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  • The Anime Trope System: Stone vs. Viper: Clyde is very knowledgeable about anime and tries to use said knowledge to avoid tropes with differing rates of success.
  • Animorphs
    • Upon being told they're not comic book heroes, Marco makes the rather prophetic comment: "Yes, but I really really want it to be a comic book. See in a comic book the heroes don't get killed."
      Marco: Now I have a new superstition. Anytime I'm not worried, I worry.
      Marco: I'm paranoid, sure. But that doesn't mean I don't have enemies.
    • All of them are at least somewhat Genre Savvy, as Tobias, Jake and Marco are all fans of science fiction and comic books, Ax loves soap operas and Rachel at least watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but they're much more likely to assert that This Is Reality and just use it for jokes.
  • In the comic mystery play Any Number Can Die, a wannabe detective urges a reluctant informant to tell him the name of the murderer, because otherwise she'll get killed and only have time to whisper him a cryptic clue. Sure enough, she gets shot, gives him a clue, and he says in frustration, This always happens in stories!
  • The Artemis Fowl books have a strong "action movie" sensibility — several of the characters are fans of action movies and are shown to compare their own experiences with the genre.
    A spinning kick, Butler. How could you?
    • Invoked in The Opal Deception, when Holly asks Artemis to think like a videogame character in order to divise a solution to their predicament (being attacked by trolls). Artemis decides to think like a character in a war game, tries to create a list of exploitable weaknesses that the trolls possess, and forms a plan based around their hatred of bright lights.
  • Isaac Asimov
    • "The Callistan Menace": Stanley Fields, who stowed aboard their ship, loves "Dime Spacers"; mass-produced tales of adventure. These stories inspired Stanley to run away and stow aboard a spaceship without knowing their destination.
    • "Search by the Foundation": Arkady Darell is delighted to engage in the sort of adventures described in book-films and thrillers on video, although when they portray a Little Stowaway, they neglect to mention the need to use the bathroom. Other characters also mention In-Universe fiction, but she's the only one who acts based on narrative tropes. Anthor describes her as "a ferocious little romantic, the only child of an ivory-tower academician, growing up in an unreal world of video and book-film adventure. She lives in a weird self-constructed fantasy of espionage and intrigue."
      With Olynthus' sound-receiver propped beside her pillow, she felt like a character out of a book-film, and hugged every moment of it close to her chest in an ecstasy of "Spy-stuff."
    • "What Is This Thing Called Love?": Investigator Botax, an alien anthropologist, has studied our literature in an attempt to understand humanity. During their demonstration to Captain Garm, they read excerpts from several erotic stories, especially "Recreationlad".
  • Bazil Broketail:
    • Unlike many other characters outside Argonath, Evander seems to be aware that he's living in a fantasy world where magic and supernatural phenomena do exist. Thus, when he visits another world and discovers impending danger at the hands of Waakzaam the Great, he knows that the best reasonable course of action is to deliver the news to Argonath, since only there he is going to find people ready to hear him out and believe him.
    • Like Evander, Serena is fully aware that what they both discovered in the Orthond world means their own world Ryetelth is in danger and the only place where their warning will be taken seriously is Argonath.
  • Joe Hill's short story Best New Horror involves an editor who slowly realizes that he's wound up in a situation that conforms to horror genre specifications. He finds this oddly exhilarating.
  • Blackout: World War 2-era veteran actor Sir Godfrey figures out that Polly is a time traveler due to her incompetence at lying and his encyclopedic knowledge of storytelling. When he confronts her about it, he speaks in storytelling terms.
  • Brenish and Gareth in Below both grew up hungering for tales of the underground ruins. They know so much about how adventurers survived or came to bad ends that they're both regarded as masters of the lore.
  • Most Agatha Christie books contain at least one line where a character exclaims that "It's just like a detective novel!" and several suspects in various mysteries show nervousness because they're the least likely character to do it and hence, if it were a mystery novel, the one most likely to be fingered. Sometimes it's true, sometimes it isn't. In the short story "At the Crossroads" the murderer consciously invokes a number of familiar mystery fiction tropes in an attempt to be regarded as that suspect who looks really guilty but you know didn't actually do it.
    • Although the title character of Christie's Parker Pyne Investigates eventually turned into another Amateur Sleuth, his first few appearances presented him as a consultant who boasts that he has discovered the underlying principles of human nature and can solve any kind of unhappiness — for, of course, a suitable fee. In practice, his "underlying principles of human nature" seem to be a form of genre-savvy, as these stories are all genre parodies, with Parker Pyne identifying what genre his client belongs in and then invoking the appropriate tropes to give them a happy ending. It's never stated that baldly in the stories themselves, although "The Case of the Discontented Soldier" has a conversation with Ariadne Oliver where he wonders if they're laying on the adventure clichés too thick and she assures him that the clichés serve to unconsciously reassure the clients because events are proceeding as fiction has taught them to expect.
    • Anne Beddingfield, the heroine of Christie's The Man in the Brown Suit, has a thorough grounding in romance novels and cliffhanger serials, which comes in very useful when she finds herself mixed up in an adventure involving murder, missing heirs, jewel robbery and multiple suitors.
  • The Chronicles of Narnia:
    • Peter Pevensie demonstrates a degree of Genre Savvy in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when — after Edmund suggests the robin they are following might be leading them into a trap — he observes that in all of the stories he has read, robins are creatures of good.
    • Edmund also has a Genre Savvy moment or two near the beginning of Prince Caspian, drawing upon his knowledge of adventure stories for ideas on how he and his siblings can get by after they find themselves in an unpopulated wilderness.
    • He has another in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when they are considering what has happened to the man whose armor they have found; it is explicitly cited that he reads mysteries.
    • Eustace, by contrast, has his initial lack of Genre Savvy pointed out multiple times — he's said in the narration to have "read none of the right books." In his diary, when the ship is becalmed and drinking water is at a premium, he recounts how Caspian warned that anyone caught stealing water will "get two dozen" and that he didn't know what that meant until Edmund explained it to him. "It comes of the sort of books those Pevensie kids read." (Even the Pevensies have their lapses, like when they first arrive back in Narnia in Prince Caspian and think they might have to live off the land. They think they remember reading about people eating roots, but they're not sure what kind; Lucy "always thought it meant roots of trees.")
    • In The Magician's Nephew, Digory reminds Uncle Andrew what usually happens to the Evil Sorcerer in stories, which seems to hit home. (A possible subversion since Uncle Andrew turns out not to be the real antagonist and simply becomes irrelevant in the end, although he gets dragged through a lot of comically miserable ordeals first.)
  • In Cold Comfort Farm, a satirical novel about a young woman who goes from the city to live with her backward relatives on the eponymous farm, Flora Poste has read all sorts of novels about young women who go from the city to live with their backward relatives on farms. She thus correctly guesses that they'll have names like Seth, Amos, and Judith, identifies Aunt Ada Doom as "the Dominant Grandmother Archetype", and keeps an eye peeled for subversions and exceptions.
  • In John C. Wright's Count To A Trillion, Menelaus notices that the future does not match what was promised in SF he read as a child.
  • Jessica in Demon in my View from the Den of Shadows series. Having written almost 20 books about the vampire world, she knows more about it than some vampires.
  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days: Greg knows that most classics his mom will force him to read will have the Death by Newbery Medal trope. He does mess up on one prediction, though. He says that because Charlotte's Web is a "Classic", either the girl or the pig won't make it to the end of the book. He doesn't finish it, so he doesn't realize that it's Charlotte the spider who dies.
  • Terry Pratchett's Discworld features the Theory of Narrative Causality as an active force in the world, blurring the line between referencing past experiences, actual stories, and the physics of the Disc:
    • Witches are said to guard the edges, and they frequently tell each other stories about other witches to keep an eye on each other. In Witches Abroad, the Lancre witches have to fight Granny Weatherwax's twin sister, Lily, with fairy tale stories in Genua. The stories want to be told, whatever the effects on their players. Lily is arranging the city of Genua along the lines of these stories. The toymaker will be a jolly, red-faced man who whistles while he works if he knows what's good for him. The servant girl will marry the prince, with the help of her fairy godmother, whoever has to get hurt along the way. Since Granny and Lily are twins, one must be the "evil" twin because "that's how the stories go".
    • Malicia from The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents insists on always seeing things in terms of stories, ranging from fairy tales to Kid Detective novels like Tom Swift, The Hardy Boys, and The Famous Five (she claims at one point that four kids and a dog is "the right number for an adventure"). Furthermore, she has trouble in coping with subversions and exceptions, and always makes herself out to be the main character of the "story".
    • In Going Postal, Moist Von Lipwig knows very well how things are supposed to go... and plays the part of the hero, because he is a con artist, and taking advantage of what people expect to see is his major skill. So when he hears that the cat is stuck in the burning building after getting everyone else out safely, he knows that there's only one choice. If he wants to continue this story, he must run back in to save the cat "because that's what the hero does." Plus, it will make headlines, since saving a cat is "full of human interest."
    • Discworld characters are often quite aware that Narrative Causality is at work (sometimes because they realize that their world is so ridiculous it could only be the setting of a story.) However, this isn't always helpful: in Guards! Guards!, the men of the City Watch are trying to invoke a Million to One Chance in trying to hit a dragon's "voolnerables." However, they soon conclude that all the points in their favor — their archer won trophies for his shooting back in the day, he's using his lucky arrow, a dragon's "voolnerables" might be quite large — could result in some boring-old-number-to-one chance of success, or might even be a near certainty. They thus attempt to correct things through a series of handicaps, by blindfolding the archer, putting soot on his face, and making him stand facing the wrong way on one leg while singing the Hedgehog Song. While these efforts are unsuccessful, in that their archer whiffs the shot, and the dragon torches their shooting spot, forcing the men to leap into a nearby pond for safety, fortunately the odds of surviving that are precisely a million-to-one.
    • The Old Count in Carpe Jugulum, when he appears, discusses how Contractual Genre Blindness can be a kind of Pragmatic Villainy. He's a Fair-Play Villain who turns up every generation or so, captures a comely maiden, but fills his castle with large windows only covered by drapes, things that can easily be bent into holy symbols, caches of stakes and anatomy diagrams, etc. The result is that the Old Count gets "killed" regularly by someone with courage and a bit of luck, who enjoys the gratitude of the kidnapped maiden and the fame of being a vampire slayer, while said vampire will be back in a few decades after something drips blood on his ashes. As a result, the local townspeople consider the Old Count a Worthy Opponent and don't take a special effort to permanently get rid of him, while the new modern "vampyres" are despised for reducing their domain to Industrialized Evil.
  • John Dickson Carr's detective Dr. Gideon Fell is well aware that he's in a detective novel. In The Hollow Man aka The Three Coffins, he stops the action to explain to everybody how a locked room murder mystery can be pulled off, explaining that there's no point in pretending they're not in a detective novel.
  • Don Quixote spends much of his entire story ruminating on how the future author of his works will portray his adventures, using the tropes he has picked up from reading volume after volume of chivalric literature.
  • Dracula: Van Helsing is genre-savvy—he's a scientist, but having recognized that they were fighting a monster out of legend, he goes to those legends to learn how to fight it.
  • Harry Dresden in The Dresden Files. Not exactly harmed by such details as Dracula having been written to educate people about how to kill a certain kind of vampire.
    "The trick was to figure out which movie I was in. If this was a variant on High Noon, then walking outside was probably a fairly dangerous idea. On the other hand, there was always the chance that I was still in the opening scenes of The Maltese Falcon and everyone trying to chase down the bird still wanted to talk to me. In which case, this was probably a good chance to dig for vital information about what might well be a growing storm around the search for The Word of Kemmler."
    • A failure of Genre Savvy is lampshaded later in the book. When Sue, the reanimated T. Rex eats a ghoul, the ghoul does nothing but scream and throw up its hands to shield itself. Butters points out that never did any good in the movie, and Harry notes he must not have seen it.
    • Also Nicodemus. At one point, Harry tries to trick him into telling him his master plan, but Nicodemus sees right through it, causing Harry to suspect he's read the Evil Overlord List.
    • In Proven Guilty Harry has a plan that hinges on a group of monsters impersonating horror movie creatures ambushing him. When they fail to do so, he threatens to take "drastic, cliched measures" like walking through doorways backwards.
  • Subverted in The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Rare book finder Lucas Corso has read enough to recognize a trope when he sees one and insists on following them until he can nab the Big Bad. He's mostly right but the Big Bad is someone completely different than he suspected.
  • Enchanted Forest Chronicles: All the characters are aware that they live in a fairy tale world. They don't call it that, but they know or expect that events will play out according to one or another fantasy tropes, e.g., when Cimorene meets the stone prince, he castigates himself for even trying to complete a quest that he should have left for the third of three brothers, the other two having tried and failed. Likewise, when Cimorene and Alianora part, they each wish that the other will live happily ever after.
  • Happens a lot in K. A. Applegate's Everworld series, about four young adults thrown into a world in which everything from all the mythologies in the history of the world co-exists. Odds are at least one of them will know enough about whatever figure they encounter to know how to deal with them. They still don't believe Cassandra, though.
  • In Fortunately, the Milk, the protagonist has an encounter with aliens that leaves him stranded in the past and captured by pirates. He decides to insist on being made to walk the plank, on the grounds that he's seen lots of stories about pirates and the heroes most often get rescued just as they're about to be forced off the end of the plank. First he has to explain the procedure to the pirates, who usually just knife people they want to get rid of, but eventually they get the idea — and just as he's about to be forced off the end of the plank, he's rescued.
  • Fox and O'Hare: Nick's seen enough television shows to be able to predict the outcome of any given situation, and considering he favors sitcom character names (e.g. Cliff Clavin and Jethro Clampett) for aliases, it shows.
  • In Andrew L Bergman's "Genre Savvy", the protagonist Edgar and his friend Charlotte are horror movie buffs talking about the Tropes and clichés of the genre. The story's title comes from Edgar's belief that the victims of horror movies have it coming since they aren't Genre Savvy themselves; they should abandon their vacation when they see the Hillbilly Horrors nearby or stay away from the places were people are regularly disappearing or turning up dead. This reasoning causes him to panic when he meets an injured girl on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, believing that something will kill him if he tries to help her, so he speeds off and leaves her.
  • The Great Zoo of China:
    • Hamish notes that the Great Zoo and its dragons are great...as long as you haven't seen Jurassic Park, wondering (accurately) what'll happen when the dragons get out and turn on the humans. Sure enough...
    • Amusingly, the Chinese think they're this, even telling Hamish they've seen the film too—but as there and the later Jurassic World, they don't do much better when the animals escape and start killing everybody.
  • Anywhere But the Head from Harda Horda anthology has a nameless protagonist who's pretty well-versed in zombie fiction. Which would come in handy during the outbreak Zombie Apocalypse that she otherwise slept through... except the story is set in a small, provincial town somewhere in Poland, rendering the "knowledge" from predominately American media utterly useless when applied to her surroundings. That ignoring the fact that the story is an Affectionate Parody of the whole concept in the first place.
  • Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest:
    • The National Questing Bureau follow traditions not out of a cultural obligation, but because "patterns" all tend to emerge whenever a Call to Adventure happens and trying to change or uproot those patterns can have cosmic ramifications, hence why they only support the ones going on quests rather than doing quests in their place. Helen and Troy's specific quest — a Fetch Quest appointed by the Lost God to two to four mortals for magical MacGuffins — has actually happened before on a 500-year cycle.
      Helen: So your job isn't to help us with the quest. You're just here to maintain the status quo.
      Neil Waechter: You're a very astute young woman, Helen.
    • When the Three Sisters refuse to give them directions until Helen or Troy buys something, Troy asks if the things they buy will reveal themselves to be important down the line. Future practically admits that he's correct to assume such a thing would happen.
    • Helen manages to get out of the Three Sister's Psychological Torment Zone test when she correctly guesses beat-for-beat what it's going to be (citing the iconic cave-scene from The Empire Strikes Back), defeating the whole purpose of the test in the process.
      Past: I keep telling you we should update the test.
      Present: But it's a classic.
      Past: There's a fine line between classic and uninspired.
  • Many characters in John Ringo and Travis S. Taylor's Into the Looking Glass series of novels are perfectly aware they've been thrown into a science fictional situation.
    • In the second novel, Vorpal Blade, being science fiction fans is seen as a useful characteristic for the new Space Marines and officers flying the first human starship, the captain of which takes a giddy delight in being able to give orders like "Ahead Warp 1" and "Engage warp drive".
    • In the sequel Claws That Catch this is taken to a slightly surreal extreme when some conflicts between various alien technologies cause them to hallucinate that they are anime characters. One of the main characters laments the fact that he is clearly a secondary character since as anime characters the hero is clearly identifiable.
  • In Island in the Sea of Time the entire island of Nantucket finds itself transported back in time to the Bronze Age. Ian Arnstein, a visiting history professor and science fiction fan, is very prone to comparing the situation the island finds itself in to science fiction and fantasy novels and using its tropes as guides to how the new Nantucket government should act.
  • The whole point of Charles Stross's The Jennifer Morgue. The villain, a Genre Savvy billionaire trying to take over the world, recognizes he's a living trope and creates a Evil Plan by creating a magic spell that turns everything around him into a James Bond adventure, so that only a British agent conforming to the Bond stereotype would be in a position to stop him and save the world last the last moment. The plan is to then end the spell, making the agent an ordinary person again and so easily contained and killed, with no one else able to get there in time. Unfortunately for him, the British are even more Genre Savvy when the agent they send isn't really the Hero, he's the Bond Babe, acting as an initially oblivious decoy for his girlfriend who is the real Hero sweeping in at the last minute with commandos to save the day.
  • Journey to Chaos: Tasio delights in pointing out conventions in the RPG genre that show up this fantasy and action/adventure style story. For instance, when Eric is about to fight a plot important major enemy, he'll announce a Boss Fight and remind Eric that the Final Boss will always have more than one form. He also likes to use tropes by name when explaining his plans, like how he exploited Mentor Occupational Hazard, defied Deus ex machina and played straight Helping Would Be Kill Stealing.
  • In the Kitty Norville novel ''Kitty's House of Horrors," upon realizing that the "reality show" she and the other guests have come to attend is actually a front for some anti-supernatural bigots who are trying to kill them and that the house they're in is a giant Death Trap, Kitty's immediate response is to gather the group and inform them that the number one reason people die in horror movies is because they don't watch horror movies. She then lists all the standard ways to get yourself killed in a slasher movie and how to avoid them.
  • In Knights of the Borrowed Dark, the main character Denizen Hardwick has read a lot of fantasy books and lampshades a great many tropes. His best friend, Simon, loves detective novels, which helps him survive his own ordeal.
  • The Langoliers:
    • Discussed. As a mystery writer, Bob Jenkins provides a plausible analysis to Albert to explain how they all ended up on a seemingly abandoned plane in mid-flight by pitching a conspiracy scenario about a black ops social experiment. When Albert suggests that they take over the plane, Jenkins admits out that his scenario can only explain the state of the plane; he can't think of any way an outside agency could suppress any sign of life on the ground, which should be covered in electric lights visible through any possible cloud cover. The fact that the entire world can be demonstrated to be out of whack takes things beyond the pale, meaning rational deduction is meaningless;
      Jenkins: I'm the wrong person to ask, I'm afraid. It's too bad Larry Niven or John Varley isn't on board.
      Albert: Who are those guys?
      Jenkins: Science-fiction writers.
    • He's not giving himself or the universe enough credit, though. Once they get to Bangor and land, he finds more than enough consistent evidence to figure out the One Big Lie: between the tasteless food, odorless air, lack of reverberating sound and a bullet incapable of punching through a T-shirt, he's able to rationally deduce that the key to it all is entropy; they're in a world that has been used up and abandoned. In other words, they've somehow Time Traveled a short distance into the past, into an existence that the universe has abandoned for greener pastures. And if they don't find a way back fast, whatever happens to such dead worlds is going to happen to them.
  • In The Lord of the Rings, most of the good guys are pretty Genre Savvy, since legends are a major form of entertainment in Middle Earth. In "The Stairs of Cirith Ungol," Sam wonders if he and Frodo have reached a part of the story that the audience won't want to hear. Frodo, however, rightly points out that it's the dark, scary parts that keep people interested.
  • In the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers, characters discourse at length about how their situations would be different if they were in a detective story. It sometimes helps: in Gaudy Night when Harriet receives a phone call summoning her back to the college:
    She remembered Peter's saying to her one day:
    'The heroines of thrillers deserve all they get. When a mysterious voice rings them up and says it is Scotland Yard, they never think of ringing back to verify the call. Hence the prevalence of kidnapping.' note 
  • E. Nesbit's Melisande: In this apparent fairy-tale world, Melisande has - the text itself states - read Alice in Wonderland and knows to avoid crying on people when expanded to giant size.
  • In Mind Games, Joe, Anthony, and James are all experienced gamers, and immediately see the parallels between the System and traditional role-playing-games, to the group's great benefit. Somewhat avoided when the characters realize the System may just be trying to find a metaphor they can use to understand what it can do, and it may not actually work like an RPG at all. Lampshaded by both Joe and James at different points. ("You had to say it, didn't you?'')
  • Nightfall (Series): Prince Vladimir. He even lampshades this after Myra’s Scheherezade Gambit:
    What are you doing, girl? Do you think you can pull a Scheherazade on me? You must know by now that I am too genre savvy to fall for that.
  • In Northanger Abbey, the protagonist Catherine is a big fan of Gothic novels and incorrectly applies their tropes when she visits the Tilneys at their home, the Abbey of the title. Her Love Interest Henry is a fan of them himself—so when he finds Catherine snooping around his late mother's rooms, he surmises that Catherine is imagining a tale of imprisonment and murder, with herself as the heroine come to uncover these dark secrets. And he's spot-on.
  • Nowhere Stars takes place in a world where Magical Girl (and boy) style heroes known as Keepers are public figures and have been for centuries. Shona Tiernan was the child-star of a Keeper-themed tv show before she became a real Keeper, and consequently knows all the tropes, which she gleefully plays into with Catch Phrases and In the Name of the Moon speeches. She also immediately identifies main-character Liadain as a Dark Magical Girl and mysterious loner-type, hence why she's so determined to get her to join the team she's trying to make.
  • The hero of Adelbert von Chamisso's 1814 novel Peter Schlemihl is well-read in all the folktale, fairy-tale, and fantasy literature of Germany. When a mysterious stranger offers to buy his shadow, offering in exchange a choice of a list of magical items such as a mandrake root, a cap of invisibility, or "the purse of Fortunatus", Schlemihl chooses this last, knowing from the novel Fortunatus that it is a source of endless money. It's true that selling his shadow turns out to be a big mistake, but otherwise, Schlemihl's genre-savvy serves him well, such as when he encounters the invisible bird-nest from Hans von Grimmelshausen's story Das wunderbarliche Vogel-Nest and at once recognizes it and knows how to use it. Later, the stranger returns; Schlemihl demands to know who he is and he describes himself as "a simple wandering scholar." Well, that is just how Mephistopheles first appeared in Goethe's Faust, and when the "scholar" offers to return the shadow in exchange for a contract signed in blood, Schlemihl does not sign.
  • In A Practical Guide to Evil, this applies to quite a few characters. Most notably the Black Knight, Empress Malicia, later Catherine, and The Wandering Bard to the point that it's the only power she's demonstrated so far. It makes them all very, very dangerous. This is largely possible because the Theory of Narrative Causality is enforced by Creation.
    • Book II deals heavily with the Rule of Three, where two foes clash three times with the loser of the first confrontation ultimately triumphing in the third. Catherine knows she's fated to lose against the Lone Swordsman but arranges the situation so she'll come out on top once the story ends. Similarly, Heiress purposefully arranged this situation between herself and Catherine so she could have a Creation-guaranteed win when it would be most useful.
    • By book five, Catherine has become so genre-savvy, that she views every action under the lense of whether it would lead to a story that could harm/benefit her, even shutting down friends who say things like "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?" These friends note that that makes her rather uncanny and unnerving, but it also serves her well.
  • In Andrew Lang's Prince Prigio, the genre-savvy King of Pantouflia wants to get rid of his obnoxiously intelligent eldest son by sending the princes after the monster, knowing that the youngest son will be the only one who can triumph. Prigio, being genre-savvy himself, does not fall for this — and STILL gets it wrong.
  • In Princess Holy Aura, Silvertail set up and helped to propagate many of the Magical Girl memes, and both Holly and Seika are very familiar with the genres and tropes.
    "We're taking the parts of the meme that we know are stupid or dangerous and punching them in the face first."
  • RWBY: Fairy Tales of Remnant: In the fairy tale The Girl in the Tower, Professor Ozpin observes that the girl effectively rescued herself. Growing up secretly reading fairy tales and dreaming of being rescued by a fairy tale prince, she is inspired to turn her situation into a fairy tale that will attract heroes from far and wide to rescue her. It succeeds, but Ozpin's notes both question whether she lied to achieve her goal and observe that there's fridge logic in just how many people her tactic ended up killing. The tale is a sanitised version of how he and Salem first met, and Ozpin implies this version is the very tale she crafted while imprisoned. However, his notes strongly imply that, after having been worn down by thousands of years endlessly fighting his ex-wife, he is haunted by the possibility that he never truly knew her at all.
  • In book two of Tanya Huff's Smoke and Shadows trilogy, the production team and main cast of a Vampire Detective Series are trapped in a Haunted House while filming an episode about a haunted house. A large part of their defenses are ripped off from Charmed or The X-Files, and much of the dialogue consists of witty observations — and creative criticism — of their predicament, and blatant self mockery of Show Within a Show Darkest Night.
  • Song at Dawn involves Troubadours, i.e. people who make their living singing stories of love or courage or bawdiness and so there are many genre savvy to the kind of story they're in.
    • Estela knows countless love ballads so she knows how the romance genre works. She'll think things like 'how would this work in a song' or 'following the instructions of a thousand songs'.
    • Dragonetz, Estela's music teacher, sees no point in going to the Court of Love because he's already an expert on Courtly Love.
  • A Song of Ice and Fire has a theme of subverting the trope. Sometimes characters figure out beforehand that life will be nothing like the stories, and sometimes they suffer horribly for it.
    • Quentyn Martell is emboldened to reckless action by stories in which princes win fights against dragons and get the beautiful princess afterwards, but he makes a muck of it and dies a horrible death.
    • Brienne tells the story of a hero with a magic sword who never used it, saving it for a singular event. Dick Crabb tells her that it's better to use the best weapon available than die thinking, "I should have used the sword!" When Brienne next anticipates a fight, she thinks back to Dick's words and pulls out her hidden Valyrian steel sword. It gives her just enough of an advantage to win the ensuing fight.
  • In Laura Amy Schlitz's Splendors And Glooms a 2013 Newbery Honor-winner, the children explicitly invoke the puppet play "The Bottle Imp" to question whether the fire opal is a good thing.
  • Spy High: In the second book, Eddie gets a monologue about how, if this were a book, he would be the Plucky Comic Relief who accomplished less than anyone else and, consequently, is at risk of becoming a Sacrificial Lamb.
  • Star City: Emma and Liam Smith are huge Science Fiction fans. They regularly reference popular works such as Star Trek and use what they learned to deal with the Ba'ren, to various degrees of success.
  • Parodied in Mark Twain's The Story of a Good Little Boy, in which the protagonist longs to be the hero of a Sunday school book and goes around trying, unsuccessfully, to do all the right things: taking in a stray dog, getting a job with only a signed tract as a reference, etc. The main thing that bothers him is that all decent Sunday school book heroes die so he'll never get to see the book he's in.
  • A relatively minor example (it doesn't actually do him a lot of good) in Sunglasses After Dark: After Claude Haggerty has been kidnapped by a pair of hitmen who want to kill him for reasons he doesn't understand, and then rescued by a tiny woman who rips the hitmen apart with her bare hands and starts drinking their blood, he passes out and wakes up in what can only be described as a lair. At which point, he desperately begins trying to figure out what sort of horror story he's fallen into, and whether there's any chance he's the hero. And praying it's not a slasher film.
  • In Through The Looking Glass, Alice's familarity with Mother Goose rhymes leads to Genre Savviness. She knows that the king has promised to send all his horses and men to help Humpty Dumpty, and she awaits the crow with great anticipation, to break up the fight between Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
  • In Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next and Nursery Crime novels, the lead characters are successful because of their Genre Savvy. Thursday works in the Literary Crime division, making sure that novels stick to the conventions of their genre and using her Genre Savvy to get out of many sticky situations. The main problems come when she has trouble identifying the genre she has stepped into. Jack Sprat, in the Nursery Crime novels, is an interesting character because he not only investigates crimes committed by Nursery Rhyme characters, but he also has a strange empathy for the genre-driven urges that make them commit the crimes.
  • P. G. Wodehouse:
    • In Jill the Reckless, Mrs. Barker notes that having problems getting married is just like in the True Hearts Novelette series. Barker has to explain to her that even though they have enough money, My Beloved Smother will persuade Derek to give it up.
    • In Hot Water, Medway, the lady's maid, speaks of how the book she's reading has a detective in disguise as a maid, causing much consternation among characters to plan to crack a safe. Actually, she's the criminal, out to crack the safe herself.
  • Sergey Lukaynenko's Rough Draft and its sequel Final Draft are practically dripping with genre savvy. Characters frequently reflect on how the events of the story follow certain genre conventions. Sometimes their observations foreshadow the actual outcome, sometimes they turn out to be wrong and other times their realization of what genre convention they wound up facing comes too late to do any good. In one of the early chapters, the main character meets up with a science fiction writer (a thinly-veiled Lukyanenko stand-in) in order to try to figure out the solution to his decisively supernatural problem. The writer winds up explaining how various Russian science fiction authors would resolve it, ending with his own take (which didn't match the actual ending of the novels.)
  • The online blogiform novel Ultimate Dream is pretty much defined by its Genre Savvy Deadpan Snarker narrator, who relentlessly mocks the cliched Role-Playing Game of the title, which plays like a catalogue of The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés. She continues mocking the clichés even after she and her friends get sucked into the gameworld. The subsequent discussions with the game characters attempts, in several cases, to justify several of the cliches. The Big Bad is Genre Savvy, while The Man Behind the Man is aware of the genre's limitations and indeed tries to enforce them.

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