Wrong Genre Savvy

As it turned out, he was less of a main character, and more of a main course.

"Kids, sometimes you think you're living out one story, but the truth turns out to be something else entirely. At the time, I thought the story was about whether Robin should be at the wedding. If only I'd understood what the real story was."

— Ted narrating in hindsight, How I Met Your Mother, "Shelter Island"

Sometimes, you can take being Genre Savvy too far, and wind up having as much Genre Blindness as the poor idiots who split up in a haunted house where one of you is a murderer.

If a character in a series that has a Fourth Wall thinks mainly in terms of tropes, you've probably got a character who's Wrong Genre Savvy. Even if you're correct about being in a story, it's possible for you to guess wrong about your role in the story, the genre of the story, or where on the various sliding scales your story is. Any way you spin it, it's still a common way of subverting Genre Savviness.

This can be a minefield. Say a stranger turns up on your doorstep; if he's a vampire, he can't hurt you unless you invite him in, but if he's an Angel Unaware or King Incognito, you might damn yourself by turning him away. And look at it from the visitor's point of view; if you're an honourable fairytale knight, you won't lay a finger on anyone who's eaten your food, but if you're one of The Fair Folk, eating your food will trap him there forever. What's a Genre Savvy guy to do?

This can also be used for deconstructing character types, by placing a generic character in a realistic setting and exploring what happens when they act as if they are in a work of a particular genre.

Of course, a potential reconstruction can occur as well. While the character is Wrong Genre Savvy about the premise or a particular aspect, they can be right Genre Savvy about complementary aspects of that premise; this means that, while the character is hopeless in the aspect to which they're Wrong Genre Savvy, in their functional aspect their support is invaluable, which may lead to the resolution of the plot and an increase in the character's chance of survival.

See Heroic Wannabe, Wide-Eyed Idealist, Black-and-White Insanity, Prince Charming Wannabe, and Lord Error-Prone for characters with this trait and Genre Savvy and its downplayed cousin Functional Genre Savvy for when characters get it right. Death by Genre Savviness is a related trope. See also This Is Reality, Hero of Another Story, Entertainingly Wrong, Thinks Like a Romance Novel. Wrong Assumption overlaps with a lot of these. May be confused with Too Dumb to Live.

Warning: It is very easy (and tempting) to list a character just because they are wrong about something, but that doesn't mean they are Wrong Genre Savvy. Even if they are wrong about their role in a story, that doesn't necessarily make them wrong about the type of story they are in. Before adding an example ask yourself "If this character was correct, would it change the genre?" if the answer is "no" then it doesn't belong here.

noreallife

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Other examples:

Blogs

• Zeke Strahm from Seeking Truth is a badass Cowboy Cop, who steadfastly refuses to believe he is in the midst of a Cosmic Horror Story. Then everyone he knows and loves dies (some of them by accident) and his life falls apart completely.

Podcasts

• Several characters across several Cool Kids Table games.
  • In Creepy Town, Walter shows up to the haunted house dressed as a fantasy wizard.
  • Mickey and Roc are zany, gaudily-dressed men who don't take things very seriously. However, they're characters for Firefly: The Zelda Chronicles and as such are stuck in that 'verse's in the dramatic Space Western setting. Jake describes them as having walked out of a David Bowie music video.
  • Yuki from Sequinox plays the story very straight, knowing all about magical girls thanks to being from Japan and her mom being an anime localizer. However, she doesn't realize that she's in an Affectionate Parody alongside absolute maniacs Sid and Chell, as well as Hannah who wants nothing to do with it.
• The Thrilling Adventure Hour:
  • In the "Beyond Belief" universe, Will O' The Wisps are creatures who are aware of narrative causality, and the stories they tell come true. One of them is actually narrating the adventures of Frank and Sadie. Another Will O' The Wisp named Crispin tries to reboot an adventure whose resolution he didn't like - a story involving murderous skeleton creatures, two Cute Monster Girls, and an earnest young delivery boy - but he completely misinterprets what the story is about. This appears to have been a lifelong problem for Crispin: he tells the story about watching an old film serial in his younger days, and thinking that the main character was a random car.
    Frank Doyle: Has it occurred to you that perhaps the love story here is between Ken and one - or both - of the Frankenstein Girls, and the skeletons aren't involved at all?!

Tabletop Games

• The Cyberpunk 2020 adventure module "Carlsbad Caverns'' features a vampire as the primary villain. Not a normal person who's been cybered with the appropriate implants to pretend to be a vampire, but an honest-to-God supernatural blood-sucking creature of the night. GM notes for this adventure module suggest that the referee allow the players to keep thinking they're in a gritty cyberpunk science fiction story, while they're actually being thrust into a gritty survival horror story.
• The background of Deadlands includes all manner of supernatural horror. In one short adventure, though, the players encounter a man who's suffering from purely natural maladies but who is mistaken for a zombie by the paranoid townsfolk. Keeping them from executing the "monster" is the meat of the adventure.
• On a Meta Game level, a player can be wrong genre savvy if they don't get tabletop role playing games or don't get the game they're playing. Imagine a typical Dungeons & Dragons player jumping feet first into the Cosmic Horror game Delta Green, and you can just imagine how quickly they're going to get killed. Can even lead to out of character hurt feelings or misunderstandings.
  • Likewise, a Delta Green player who picks up Dungeons and Dragons later might have trouble adapting to a world where the light at the end of the tunnel isn't an oncoming train. The first variant tends to be more common because D&D is much more popular and more likely to be the first game one plays, but it's not unheard of for someone who usually plays something like Call of Cthulhu to do stuff like refusing to pick up genuinely beneficial magic items or running away from a monster that they could actually kill.
  • And even within systems, if everyone isn't clear what the campaign is going for, this issue can crop up. Someone can bring a character built for courtly intrigue into a pure dungeon crawl, or one built for busting heads to a heist.
• Most of the splats in the Old World of Darkness resemble classically known monsters, but each species has been surrounded by superstition. A very large number of mortals will think they're the protagonists in a Gothic Horror movie and try garlic against vampires, look for curse marks on werewolves, or assume mages are incompetent in close combat. By the time they realize it's closer to Dark Urban Fantasy from the monsters' perspective, it's generally too late.
• The Tau Empire in Warhammer 40,000 believes in The Greater Good, and that the aliens they encounter can be brought into the fold with enough diplomacy or firepower. If they were correct, then there is hope for a brighter future where there is peace, and war will be in small scale. As it turns out, most of the other major factions are either impossible to negotiate with,^note Tyranids, Necrons, and to a lesser extent, Orks or should not be negotiated with.^note Chaos, Dark Eldar One story had them actually prepare a celebration for the Necrons who smashed the Tyranid armada threatening one of their worlds, only for the Necrons to vaporize the planet as well.
  • On a smaller scale, an Avatar of Khaine was once raised by an Eldar Craftworld to take down the Swarmlord creature leading a Tyranid invasion. The Avatar, manifestation of martial strength and fury, singled out the commanding organism of the opposing army, and challenged it to a duel. The Swarmlord, manifestation of "I'm hungry", promptly ordered a dozen Carnifexes to tear this strange, rambling, exposed living statue apart.

Web Animation

• Meet the Spy has the BLU Soldier shooting the BLU spy after the latter made the point that any one of them could be the RED spy. The joke here being is that had Soldier actually been in the game, this action would've been an entirely rational choice. There were four people in the room: Soldier himself (he knows he isn't a spy), the Heavy (a poor choice for a Spy's disguise because Spies are faster than Heavies, making their identities obvious to an observant player), the Scout (also a poor choice, this time because Spies are slower than Scouts and can't double-jump), and the BLU spy (who had been emphasizing RED spy's dangerousness the whole time), and attacking the Spy would have done no damage had he been friendly in-game. Of course, since the machinimas run on (somewhat) more realistic logic, Soldier just murders one of his teammates on a minor suspicion. The RED spy was the BLU Scout all along, something Soldier would've noticed if he'd been as observant as players should be when playing against Spies.
• Meta Runner has Theo, the protagonist of an in-universe video game who is aware he is a character in a game. Except once he's brought to the real world, he believes that he is still in a video game and wrongfully thinks that the world will operate on the same logic as his video game.
• The main character of Pokémon Rusty thinks he exists in the world of the Pokémon games, complete with the logic of said games. However, he's in a Deconstructive Parody of those games, where Surprisingly Realistic Outcomes occur and such thinking is an example of Didn't Think This Through. Not to mention, Rusty thinks he's the hero till the very end, not realizing, or capable of realizing, that he's in fact a terrible trainer who gets his Pokémon killed and they all hate him.
• RWBY: General James Ironwood, while a Reasonable Authority Figure and Four-Star Badass, would still be a lot more at home in a cynical, Military Science Fiction story like Mobile Suit Gundam, where he could comfortably assume the "grey" in Black-and-Grey Morality. Unfortunately for him, he's in an Animesque action series that runs on Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!. The consequence is that his force-over-finesse way of thinking and ends-justify-the-means philosophy cause more problems than they solve, despite his genuine best intentions. Ultimately, this culminates in him trying to leave a city to die when he considers it beyond saving; something that might be presented as a Necessary Evil in a more cynically-minded series, but here functions as a Moral Event Horizon that cements him as an unhinged antagonist who must be defeated.

Websites

• Cracked's Infiltrating a Gang Based on My Knowledge of West Side Story.

Web Videos

• In Achievement Hunter's Let's Play Grand Theft Auto V episode "Lindsay's Heist", Michael stops Lindsay during the live-action segment and asks if there was anything she wanted to tell him. She just looks at him in a confused manner, says "no" and walks on. This was because, in "Michael's Heist", Michael had done this with Lindsay as he plotted to betray everyone save for Gavin.
• In Atop the Fourth Wall, during the "Sleepwalker" story arc, Harvey Finevoice informs the (as of yet unnamed) female intruder that Linkara is locked in his room and weird things are happening in there, thinking that she's the one responsible. The intruder theorizes that Linkara is asleep and being tortured by Freddy Kreuger, since he was reviewing NoES comics and this cliché has been done several times since the AVGN first did it. Harvey shoots down this assumption with evidence showing that Linkara is very much awake.
• In Escape the Night Jesse tells Destorm that he’ll be the first to die. Humorously, Jesse is the first to die, with the group saving Destorm instead and leaving him to his fate.
• Matt McMuscles: In Matt's Flophouse Plays of Gex: Enter the Gecko, Matt sees a sign in a "Scream TV" stage that says "Go into the light". Matt believes this is a Shmuck Bait trap and that doing so will let the ghosts get to him, but in reality, the light prevents the ghosts from attacking the player. The hint is sincere.
• Suburban Knights:
  • The Spoony One tries to apply LARPing rules in the first encounter with The Cloaks (Specifically throwing bird seed at them, saying "Two magic!" and expecting them to give up). He eventually realizes that they're not playing by the rules.
    Spoony: Suddenly I've decided that I'm terribly afraid of you.
  • Just in case, he tries the same thing on the Big Bad, who throws down his staff in exasperation when he does it, making it look for a second as though that somehow actually worked.
• In Ten Little Roosters, the titular ten Rooster Teeth creators are in the midst of a Murder Mystery, but Chris, decked out in his Hobbit-like outfit, has his mind set on The Lord of the Rings and other fantasy settings. This goes to the point where Burnie gives Chris a "The Reason You Suck" Speech because he just wouldn't stop and say who the killer was. Even worse, when the killer does show up to confront the two, Chris decides that now is the perfect time to pull off a Heroic Sacrifice. Three times. And each time, he blocks Burnie's shot of the killer! By the third time he hops up, Burnie's just had it and when he croaks, he just says "Yup, I'm done here" and leaves him.

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