Basic Trope: A character demonstrates awareness of the particular conventions that usually govern stories and genres like the one they are participating in. May or may not involve Leaning on the Fourth Wall (it usually does, though.)
- Straight:
- Bob, the lead detective in a murder mystery, arrives at what appears to be a suicide and notes that it is Never Suicide, Always Murder in murder mystery stories that look like this, and thus suggests that this case is a murder. He is revealed to be correct.
- Bob, the main character of a Horror movie, always makes the smart decisions (never going alone, walking into a dark forest in the middle of the night, getting drunk, and avoiding Schmuck Bait and Tempting Fate) when he realizes what story he's in. As a result, he's the Sole Survivor.
- Exaggerated: Bob can accurately predict everything that will happen in the story.
- Downplayed: Bob knows how things usually happen in detective stories, but he's hampered by a belief that This Is Reality.
- Justified:
- Bob is a troper.
- Bob has awareness of the Fourth Wall.
- Bob has a great deal of experience of the kinds of story he is involved in, whether as an active participant in previous examples or as a reader/consumer/producer of them.
- Bob's in a story brought to life. He's read so many that he can essentially spot the transition at once, possibly because it's based off a story he encounters already. Now that he is confirmed to be working within the realm of what he knows, he doesn't hesitate a second to play off genre conventions.
- Inverted: Bob suffers Genre Blindness and has absolutely no understanding or awareness of the conventions of the stories he is in at all.
- Subverted:
- Bob is Wrong Genre Savvy; he thinks he's in a detective novel, but he's actually in a Cosmic Horror Story.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome; it turns out that in this particular case, it actually was a suicide, plain and simple, and Bob just reads too many detective novels.
- Doubly Subverted:
- However, despite the fact he's in a Cosmic Horror Story, his knowledge of detective novels help him dismantle the cult trying to summon an Eldritch Abomination.
- While dominantly Cosmic Horror Story, it's actually a Cosmic Horror Story/Detective Novel hybrid.
- Alternately: Bob might have been wrong in claiming that it's Never Suicide, but the victim was intentionally Driven to Suicide by someone who wanted him dead.
- Parodied: At the beginning of the murder mystery, Bob is able to outline exactly how the story will progress, right down to who the likely suspects are, who didn't do it, and who will have ended up doing it, based entirely on similar stories. He's not wrong on any count.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob is alternatively Genre Savvy, Wrong Genre Savvy, and Genre Blind. The rules of the story keep changing from underneath him so he doesn't know where he is most of the time; at one point the story seems to be a murder mystery, spirals into a Cosmic Horror, goes from there to being a pulp adventure thriller before ending up back as a murder mystery.
- Averted: Bob displays no overt awareness about the conventions of the story he has found himself in.
- Enforced: "This is a pretty hackneyed trope/story we're putting together here; it'd be pretty funny if we had the characters acknowledge it."
- Lampshaded:
- "I've seen cartoons like this before!"
- "First time I've ever seen a Spit Take in real life."
- Invoked: The murderer is a fan of murder mysteries and is intentionally basing his crimes on the murder scenes in his favourite novels, thus deliberately engaging with and forcing Bob to engage with the tropes commonly found in murder mysteries.
- Exploited: Bob becomes Combat Pragmatist and can use his knowledge of genre conventions to uncover and defeat his enemies.
- Defied:
- Bob is put through therapy, whether at his own or the villain's insistence, to remove his Genre Savvy insights.
- The murderer intentionally removes any tropelike elements to their crime, thus rendering Bob's Genre Savvy useless.
- The murderer is playing a Kansas City Shuffle to target the Genre Savvy detective himself.
- Discussed: "You watch too many detective shows; while some of the assumptions in those shows are true, there are occasionally apparent suicides that are actually suicides."
- Conversed: "Finally! A detective story with a detective that knows how these stories work."
- Implied: Bob is unseen, but many people mention his knowledge of stories.
- Deconstructed:
- Bob breaks the Fourth Wall and discovers that his entire conception of reality is simply an amusement designed for the readers. His Genre Savvy ends up completely destroying the world of the novel.
- Bob's Genre Savvy makes him look more suspicious to the others due to his awareness of what's going on.
- Bob takes the above world's destruction quite literally, out of disgust of the idiocy of its inner workings.
- On a more in-universe related note, the villains notice that Bob is Genre Savvy, and acts accordingly. Unfortunately, that didn't end very well for the heroes.
- Bob's sheer Genre Savvy ends up writing his author into a corner, as there's no way the story would really survive with him in it. The author is forced into an early ending, abandons the story from a lack of usable ideas, or simply kills him off so he'll stop being a nuisance to them.
- Bob discovers that being Genre Savvy doesn't necessarily make him more capable of stopping certain conventions from happening and his attempts to do so only make them worse.
- Turns out people are rather resentful of being treated as bits and pieces of storyline rather than, you know, people. Bob quickly finds himself in a tight spot when this tendency alienates him from the rest.
- The real world doesn't exactly conform to the laws of fiction, and Bob learns this the hard way.
- Reconstructed: Bob can use his Genre Savvy to put things back together as they should be.
- Played for Laughs: Bob is the most Genre Savvy in the main cast, but he just uses it to be a Deadpan Snarker.
- Played for Drama: With his Genre Savviness, Bob excludes everybody else from what he's doing, and vice versa.
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