Genre Blindness - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Genre Blind

"As a rule, people in movies haven't ever seen a movie. They're not equipped to deal with anything strange."

— Seanbaby, 7 Great Occupations...

"This is something that nobody has ever heard about or seen before."

— Ben, Night of the Living Dead (1990 movie)

A condition afflicting many television characters, seen when one demonstrates by their behavior that they have never in their life ever seen the kind of show they're in, and thus have none of the reactions a typical audience member would have in the same situation. Worse, they are unable to learn from any experiences related to their genre.

Genre Blindness is what keeps the cast of Threes Company leaping to outrageous conclusions even after the hundredth stupid misunderstanding, instead of sitting down and talking things out. It makes young girls go for walks in the woods after midnight without a flashlight when there's an axe murderer or a vampire around. It makes the supergenius supervillains in James Bond movies stuff the hero into an elaborate melodramatic Death Trap from which he inevitably escapes instead of just shooting him. It's why a Professional Wrestling referee always holds faces to the strictest letter of the rules, even as the heels break every rule in the book behind his back. It is one of the engines that drive the classic 1960s-70s sitcom.

Although genre blindness is a legitimate flaw, it should be noted that it can be difficult for writers to create characters who are not genre blind without hanging a lampshade on it by saying something like "This is just like in the movies!", especially in the horror genre which requires suspense that can easily be undone by such comedic relief.

Related:

One of the more common forms of Genre Blindness is ignorance of Hanlon's Razor.
Reality Is Unrealistic is what happens when real people come down with this.
Contrast with Genre Savvy, and its extreme form, Contractual Genre Blindness.

Examples

Anime

In an episode of Pokemon, the gang falls into the battle pyramid. Ash then finds an ominous stone Pikachu idol sitting on a pedestal. He takes it off. No prizes for guessing what happens next. Ash, maybe you need to watch this movie called Raiders of the Lost Ark. Later, he finds a ancient Pokéball, and thinking Ho-oh is inside, tries to use it... And gets possesed by ~~Yami Bakura~~ ~~Florence~~ The King of Pokélantis.
If Miki from Hell Teacher Nube ever approaches you with an occult magazine, RUN. Despite having nearly killed herself (or her classmates) fifty times over while testing an local rumor or deliberately Tempting Fate just to see what would happen (which resulted, very early in the manga, in her turning into a half-youkai permanently,) she will try again. And again. And again.

ComicBooks

Let's say that you're confronting a Corrupt Corporate Executive who's ruined your life by putting kiddie porn on your computer. You put a gun, given to you by a mysterious benefactor, to her head and explain why you're about to kill her, and she offers to give you and your kids enough money to start over on the condition that you give her the gun so she can use it to find out who your benefactor is. Do you accept this offer? If you say no, you are a smarter man than Lee Dolan.
The characters of The Walking Dead have never seen zombie movies. Fine. But they still don't learn. Multiple characters die/are injured in the exact same zombie-attacking way. Heck, zombies or no, the cop character never quite grasps the concept of 'clear one room before going to next'.

Film

In Galaxy Quest, the main characters initially suffer Genre Blindness despite being actors in the genre; this is underscored by Guy's outraged query, "Did you guys ever watch the show?".
Pretty much every zombie film ever made relies on Genre Blindness.
- With exceptions.
In Pirates Of The Caribbean, Captain Barbossa retorts Elizabeth Swann's denial of ghost stories by showing her the true, undead forms of himself and his crew.
"Best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner — you're in one!"
The original Night Of The Living Dead is a notable exception. It was the first film to feature zombies as mindless flesheating corpses. Most zombie rules are based on this film.
A particularly infuriating example is Lucio Fulci's The Beyond, in which the protagonist shoots zombies in the torso ineffectually and finally downs one with a head shot... and then continues to fire uselessly into their torsos for the remainder of the film. To put it into context, Fulci's horror movies are generally populated with characters who are juggling the Idiot Ball.
When this contributor saw Premonition, literally every person in the theater was screaming, "Get out of the car, you moron!" as Jim sat continuing to turn the key in his stalled car right in the path of a semi!
The first Scary Movie parodies this when a character being chased by a killer is confronted with two signs pointing towards "Safety" and "Death" respectively. In classic horror movie fashion she chooses the wrong one and, unsurprisingly, is the first casualty of the film.
Subverted in Scream, which the above film parodies. The young characters are all slasher film fans and the final girl at one point discusses the stupidity of tropes such as running upstairs instead of out the door with a creepy anonymous caller. When the caller bursts into her house from behind her, she promptly runs up the stairs, which incidentally are opposite the front door. In this instance, despite understanding genre blindness, she unwittingly makes mistakes that are symptomatic of this trope, yet for arguably not the same reasons.
Averted in pretty much every vampire film, which are guaranteed to include some form of the phrase "Forget everything you've seen in the movies."
Any "victim" character in The Strangers is so genre blind it's astounding they're not forced to wear dark sunglasses and follow a seeing-eye dog. The first death involves the husband's friend, Mike, walking into the house after the three killers have already pinned the protagonists down in a corner. The husband, James, has a shotgun pointed at the door to the room they're hiding in. Instead of turning off the deafeningly loud record player and calling out to the couple, Mike slowly....creeps....down....the hall....*BLAM!*. It gets really horrid when Kristen, the wife, attempts to run across the backyard for a radio in the barn. Instead of carefully selecting her steps, she tumbles into a two foot deep trench and snaps her leg like a twig.
Batman's Genre Blindness is lampshaded in The Dark Knight when he demands that the Joker let Rachel go while standing near the edge of a broken window high up in a skyscraper. Joker stares at him for a second and responds "Very poor choice of words" before tossing Rachel over the edge. Which brings about a bit of Fridge Logic when you consider that, by jumping out the window to save her, Batman left the Joker and his minions alone with the Gotham upper class.
In Time Bandits, the dwarves don't recognize Robin Hood when they see him. Kevin attempts to explain after they have lost all their treasure to the poor.
Any mooks in any all-against-one martial-arts movie fight scene ever. Seriously, after seeing the first dozen or so of their fellows being fed to a human blender, you'd think they'd re-evaluate their strategy, but no. Unless they're relying on Conservation Of Ninjitsu.
Comes up briefly in Cloverfield, which is shown to have a pop culture landscape clearly different from our own. When Hud starts to hypothesize that maybe the monster came from another planet Marlena suggests "like Superman" and he says "yeah". Before saying, surprised, "wait, you've heard of Superman?" to which the equally incredulous Marlena replies "this is weird. Have you heard of Garfield?" At this point, it should go without saying that probably no one here has ever heard of Godzilla.
- Cloverfield's protagonists also, while being too dumb to live, have genre blindness in not realizing that the monster clearly wouldn't be dead after something as simple as being bombed by stealth bombers, and their chopper is knocked out of the sky by the self-same monster even while they are celebrating . The chopper pilots also clearly have genre blindness in choosing a flight path that circles the monster rather than going directly the hell away from it, ensuring that they will be close enough to be knocked out of the sky.

Literature

In CS Lewis's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the narrator observes that Eustace "had read none of the right books," and as a result does not recognize a dragon when he sees one and is generally poorly equipped for his first visit to the world of Narnia.
The Bigtime series by Jennifer Estep takes place in a world where Super Heroes and supervillains are as common as dirt. The characters are totally unaware that if you have an Alliterative Name (95% of them seem to), odds are higher that that person is a superhero, and their superidentity is something that also starts with that letter. (Examples: Fiona Fine = Fiera, Sam Sloane = Striker.) Occasionally subverted with the Belluci family's "Johnny Angel" and Sean Newman = Mr. Sage. When characters are trying to figure out who a superhero's real identity is, they have to resort to other means. This leads to an interesting experience for the reader, who knows VERY early on who everyone really is long before the characters can.
Everyone in the whole world who isn't a member of Tribulation Force, in the Left Behind series. Not one person on earth seems to have ever seen "The Omen" or any other movie featuring the Anti Christ; not one seems to recall any popular culture or 70's style paranormal documentary that would tip one off to the true nature of a strangely charismatic world leader. One would assume that even the most hardcore agnostic or atheist would take one look at Nicolae Carpathia and say, "hey, this reminds me of that special I saw on History Channel", but ... so, yeah.
- In the LB-verse, most people are staggeringly ignorant about the Bible, too, So Yeah.

Live Action TV

Many professional wrestlers (and their referees!) suffer from complete Genre Blindness. Subverted by some promotions and wrestlers such as WWE wrestler Batista, whose defining character trait around the time of his Heel Face Turn was being Genre Savvy. More recently, John Cena has been conquering his genre blindness:
Jonathan Coachman: "I've decided to give Umaga a very well-deserved night off."
John Cena: "A night off? Like I haven't heard that one before. What does that mean, that he's showing up in five minutes? That he's gonna show up when I go to my car tonight? That he's gonna show up when I'm in the sho— You know what, just don't let him show up when I'm in the shower. I don't think any of us want that."
Once taken to a ridiculous extreme by Ring Of Honor (ROH) — which had a referee get knocked out during a match and count the pin that he saw when he was revived... completely missing the debut of a new faction, a three-way brawl, and multiple rule-breakings that happened all in the course of the same match while he was out, yet not questioning why the action was any different than when he'd woken up.
Doctor Who has plenty of these characters. Of notable example is the Doctor's tenth incarnation, who says "That's impossible" far too many times for someone who's seen what he has.
- A bit character from "The Unicorn and the Wasp" goes out with the wonderfully Genre Blind line:
Professor Peach: "I say, what are you doing with that lead piping?"
You would think that, for as long as he's been around, Captain Jack Harkness would know enough to avoid this. But while he's had his moments of clear thinking, on the whole, that's not the case. Same goes for his team. Let's see... when we split up to investigate the creepy village, we were assaulted by cannibals. When we split up to go on a wild goose chase for canisters, we ended up with one death, one near death, and a gunshot wound. So what do we do when there's a creepy building to search? We split up... and then stare at the bombs we find in surprise? Really?
They might have gotten better in later seasons but throughout Season One, the Supernatural boys were always fighting about if the problem of the week was supernatural or not. With the exception of "The Benders," where it was just human cannibals, you would have thought with their years of training they would know better than that.
- Boys, listen very closely. Have you ever noticed than whenever you two split up, something horrible happens or one of you gets kidnapped/tied to something? Just stick together and nothing bad will happen, m'kay?
- Guest characters in Supernatural also do this constantly, especially in the first season. This included the couple making out in the middle of the woods who hear strange noises. The boy gets out of the car to investigate and disappears, following which the girl gets out too.
When trying to track the movements of the mysterious Green Ranger, the rest of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers immediately ask the new kid that dresses in green from head to toe if he has noticed anything unusual lately. He hasn't, though. False alarm, guys! The dressing in green part isn't so much the genre blindness (Less they were going to beat up everyone who wears something green) — it's the fact that said Green-wearing kid is also a known martial artist with something of a rivalry going with the Red Ranger.
The characters in Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis are usually pretty Genre Savvy, but in Season 4 of Atlantis, Samantha Carter has two instances of genre blindness combined with Arbitrary Skepticism: The first where she is skeptical about Teyla's visions; the second where she is skeptical about John's time-travel story. Given her wacky adventures as a member of SG-1, not to mention the mission reports from Atlantis that she would have read about, she really should have known better.
- Compare to Gen. Hammond in SG-1, who immediately gives some of Daniel's most outlandish claims his full attention. "The things I've heard while sitting in this chair...
In the opener of Heroes season 3 Mohinder Suresh, the resident scientist, tests an experimental Super-power giving serum on himself. That's something that's never gone wrong before. What's really bad is that he announces his plan to inject himself right in front of a living example of Blessed With Suck who points this out.
- This is topped by the end of Book 4. The surviving Petrellis and Matt have subdued and captured Sylar, the resident Ax Crazy Manipulative Bastard with the powers of everybody he's ever killed. Good situation, right? So Why Dont You Just Shoot Him... naturally, they don't. Instead, they brainwash him into thinking he's Nathan. Because even though previous attempts to control Sylar have failed disastrously, and Matt's powers are known not to be absolute, and you'll have to take on an emotionally stressful masquerade to maintain this, it can't possibly go wrong!
Arthur from Merlin has got himself a bad case. Its Probably Nothing and Lets Split Up Gang within five minutes of each other? He probably gets it from his dad, who lets wandering weirdos stay at Camelot far too often for someone who's as paranoid about magic as he is.
Katherine Reimer in Jekyll; when you're all alone with Mr. Superpowered Evil Side, who's explicitly warned you to make sure that the lights are never ever out when the good personality isn't firmly in control, anyone who's seen a single horror movie might want to think of some ways to disable the security system that don't involve drugging him and cutting off the power to the entire huge, soundproofed house... (She manages to talk him down, but, still.)
The main characters of The Big Bang Theory, being humongous nerds, should probably have no problem with sidestepping their Genre Blindness, maybe realizing they are at least in a situation similar to a Threes Company-type sitcom... Sadly (and gladly...?) they never do. It works just fine, though, so no biggie.
In the Taiwanese Cop Show Black and White they meet an undercover and ask him to find some information. The guy is already leaving when he turns around and declares "Please remind the chief that he promised to retire me after this case. I have promised my girlfriend that I'll marry her soon. My boy is already five years old and still illegitimate..." This complete and utter lack of genre savvyness had me cringe in my seat as if I was watching someone take a head dive into a shark basin. And for good measure another cop explains that "He's the last surviving undercover in that group." It was just painful.
This is so prevalent on reality shows that it even has its own trope.
One episode of Smallville had Clark go through a WonderfulLife experience. It takes him over a quarter of the episode to realize what happened.
In The X Files Scully ought to have realized after a while that her persistent skepticism is misguided.

Video Games

For a Super Robot anime fan, Ryusei of Super Robot Wars sure is clueless about love. Not only does he have one person who wants to have sex with him, he has two — and he's in a Love Triangle. The numbskull has been on dates and he's still clueless. Being completely oblivious to the fact that the guy who thinks of you all as being nothing but samples is actually evil. That's being pretty genre blind.
Lampshaded by King Boo in Luigis Mansion when he says, "Who honestly thinks mansions are won in contests? Talk about stupid. What do they feed you Mario Bros anyways? Gullible soup?"
So far in Wrath of the Lich King, the titular character has made nearly every Bond Villain mistake in the book. After nearly every major blow your character deals to the Scourge, The Lich King personally shows up, yells at his minions, maybe kills them for failing him, and then wanders off either because he has hope that you'll join him later or because he doesn't see you as a threat. He's going to be a killable boss in the Icecrown Citadel raid dungeon.
In Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Nathan Drake, Elena Fisher and Victor Sullivan witness firsthand that the legend of El Dorado is largely twisting of reality over the ages, and that El Dorado is a big, golden coffin containing a mummy that turns people into ageless zombies. In the sequel, Among Thieves, Nathan and Elena are just as incredulous as Chloe Frazier at the suggestion that the Cintamani Stone could have some sort of supernatural or at least biologically enhancing property about it, often even saying "Do you really believe in this stuff?"
Used and Justified in Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles. Claire and Leon burst in the gun store after hearing a struggle from outside the store and find a zombie bent over the body of the clerk. They say the following:
Leon: "What's he doing!?"
Claire: "He's eating him!"

Justified in that this took place in 1998 and zombies weren't very well-known during that time period.

What? 1998?
During RE 2, to be specific. In Resident Evil, everything happened in the year 1998.

Web Comics

El Goonish Shive Tedd is easily the most Genre Blind character in the strip. This is also a correct use of irony, because as a nerd it is expected that he should know more about the weirdness. It could also help that he's not very observant.
While most of the cast members of The Order Of The Stick are Genre Savvy, there are a few exceptions, particularly among the Azurites. In particular, Lord Shojo actually sits and strokes a white cat but no one sees him as the cunning Chessmaster that he is until Haley figures it out.
- Miko displays plenty of Genre Blindness, with her inability to grasp the real-world references that the rest of the cast use so liberally.

Web Original

In the Zelda parody Legend Of Neil, Ganon takes this to ludicrous levels. He insists on making sure "Link" progresses through each of the levels in order, rather than just tricking him into the last level at the very beginning where it would be impossible to win without the items he picked up along the way. Ganon also insists on having a map in every level (in case his minions get lost). It's practically his catchphrase "Link will never beat level ___", then when Neil beats that level, "Well he'll never beat level (number one higher than the last)!" His minion, Wizzrobe, is Genre Savvy enough to catch all of Ganon's mistakes, but unfortunately Ganon doesn't listen to a word he says.

Western Animation

Subverted/Justified/Played straight in Kim Possible as explained by the Villain Traditions that most of the bad guys follow. These traditions include the villains "making their lame pun and leaving" the heroes in a Death Trap. Senor Senior Senior sticks closely to this, even telling Kim how to escape. Shego, on the other hand: "I prefer the direct approach, but you know Drakken..."
You'd think after the first dozen or so times, Timmy of The Fairly OddParents would think for more than a few seconds before saying "I wish..."
While still Genre Savvy, Sokka from Avatar The Last Airbender has had one or two moments of Genre Blindness. Most notable was in The Boiling Rock, where he tries to talk to Suki while still wearing his guard disguise. Later, he does the same thing when he tries to talk to his father.
- Likewise, Katara shows a certain Genre Blindness — or perhaps lack of common sense — when she runs into the Agni Kai arena just as Azula is charging up her lightning attack.
In Scooby Doo, the heroes not only had genre blindness, they seemed to have inter-episode amnesia. How many times can you really think say "Let's split up to explore the haunted castle" and think it's a good plan?
- Hell, they solved the mystery every week. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
If Robin wasn't so good at improvising (and so well-trained), he would've been dead a long time ago. The boy simply has no concept that things may not be what they appear to be. He gave a frickin' communicator to a villainess who was masquerading as one of his own team, which was how the season's Big Bad and his Evil Minions almost defeated the Titans. There may be nothing wrong with giving a communicator to someone you think is a friend of yours and who you think might be in trouble soon... but there is after you just spent the whole episode fighting a shapeshifting villainness.
In one Treehouse of Horror episode on The Simpsons, while being chased by the wolf man Flanders, Homer instructs Marge to hide in the abandoned amusement park, Lisa to hide in the pet cemetary and Bart to hide in the spooky roller disco, while he goes skinny dipping in 'the lake where the sexy teenagers were killed 100 years ago tonight'.

Other

The unwashed heathens in Jack Chick's tracts seem to exist in a world where no one who isn't already a Christian has heard about Christianity. (See: Easy Evangelism.)
Truth In Television: On Cops or any Reality Show featuring criminals running from the cops, as well as jail, routinely features suspects who are surprised that their attempts to run from the police are unsuccessful and resisting police officers doesn't go so well for them.
And let us not even get started on the whole "To Catch A Predator" segments on Dateline. People, the second Chris Hansen shows up (instead of the jailbait you met over the internet), points out the camera, and asks you to have a seat, just ask where the cops are and turn yourself in rather than embarrass yourself further.
- At least one guy simply walked out of the house and laid down on the lawn with his hands behind his head, waiting for the cops. Of course, that was his second time on the show.
The reporters from this Onion segment.