Wrong Genre Savvy / Anime & Manga

---

• Cheat Magician Life That Started From Being Judged Useless: Princess Camilla Rosenberg of a medieval fantasy world does a summoning ritual and gets several students and teachers from the modern world. The school bully, Funayama, attempts to boss everyone around, thinking he's in a straight forward Isekai story where he was summoned to be a legendary hero. The princess and her guards shut him down quickly. She didn't summon them to be heroes, she's conscripting them into her army as sacrificial lambs so that she doesn't have to risk her own people, and if they refuse, they die. He doesn't take the hint and keeps complaining and making demands, leading the guards to kill him.
• Hanano of Chihayafuru is convinced she's living in a romantic shōjo manga and that she, the 'cute but in an approachable sort of way' and modest (deliberately) Nice Girl is the protagonist. She quickly decides that Taichi is her popular and good-looking love interest and model-level pretty Chihaya is her Alpha Bitch rival. Unfortunately for her, none of that is true — Chihayafuru is a Josei Genre Sports Anime and Chihaya is its Hot-Blooded protagonist.
• Code Geass
  • Suzaku Kururugi acts for a majority of the series as if the world of Code Geass is a standard mecha shounen where holding strong to idealist principles and avoiding unsavory methods to achieve one's goals is rewarded. However, all he succeeds in doing is getting in Lelouch's way every time he's on the verge of actually making significant progress in overcoming Britannia, so blinded by his guilt over killing his father that he believes aiding a fascist and genocidal empire will ever actually earn him enough respect to change it from within. Only after his "Live" command forces him to destroy the Tokyo Settlement does it finally sink in how impossible his non-pragmatic lifestyle is.
  • Shirley Fenette thinks she's the idealistic heroine of a teen love story, when the story she's in is about as far away from that as can be. She tragically continues to believe this is the case even as the story around her gets darker. Though how tragic it gets depends on which version of the series.
• In Death Note, Light Yagami believes he's The Chosen One who was selected to save the world due to being the only one willing to do what it takes despite the being who gave him his powers explicitly telling him otherwise. In truth he's a narcissistic Villain Protagonist who quickly reveals his only real goals are taking over the world and killing anyone he doesn't like.
• Digimon:
  • In Digimon Tamers, by the time of the Deva arc, the Tamers choose to not have their Digimon invoke their Cannibalism Superpower of absorbing the data of Digimon they defeated, under the belief that Digimon would reconfigure like in the show they've watched^note i.e Digimon Adventure and Digimon Adventure 02. Turns out that in this incarnation, Digimon don't have Resurrective Immortality and any that are deleted are Deader than Dead. Because of this, Catsuramon is disgusted that the data of the Devas defeated by the Tamers was discarded like it was nothing but refuse.
  • Digimon V-Tamer 01 is a setting where Comic Books Are Real. Specifically, Yagami Taichi has a 100% win record in virtual pet battles, so Lord HolyAngemon brought him into the Digimon World in hopes Taichi and his monster Zeromaru would be unstoppable there too. Turns out that not only have they been winning in spite of Taichi's poor understanding of virtual pet mechanics, but that the experience Taichi does have largely does not apply. Fortunately, Taichi is a perceptive strategist who quickly adapts and then refines his tactics, while Zeromaru will fight to his last breath. Playing even more into this is that Zeromaru is a fan of Shonen Jump manga comics like One Piece and thus believes anything that cannot be overcome through clever plans can by gotten by with Training from Hell. Several characters mock them for their failure to grasp the importance of Evolutionary Levels, something Taichi makes light of long after the point he should have really learned his lesson. It isn't until Gabo hammers in how the higher level monster pretty much always has an inherent advantage after Gabo comes to respect Taichi and Zero that Taichi finally realizes how vulnerable Zero is.
• The members of the supporting cast in The Disastrous Life of Saiki K. think they're the hero of anything but a gag anime with the psychic Saiki as the main character, and try to invoke the cliches from other anime genres to accomplish their tasks, even though this almost never works without Saiki's powers intervening.
  • Kaidou believes he's The Chosen One of an Urban Fantasy battle shounen, and acts like he's got special powers he needs to hide from the world so he can defeat The Conspiracy. Everyone else correctly acknowledges this as Chuunibyou and considers him a wimpy nerd.
  • Yumehara Thinks Like a Romance Novel and initially sees herself as a clumsy-but-plucky Stock Shoujo Heroine, so she tries to engineer shōjo situations so she can snag Saiki. It falls apart because Saiki can read minds and goes out of his way to derail them.
• Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?: Masato Oosuki is a fan of anime and video games. When he gets sent to a video game world, he automatically assumes he's The Chosen One in a straight forward Isekai story where he becomes stupidly overpowered, has a legion of large-chested girls fighting over him, and becomes a legendary hero. Unfortunately for him, he is in a comedic parody of an Isekai where his mother Mamako is the real overpowered hero while he is actually very weak, has no secret power hidden under the surface, and the only girl interested in him is as flat as a board.
• Farming Life In Another World: Hiraku read stories about elves in his original life and assumed that elves live in harmony with nature and go without fire and metal. The elves he meets reveal they lived in civilization and trying to live in a forest without technology is a death sentence because Nature Is Not Nice.
• Full Metal Panic!: Being an action movie buff, Kaname Chidori generally knows what sort of war antics she's going to fall into as part of her friendship with Sousuke. However, she does not quite appear to realize she's in an action anime, so she still gets blindsided by the more anime-esque aspects of her new life. For example, upon first meeting the captain of Tuatha De Danaan, a painfully cute teenage girl, she has this to say:
  Kaname: Oh, please. I've seen The Hunt for Red October. Captains are tough old bastards like Sean Connery. You're one of those people who read telegrams or something.
• Genshiken:
  • When Sasahara's younger sister comes to visit, the club members expect her to be like the Moe little sister love interest character from their favorite anime. This being a much more nuanced Slice of Life show, upon meeting her, they find that she's an assertive, somewhat bratty young woman with little in common with the one-dimensional archetype they imagined.
  • Lampshaded in one Bottle Episode, where Madarame finds himself alone with his friend's girlfriend Kasukabe in the club's meeting room and realizes that he's never really spent time one-on-one with a woman before. With no real-life experience to draw on, he visualizes the situation as a Dating Sim. He knows full well that this is not actually a good guide for how to act, but has no other frame of reference to use. Awkwardness ensues.
• Gundam:
  • Force BUILD DiVERS in Gundam Build Divers Re:RISE believe that Eldora is just a part of the Gunpla Battle Nexus Online MMO, treat the Eldorans as normal NPCs and aiding the resistance against the One Eyes as just game missions. Sadly, this isn't a video game, they've wandered right into an actual Gundam series and they don't find that out until it's too late.
  • Minor antagonists Carta Issue and Iok Kujan from Seasons 1 and 2 respectively of Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans fall heavily into this trope with the former behaving like a Pokémon character instead of a military officer and that the people of Tekkadan are honorable like she is, and the latter is a Leeroy Jenkins that his subordinates look up to and styles himself as an ultimate hero which wouldn't be out of place in a Super Robot Genre show like Gurren Lagann. Unfortunately for them, they actually exist in a brutal Real Robot Genre, and the Child Soldiers who make up Tekkadan are major Combat Pragmatists that will play every underhanded trick in the book just to survive. Naturally, both of them do not survive to the end of their seasons and are ultimately killed by Tekkadans' Gundam Pilots.
• In Hayate the Combat Butler, while the characters often seem to know they're in an anime/manga, they just as often think they're in an actual fighting series, not a parody.
• In one scene in Hidamari Sketch, Yuno tries to break an awkward silence with then-newcomer Nazuna by trying to hold her hands in true shoujo style despite this being a seinen series, much to the latter's confusion. Or maybe it's how the way her arm stretches to close the gap that does it.
• An interesting (and possibly unintentional) case occurs in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders. When trying to figure out how J. Geil's Stand, the Hanged Man, works, Kakyoin insists that there's no such thing as a 'mirror world', as mirrors are just reflections of light, so there must be some other trick to the Stand's power (he even says that 'this isn't a fantasy or fairy tale'). It turns out that, in this case at least, he was right, as Hanged Man worked by jumping between reflective surfaces and never entered a 'mirror world'. However, in Part 5, there was another Stand, Man in the Mirror, that actually did enter a 'mirror world', thus proving Kakyoin wrong.
• Yuji Itadori of Jujutsu Kaisen is noted to be an avid reader of shonen manga, which is shown when he namedrops attacks from popular series such as Naruto, Bleach, and Dragon Ball. As such, when he finds himself becoming the vessel for the King of Curses, Ryomen Sukuna, he assumes that it is just like most Superpowered Evil Side Sealed Inside a Person-Shaped Can cases in shonen such as Kurama or Hollow Ichigo and that he will eventually be able to control the cursed spirit. He is given quite the rude awakening when - after watching Mahito use Idle Transfiguration on his friend Junpei - he summons Sukuna to save his newfound friend as the cursed spirit had done the same to him earlier on. Instead, Sukuna refuses to comply with his plea and instead proceeds to laugh at him alongside Mahito. It is at that moment that Yuji realizes the being inside him is an irredeemable monster and that this isn't a normal shonen story he has found himself in.
  Yuji: Oh, that's right. At the end of the day, these two are both curses.
• Haruka Akashi of Kamen Tantei is a huge mystery buff and aspiring mystery author who keeps running into mysteries. So far, so good. Unfortunately, she's a "fair play" mystery fan trying to apply "the rules" of such to a world where psychic powers, ghosts, All Just a Dream endings and fictional characters come to life are regular occurrences.
• Combined with Aliens Steal Cable in Lagrange: The Flower of Rin-ne — one of the Human Aliens in one episode watches a samurai movie and mistakes its events for some Earth tradition he then tries to repeat to challenge Madoka for a duel. Surprisingly things work exactly like he is expecting them to, but for different reasons and he accidentally convinces girls at Madoka's school that he is her boyfriend.
• Konata from Lucky Star plays so much eroge, she thinks that she's living in one — despite this being a Slice of Life Schoolgirl Series. She sometimes changes the game genre she believes she is in depending of the situation, but still does not get it right, and whatever genre it is, she will usually explicitly reference the tropes and mechanics of that genre, or even a specific work that's inspiring her — she justifies laying a bar of soap down on the floor of a bath with claims that she's setting up the event flags for a special scene.
• Lord El-Melloi II Case Files: Flat Escardos is a fan of Sherlock Holmes. He automatically assumes that since Lord El Melloi II/Waver Velvet is a detective, then he must be a secret Baritsu master like Holmes and assumes he will act like Holmes in certain situations. In reality, Waver is non-athletic and has no fighting prowess, leaves all the fighting to his sidekick Gray, and is nothing like Holmes.
• In Magic Knight Rayearth, Fuu Hououji immediately starts identifying similarities between what is happening to them and the series of events in a JRPG — evolving in skill by fighting monsters, obtaining a legendary weapon, being sent on a journeying quest, etc etc. She gets flustered when Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs in the form of Alcyone, who they do not have enough 'experience points' to handle, and does not realize until far too late that they are actually in a deconstruction of the Save the Princess plot where the "final boss" is not what he seems.
• Magika Swordsman and Summoner: Charlotte "Lotte" Lieben Frau is a sheltered princess from a small country in Europe who comes to Japan. Her whole understanding of Japan comes from watching anime, so she constantly tries to invoke anime tropes like Skinship Grope and kisses people she just met because that's what people do in her anime. Other characters constantly inform her that is not how it works in real life.
• Oh, poor Gai Daidoji of Martian Successor Nadesico. Being a fan of Gekiganger 3, he styles himself as the hero of the titular ship, gives his Aestivalis super robot attack names and even tries to drag the main character Akito Tenkawa into his craziness. Sadly for Gai, he’s in a Real Robot anime and he is unceremoniously murdered in the third episode.
• Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun: The main characters are avid readers and creators of shōjo manga (and in Mikoshiba's case, dating sims) and are familiar with shōjo tropes, so they can recognize and attempt to invoke Romance Arc-related situations. However, they are actually all in a shōjo parody, so things tend to go off the rails in ways they never expect.
  Wakamatsu: Senpai...where did I go wrong...?
  Nozaki: ...Probably from the moment you started using shōjo manga.
• "Murai-kun Wants to Fuck Mizuno-kun": While showering, Mizuno remarks to himself that, having run into and then gone home with trans man Murai Shion, whom he once admired from afar when he attended the same school before transitioning to male, that "if this were a manga or a drama, we'd definitely be headed in a sexy direction," while imagining the teenage Murai "Shiho" taking off her clothes for him. "Unfortunately," he says, "Murai-san... is a man"—not having realized that he's in a Queer Romance manga.
• In one of the later chapters of My Hero Academia, All For One dismisses Jiro and Tsukuyomi as side characters who exist to die horribly to show how scary the Demon Lord is. He is immediately proven wrong because despite the series' reputation as a paint-by-numbers Shonen Battle Manga, it's more accurate to call it a Japanese take on the American Superhero Comic and somewhat of a love letter to the genre. And in superhero comics, such displays of arrogance by the villain almost never go unpunished for long.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi: When Asuna learns that Negi is a mage, she asks if he can make a tree that grows money like in the TV shows. He says there is no such thing and pop-culture does not accurately portray magic and mage society.
• Tomoko from No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular! regularly misapplies her knowledge of manga and otome games to her real-life high school experience, with disastrous results.
  • Nemoto thinks she lives in a Schoolgirl Series. Technically the manga is one, just one that relies on Cringe Comedy instead of moe.
  • Shizuku thinks she lives in a Shoujo. The manga is published in the Shonen Gangan Online.
• Nyaruko: Crawling with Love!: Mahiro, who is an avid fan of the Cthulhu Mythos, resists Nyarko's advances partly because he assumes she is exactly like her infamous namesake and is just trying to drive him insane For the Lulz. He would be a lot happier and more mellow if he realized that he is in a Reference Overdosed screwball Romantic Comedy and that Nyarko actually is in love with him (and is far nicer than Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep).
• In the third episode of Ouran High School Host Club, Tamaki identifies the show as a high-school romance anime, calling himself and Haruhi the main pair destined to be together — not too far off the mark so far, but then he identifies the rest of the club as "the homosexual supporting cast". This last remark inspires Kyouya to show him up by coming up with a better plan to save Haruhi from being exposed by the physical exam and saying "I just don't think I'm supporting cast, homosexual or not."
• In an episode of Pokémon the Series: Sun & Moon, Lillie and Gladion go through a temple together and Lillie twice makes a mistake about the genre she is in, by expecting puzzles where there are none. At the entrance to the temple she sees three statues and three symbols on the wall behind the statues and she incorrectly guesses that the door is unlocked by moving each statue to the correct symbol, apparently thinking by Adventure Game logic. Gladion stops her and shows her that, 1, the door isn't locked and, 2, moving the statues sets off a spike trap. Later they come to a gap without a bridge, and Lille guesses based on books she read that there is an invisible bridge that she tries to reveal by throwing sand on it. Gladion tells her that there is not an invisible bridge and has Silvally jump across the gap while carrying them, then explains that there was a bridge but it fell down, which Lillie didn't recognize the remains of. Plus, they didn't need to do any of that as Ash and the others just took a boat.
• Sayaka of Puella Magi Madoka Magica thinks she's in a typical Magical Girl show where The Power of Love and Justice Will Prevail are the key status quo while ignoring the fact that she's in a Gen Urobuchi story and failing to realize that she's the modern day Darker and Edgier version on Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, which ultimately cost both her life and her humanity due to foolishly accepting the Deal with the Devil. At least she did learn her lesson and smartened up during the events of Rebellion.
• In Re-Kan!,during the traditional visit to the shrine on new year eve, Yamada is overjoyed at being the only guy in a group of 5 girls, convinced that he have a harem. He is obviously wrong: this is a Schoolgirl Series and he is the Butt-Monkey and Human Pack Mule. A other character lampshade this.
• Re:Zero: Subaru Natsuki is a fan of anime and video games who gets sent to a fantasy world. He automatically assumes that he's in a straight forward Isekai story where he will become a popular hero who gets all sorts of cool powers and wins over all the girls. Unfortunately for him, the only power he gets is Return By Death, which requires him to die to activate. He gets killed over and over again and no matter how hard he tries and trains, although he picks up a few fighting skills, he is still an ordinary human and no match any of this world's fighters in a straight fight. It is not until he finally stops trying to save people or the world by himself and uses the knowledge he gained from his do-overs to gather and coordinate allies that he gets results and wins over a few girls, and even then he is not very popular.
• The Rising of the Shield Hero: When the four Cardinal Heroes are summoned to the fantasy world, the Sword, Spear, and Bow Heroes automatically assume they are in a video game world due to it operating on RPG Mechanics: where there are no consequences and everyone else is a mindless NPC. The three also constantly follow the tropes of their favorite video games, which leads to them making a lot of stupid mistakes and getting a lot of people killed. The Shield Hero constantly tries to drill into their heads that this world is actually very real and that they need to be more realistic and practical with how they operate in it.
• Sailor Moon: Haruka and Michiru are convinced that they're the Pragmatic Heroes of a dark urban fantasy where victory without sacrifice is impossible. They're really living in a Magical Girl series that runs on The Power of Friendship, Usagi is the protagonist, and since they won't consider other options or accept help from anyone else, they're not nearly as pragmatic as they think they are.
• Soul Eater: The immortal werewolf Free says that he allowed himself be arrested because he watched a lot of prison movies and he thought it would be cool to dig a tunnel with a spoon to escape. Unfortunately, all his meals came with chopsticks instead of spoons or forks. Unable to dig with chopsticks as they kept breaking, he spent about 200 years in prison until Eruka Frog broke him out.
• Rossiu Adai in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is the strategic commander of Humanity post-timeskip. He often tries to improve mankind's chances of survival by making cold, calculated and overall logical decisions. Such a morally dubious character would be right at home in, say, the world of Gundam. Sadly, he exists in a world that runs on Hot-Blooded "Kick-logic-to-the-curb-and-do-the-impossible" philosophy of a Super Robot Genre. Basically, every plan Rossiu has is hard countered by the illogical Anti-Spirals.
• Uncle from Another World: Uncle Yousuke Shibasaki only played Sega games and knows nothing about anime or RPGs, so he has a rough time in the fantasy world due to Sega being his only reference. At one point, he tries to communicate with a monstrous hedgehog due to thinking it would be like Sonic the Hedgehog, only to learn it is pure evil and be forced to kill it.
• Urusei Yatsura: Ran is convinced she's in the kind of Love Triangle with her former best friend Lum and heartthrob Rei where both she and Lum are competing for Rei's heart. In fact, it's the kind of Love Triangle where she loves Rei, Rei loves Lum, and Lum wants nothing to do with either of them, but Ran refuses to listen no matter how much Lum asserts she has no intention of taking Rei away and is in fact happily married to her new beau, Ataru Moroboshi.
• Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!: Several members of the Uzaki family fall into this, to humorous effect.
  • Tsuki Uzaki is under the impression that she (and to a lesser extent Hana) is the heroine of an H-manga or a particularly racy soap opera. This is born out of an extreme misunderstanding that Sakurai lusts after her and wants to bed mother and daughter both, no doubt caused by her watching dramas where younger men have affairs with older, married women. The really crazy part is that it's ambiguous how receptive she'd be to the idea if that was the case.
  • Fujio's behavior matches the protagonist of a fitness based manga, ala How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift?.
  • Finally, Kiri see's himself as the unlucky hero of his own romcom story where he's constantly chasing female attention. He is not.
• The World God Only Knows:
  • Keima gets all his experience from Dating Sims, so he falls into this when he gets into situations outside his experience. For example, Haqua is a tsundere who is obviously in love with him, but in Dating Sims, the girl pursuing the boy is a trap for a Bad End, and must be avoided at all costs, so he barely even notices.
  • His misplaced experience also kicked off the entire plot. He unquestioningly accepts a Deal with the Devil to "capture girls" because he does not know demons exist and does not think anyone would ask him to go after real girls, so he assumes that someone is challenging him to beat a Dating Sim.
• Yatterman Night: With an ironic dash of Only Sane Man: or, at any rate, Galina certainly thinks he is, behaving in what would be a perfectly sensible way for a young, traumatised man with no combat skills in a dystopian totalitarian regime. Even when he starts to befriend the Doronbo Gang, their zany behaviour continues to bemuse and frustrate him. Ironically, as it turns out, he is the one in need of a reality check, as in spite of all the contrary evidence he is not a character in a serious, downbeat, post-apocalyptic drama at all. He is actually a character in a zany cartoon melodrama, and even the fascist robot police and cyborg generals he lives in dread of derive their obscene power from cheesy physics-defying cartoon tropes. Like those annoyingly crazy friends of theirs who have come to terms with this twisted situation, Galina and Alouette can only realise their destiny and free the Yatter Kingdom by wholly embracing their roles as the heroic, clichéd protagonists of this jolly-kids'-show-gone-spectacularly-wrong.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! GX:
  • Edo Phoenix dresses, acts, and fights crime like he's Batman — dressing in a monster costume and pursuing criminals by night, searching for the one who killed his father, while living as a wealthy, famous celebrity during the day. He even duels with an Anti-Hero-themed deck. Between his cynical view of the world, lifestyle, and crimefighting modus operandi, he truly lives as if he truly thinks he's the Anti-Hero protagonist of a vigilante Super Hero comic book...which would be great, if he weren't The Rival of a shonen gaming anime.
  • The Dark Scorpions wish to capture the Duel Academy's keys, and being a group of bandits, approach the problem as though they were the protagonists of a heist movie, coming up with an intricate heist plan and giving everyone a role. The plan goes off almost without a hitch... but fails because they are in a toy shonen where Duels Decide Everything and thus the stolen keys are useless without a duel.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V:
  • Yuya thinks he's in a regular gaming anime where Hot-Bloodedness, The Power of Friendship, and being a Warrior Therapist can solve any problem. Unfortunately for him, not only he's Born in the Wrong Century, but he's also in a Psychological Horror story in the same vein as Tokyo Ghoul and Black★Rock Shooter.
  • Not even Kurosaki, Kaito, and Reiji are safe from this: While they correctly knew that they're in a Darker and Edgier anime, the problem is the former two thought they're Anti-Heroes in The Dark Age of Comic Books story and the latter thinks he's in a Genius Thriller Seinen anime where being a quick-witted Chessmaster is a prerequisite for winning.

---