they're in a harem manga. A really, really shitty harem manga.
  • Shiro of K. He talks this kind of sense into Kuroh to stop the latter from killing him over the video that seems to show Shiro murdering Tatara Totsuka. He and Reisi Munakata also both use some of this in their phone negotiations in episode 8.
    Shiro: Pleading my innocence from inside of a jail cell would be a waste of time. I've seen enough cop shows to know how that works.
    Reisi: And I can't help but feel your two companions would come to bail you out... probably in a non-traditional way.
  • Kannagi: Crazy Shrine Maidens: Akiba Meguru, being a "self-conscious Akiba-freak", is Genre Savvy to the extreme, even recognizing that Mikuriya Jin for what he is:
    'If this is a comic, you are the main character!'
  • The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer:
    • Amamiya Yuuhi displayed a large amount of dating sim genre savviness on multiple occasions. One occasion during which he specifically chose to walk in on Asahina changing, knowing this type of situation usually engenders "special events".
    • At another time, instead of opening the door onto a changing girl, he felt accomplished instead, by having a girl walk in on him naked as a "special event"
    • Sami also remarks, at a certain point when Yuuhi suddenly grabs her face in during a dream that, had this been a romantic comedy, he'd have grabbed her boobs instead of her head.
    • During the final fight of the manga, Mikazuki realizes that final dramatic fights must be ended with a one-on-one Cross Counter or a Single-Stroke Battle or similarly dramatic mutual 'final technique', and charges up for a final super punch with a ludicrously long and awesome name. When Yuuhi moves in to oblige him, Mikazuki kicks him in the face instead and wins the match.
  • Lucky Star: Konata is Genre Savvy to the point of being a trope-fixated Cloudcuckoolander. She recognizes tropes and conventions... but never seems to be able to tell which actually apply to her own genre. Sometimes she gets it right, but other times, she applies tropes that are spectacularly wrong for her situation, referencing Dating Sim event flags or deciding the dentist sounds like a classic mecha anime.
  • Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
    • The "library girls", quite understandably, read a lot of books... which means they're quite willing to accept the idea that their teacher is secretly a wizard. In particular, Paru (Saotome Haruna, herself supposed to be an amateur manga artist!) is all too willing to participate in cliche storylines.
      Paru: But mostly I want to help because IT SOUNDS LIKE A BLAST!
    • But then, one character is Genre Savvy enough to freak out when she realizes that she's in a Love Triangle, and those never end well... (especially not in Japanese literature!)
    • In a curious and almost tragic use of this trope, Ako expresses her lack of self-confidence and feeling of being "ordinary" by saying she's literally "just a supporting character". Negi, of course, tries to reassure her that she is important... but in the context of the manga as a whole, she's exactly right about her lack of importance. At least so far...
  • Oh! Edo Rocket:
    • Because the show has No Fourth Wall, some of the characters are genre savvy. For example, in the English version, there is a point where Tetsuju falls off a hovering space ship and crashes to the floor of a rocky canyon. Sora then assures Seikichi, "Don't worry, he'll be fine. He's the comic relief!"
    • Shinza says the same thing about himself after he narrowly escapes being arrested and is nearly sliced in half inside his hiding place. "Good thing I'm the comic relief!"
  • Ouran High School Host Club: Houshakuji Renge is an Otaku example. All of the other main characters (except Haruhi), as well, to the extent of deliberately playing up their specialized Bishōnen stereotypes to please their customers.
  • She's My Knight: In contrast to Mogami's Genre Blindness, Ichinose and especially Miyoshi and Nikaido are fully aware of the Shoujo manga tropes Mogami exhibits, though Ichinose has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to himself.
  • The World God Only Knows:
    • Keima is an internet-famous genius when it comes to Dating Sims, so when Hell has a problem with evil spirits hiding inside schoolgirls—where making them fall in love is the only way to exorcise them — they call him. And despite Keima's dislike of real girls, it works.
  • Tsurupika Hagemaru-kun: Hagemaru suffers from this and Medium Awareness.
    Hagemaru: Hey, Kaka, don't sneeze like this while you're naked or the censor guys will cut the scene!
    Hagemaru: I can do anything, I'm the hero of this series!
  • Subverted in Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School. The character Chisa is a fan of horror movies, and yet sees nothing wrong with saying things like "I'll [do X] once this is over" or wearing white clothes while fighting in a war. Unsurprisingly, once shit gets serious in the Future arc, she is the first to die.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!: Yugi and his friends play two tabletop-roleplaying games in the manga series (where they are trapped in the game world as their characters), and in both, their first stop for information is almost always the tavern. During the second RPG, which was based on actual historical in-universe events, Yugi doesn't even realize it's an RPG they're in at first: being a gaming nerd, he actually goes there compulsively because adventurers tend to go to taverns to gather information in role-playing games.
  • Dragon Ball Super: In the fight against Arale, Vegeta realizes that she acts and operates like a gag manga character, and concludes that conventional attacks won't work on her. So he gets her to look at a make-believe UFO, distracting her long enough to kick her with enough force to knock off her head... though as a robot she easily puts it back on.

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