Wrong Genre Savvy / Literature

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• In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer convinces Huck and Jim that they can't just sneak Jim out in the night, instead mashing every Great Escape trope he can think of together into one ridiculously complex (and redundant) plan because it's not worth doing if they can't do it like in the books. All this accomplishes is to put Jim's captors on guard. Furthermore, Tom knew of an even simpler solution than Huck's: just inform the captors, truthfully and with evidence, that Jim was a free man. But doing it this way was more fun.
• Angel: In Solitary Man, Mildred Finster is a Cozy Mystery fan who wants to have adventures like the ones she reads about. Witnessing the brutality of the Occult Detective work Angel performs makes her decide to stop being a detective and stick to reading.
• In Ayesha At Last, Faraza believes she’s the flawed yet well-intentioned mother in a Generational Saga plotline, meddling in her children’s lives because she wants what’s best for them. In reality, she’s the My Beloved Smother in a romantic dramedy. When she learns that she’s the bad guy, it’s essentially too late to save her relationship with her daughter and her son is keeping her at arms length.
• Bazil Broketail: Apparently, Zettila thinks of herself as a heroine in a dark fantasy setting where her bloodthirsty goddess is real and in exchange for a hefty sacrifice, will grant her power that would allow her to vanquish the enemy and save the empire where conventional armies have failed. She is very, very wrong.
• Discworld:
  • Discworld runs on a force called Narrative Causality. This is that it follows the logic of epic stories. However, characters are explicitly warned that they should be wary of casting themselves. You might think yourself the seventh shoemaker who will defeat the monster through wit and cunning, while Fate decides that you are the seventh victim before the heroic knight comes to save the town.
  • In Witches Abroad, Granny Weatherwax's sister Lilith invokes the power of stories and tries to twist Genua into a fairy tale. She casts herself as the Fairy Godmother of the story and is fully convinced that she is the good guy. But Discworld is a deconstruction of stories, so ultimately she's just a cruel woman who meddles with peoples' lives to fit her twisted ideals. Lilith's mistake was believing that she was the Good Witch and Granny was the Bad Witch. Granny Weatherwax tells her that it's the other way around.
  • Malicia Grim of The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents initially has the same problem, expecting everything and everyone to fit into fairy tale and children's literature tropes which are too simple and unexamined for a Pratchett novel. Occasionally she gets the basic elements right, but even then the details are more complex than she was expecting.
  • This is explicitly invoked with the character of The Lady. While she is effectively the goddess of fortune, and she explicitly has favorites, including Rincewind, naming her or relying on her in any way is guaranteed to turn her against you.
  • Even Vetinari can occasionally fall into this. During The Truth, he prowls about William's newspaper offices trying to determine if the printing press is yet another newfangled creation about to cause a magical catastrophe like the events of Soul Music and Moving Pictures. He remains very skeptical of the idea this might be an actual crack in the Medieval Stasis of the setting and something that'll play a part in a more mundane criminal conspiracy targeting him.
    Vetinari: Possibly on this very site a strange cult once engaged in eldritch rites, the very essence of which permeated the neighborhood, and which seeks only the rite, ahaha, circumstances to once again arise and walk about eating people?
    William: They made rocking horses here.
    Vetinari: ...I've always thought there was something slightly sinister about rocking horses.
• Ginevra from Doctrine of Labyrinths was named after the heroine from an (in-universe) romantic novel, and often behaves as if she's really in one. She's drawn to glamour and excitement, is very easily swept up in fantasy, and often wanders blithely into dangerous situations, convinced that things will turn out for the best if she follows her heart. Sadly, she lives in a Crapsack World where such idealism rarely goes unpunished.
• Older Than Steam: Don Quixote is severely delusional and believes he is in a Chivalric Romance. A lot of his plans are based on assuming the clichés and tendencies of chivalric romance will end in his favor: for instance, he initially doesn't bring any money with him, because he's never read a chivalric romance where the knight had to actually buy something. Sadly for him, This Is Reality. While Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs, so does hilarity.
• In Dracula, Dr. Jack Seward spends far too long insisting that he's a character in a medical drama, not a vampire novel. Even after Van Helsing straight up convinces him they're dealing with a vampire, he has one night's sleep, ignores all the evidence Van Helsing has shown him, and goes "eh, he's probably just crazy".
• The Dragaera novel Athyra is told from the perspective of Savn, a Teckla peasant training to be a "physicker". Savn is definitely aware of narrative conventions, as part of a physicker's job is knowing stories to tell patients to distract them from the pain of medical treatment. From Savn's perspective, Vlad is the stock fantasy mentor character, a mysterious and kind of strange character who shows up in the hero's backwater town and introduces them to adventure. Unfortunately for Savn, he's not a character in a straight Heroic Fantasy: he's in a Black-and-Gray Morality Dungeon Punk series, and Vlad's the protagonist, not him. Needless to say, Savn doesn't get a happy ending.
• The Dresden Files: Lampshaded Trope: Harry Dresden understands the importance of identifying his genre. From Dead Beat:
  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.
  • Doesn't stop him from falling into this though. Occasionally Murphy has to poke holes in Harry's theory that he is the ultimate Wild Card protagonist that his foes can never predict.
• Ender's Game: During Ender's flight to the Battle School, he immediately recognizes Colonel Graff's Drill Sergeant Nasty routine from war movies he's watched, an act to get the soldiers to unite through the mutual anger towards their unkind commander. Unfortunately for him, this isn't a war movie about battlefield camaraderie but a novel about, among other things, the isolation inherent in being a gifted child. Graff deviates from the routine and praises Ender and tells the others how insignificant they are compared to him. Graff is uniting the soldiers through mutual anger towards Ender, forcing the poor kid to be isolated so that he has no choice but to rely on himself. Ender realizes too late that Graff has turned him into the Teacher's Pet, and therefore the team scapegoat.
• Fate/strange Fake: Servant Saber is Richard the Lionheart. He mentions that back when he was alive, he was a big fan of King Arthur and saw his stories as a perfect guide for life and running a kingdom. He tried to turn his kingdom into a copy of Camelot and copy the quests that Arthur went on. Unfortunately, since the stories don't reflect real life (and he likely missed the fact that Camelot fell in the end), he ended up running his kingdom into the ground through war and overspending, then got assassinated.
• There is a children's picture book called Gila Monsters Meet You At The Airport about a kid from New York who moves to Texas but has wildly inaccurate expectations because his only frame of reference is old Western movies. Once he gets there, he meets another kid who has equally off-the-mark ideas about New York from watching gangster movies.
• Great Expectations has Pip, who sees Estella as a princess who he's meant to save and believes Miss Havisham became his benefactor in order to make him worthy of this task. In the end, not only was Miss Havisham not his benefactor, she never meant for Pip and Estella to be together, as she was raising Estella to be a heart-breaker.
• Homer Price by Robert McCloskey includes a story about a mysterious old man who has spent twenty years alone in the mountains inventing a humane musical mousetrap. The Centerburg residents are impressed with his similarity to a storybook character and, once the librarians determine the most fitting one, refer to him patronizingly as Rip Van Winkle. It isn't until all the children in Centerburg are following his musical mousetrap out of town that they realize he's a lot more like The Pied Piper of Hamelin. (And even then, he's not purposely luring them like the Piper did — the children just think it'll be quite a sight when the mice get freed and want to be there to watch.)
• Howl's Moving Castle: It is mentioned at the start that this is a world that runs on the logic of fairytales, or at least this is widely believed. This is the reason Sophie gives herself at the start for not taking risks to improve her fortune: as the eldest of three sisters, she would fail as a setup for the youngest to succeed. What follows is much closer to Fractured Fairy Tale, as many familiar elements are there but they never quite work as expected.
• Being a science fiction author, the protagonist of Inferno (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle) by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle is completely prepared to deal with an artificial world created and inhabited by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who have resurrected humans for an elaborate Sadist Show (in a possible Take That! at Farmer's Riverworld)... but not exactly prepared to deal with a mythical, supernatural Ironic Hell, literally matching the one from Dante's The Divine Comedy, which is where he really is.
• In Isekai Battle Royale the main character Brent is familiar with MMORPGs and traditional fantasy isekai settings, but not shooters or the Battle Royale genre.
• KonoSuba has the masochist knight Darkness, who goes into battle under the hope the various monsters and evildoers are perverts looking to violate her sexually. She would be right if she were in a Hentai, but she isn't and her perverted desires have actually disgusted the villains.
• The Stephen King novella The Langoliers has a mystery writer giving an analysis of the situation (everyone waking up on an abandoned plane in mid-air) from the perspective of a mystery thriller. However, he immediately admits that it's a bunk theory, because there are still too many discrepancies, and they're actually in a science fiction story.
• Alma in The Last Resort by Jan Carson is an 11-year-old Agatha Christie fan who thinks she's a Kid Detective investigating a series of impossible thefts in a caravan park. However, she's actually in a Magical Realism story, and slowly and reluctantly comes to the conclusion that the thefts really were impossible.
• The Laundry Files:
  • In The Rhesus Chart, Mhari and her fellow young vampires are Wrong Genre Savvy when designing tests to determine the setting's position on the Sliding Scale of Vampire Friendliness, leading them to conclude that they have much more leeway to be friendly than they actually do. It's later determined that older vampires are deliberately spreading incorrect vampire tropes.
  • In the following book The Annihilation Score, magical powers begin to manifest in ordinary civilians, through a subconscious version of the series's Ritual Magic. Because comic book style superheroes and villains fit better with the general public's worldview than interdimensional eldritch magic, the public at large views these powers through this lens (at least in the United Kingdom; it is mentioned in passing that other parts of the world have other, similarly Wrong Genre Savvy interpretations). The empowered are Blessed with Suck in about the same way as other magic users in the series, worse in that most ordinary ritual magicians at least have some understanding that their magic is Cast from Lifespan.
• In The Macbeth Murder Mystery by James Thurber, a woman who reads nothing but detective novels accidentally picks up a paperback copy of Macbeth. Quickly realizing that Macbeth must be a Red Herring — because Macbeth is shown going in to commit murder on Duncan, but the action cuts away without showing the murder itself, which is a sure sign he didn't actually do it — she sets out to apply her knowledge of murder mystery tropes to figure out who really did it.
• Madame Bovary: Emma, after growing up reading many romance novels, wants the world to be like romance novels, and acts as if it is. This ends up leading to the ruination of her and her family since she's actually in a very cynical Spiritual Antithesis to them.
• In The Mug and Spoon by Anastasia Kharlamova, Lord Austreigh believes he has just woken up Snow White with a True Love's Kiss. He never finds out the truth, which is that he is in a Fractured Fairy Tale and said "Snow White" is a lowborn girl who was never cursed to begin with. Her entire hometown is involved in the con: one girl after another pretends to be the cursed princess to attract potential wealthy husbands.
• The Magicians: Quentin Coldwater is a longtime fan of fantasy novels, most prominently the Fillory And Further children's books, and frequently imagines himself as the hero of his own fantasy story, though to be fair he is studying as a Wizarding School. Once he discovers the Land of Fillory, he sets out on a journey into it, jumping at every opportunity for adventure under the impression that it'll result in him becoming a true hero and a king. Not only is he being manipulated into providing MacGuffin Delivery Service by the Beast, but he's not even the real hero of the story, doing very little to help anyone and proving of little use in any of the fights: he's the Supporting Protagonist to the real hero of the story, Alice.
• Overlapping with Death by Genre Savviness, the Villain Protagonist of Malice Aforethought is knowledgeable of mystery stories and real-life spousal murderers, and aims to commit the perfect murder. What he overlooks, is that everyone else who tried to do this has failed. He also buys into the stereotype of the police as morons, which while often true in Genteel Interbellum Setting fiction, isn't true of the police inspector he encounters.
• My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! has Catarina properly recognize that she is in an otome game after recalling her past life, and holds the role of the villainous bitch who gets in the heroine's way and is meant to meet a horrible death or exile at the end of the game. Her mistake is assuming that she's stuck as the Designated Villain when, in actuality, she became the protagonist of what is now a romantic harem comedy as soon as she regained her memories and began acting as a friendly goofball (i.e., the polar opposite of her intended characterization). As a result, not only are her several (ridiculous) countermeasures rendered pointless by the time the game proper begins, but she's left wondering why all her friends — including the intended heroine — are constantly giving her presents and saying how much they care about her.
• Nightfall (Series): Myra’s knowledge of the outside world is based on a very limited collection of books. She imagines herself a hero on a quest. It doesn’t take her long to realize she’s in the wrong genre.
• Jane Austen: Catherine Morland from Northanger Abbey. She admires a sinister-looking old mansion and, inspired by her Gothic novels, gets the idea that her host has killed his wife. Actually she's in a Regency romance and her love interest, the son of the man she suspects, isn't pleased about her thoughts.
  • John Meade Falkner's The Nebuly Coat has a deliberate inversion of this. Anastasia Joliffe thinks of herself as an Austen heroine and is even reading Northanger Abbey when she first meets Lord Blandamer. However, Anastasia is in a Gothic novel, and doesn't realise the true reason for Lord Blandamer's interest in her.
• Jack Hamilton, of Greg Egan's novella "Oracle", believes that he is the hero of a Christian end-times novel, bravely fighting against the Satanic materialists who scheme to bring about Hell on Earth. This being a Greg Egan story, in reality, he is a fundamentalist loon, tilting at windmills while his nemesis has invented scientific wonders entirely through the scientific method, with no demonic help whatever, and doesn't even believe the supernatural exists.
• The King and Queen in the Fractured Fairytale The Princess and the Pig. Every decision they make is based on the logic that "it’s the sort of the thing that happens all the time in fairytales". When a freak accident switches their newborn daughter with a piglet, they believe a bad fairy cursed the princess into a pig as revenge like in Sleeping Beauty. They raise the piglet as Princess Priscilla. Years later, when their real daughter returns and claims herself as the true princess, they think she’s lying to marry into royalty like Puss in Boots’s owner did and send her away. Finally, they arrange for the pig Priscilla to marry a prince, thinking his kiss will break her "curse" and return her to human form, like it did with The Frog Prince. Guess whether or not it works.
• The protagonist of The Pyat Quartet seems to think that he's starring in the sort of pulpy Victorian science fiction story he grew up reading, about a hyper-competetent gentleman scientist who embodies the romanticised values of Western civilisation and constantly has to battle ill-bred criminals and foreign savages. He's in fact living out a fairly cynical and gritty historical novel set in a Crapsack World where everyone, regardless of ethnicity or class, is either a huckster, a fanatic, or a moron. And of course, in such a world someone like Pyat, who fancies himself an Omnidisciplinary Scientist, is really more of a Bungling Inventor and a Master of None.
• The Scholomance: The students from the Shanghai Enclave think that El Higgins is a Fake Ultimate Hero who is only pretending to be the senior class's savior as part of a plan to either kill them all and drain their mana or enslave the minds of the Shanghai students in particular as part of a deal with the New York Enclavers. El is frustrated by this, but admits that neither of them are absurd or illogical theories between her noticeable aura of Black Magic and persistent closeness with Orion Lake (son of New York's probable next leader).
• The School for Good and Evil: Sophie believes she’s destined to live out her own fairytale as a Princess Classic, meet her Prince Charming, and live Happily Ever After, and strives to keep herself beautiful and do good deeds like the heroines in the books she reads. Meanwhile, her best friend, Agatha, with her black frocks and odd interests in the graveyard, is believed to be on the right track to become a Wicked Witch in her fairytale. Of course, when the time comes for the girls to be taken to the titular fairytale schools, Agatha is enrolled at the Good School for princes and princesses, and Sophie is taken to the Evil School for villains. At first, both think that there was a mix-up until they realized that while Agatha does seem to fit the witch stereotype, she has a genuinely good heart, and thus is the true princess at heart, while Sophie might be beautiful, but all her "good deeds" came from selfishness rather than wanting to be good, and is not a true heroine.
• The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong: After Shen Yuan is transmigrated into the stallion novel Proud Immortal Demon Way, it takes him a long time to realize that the protagonist of said novel, Luo Binghe, has absolutely no interest in collecting a massive harem of women like he did in the original. In fact, the only one Luo Binghe now has eyes for is him. This and several other misconceptions Shen Yuan has from the original novel play a large role in the conflict between him and Luo Binghe.
• Small Game features two in opposite directions:
  • Kyle insists they are in a survival situation and thus all resources should be available. Mara counters that they are on a survival television show.
  • Ashley knows how to make good television - maintaining her appearance, presenting for the camera, and bonding with the other contestants to showcase for the audience. But on a survival television show she needs to contribute to day-to-day food, water, and shelter.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Sansa Stark begins the story thinking of heroic ballads as the way of the world in a world where it's a wonder they came up with a concept of heroism to write the ballads about. Yeah, the results aren't pretty. Littlefinger calls it fairly early, telling her that, "Life is not a song, sweetling. You may learn that someday, to your sorrow."
  • Littlefinger himself learned this lesson the hard way. After learning that the object of his Childhood Friend Romance is betrothed to Brandon Stark he challenges him to a duel for Cat's hand. After all, in the ballads, the underdog who's fighting for love always defeats his brutish rival, right? Except he's a short scrawny 15-year-old boy and Brandon is a strapping 20-year-old with actual combat ability. The fight goes exactly the way you'd expect. The only reason Petyr survived (albeit badly injured) was that Brandon went easy on him. To add insult to injury, Cat had no interest in Petyr, was entirely willing to marry Brandon, and is genuinely perplexed by the challenge.
  • The most tragic example is Prince Quentyn Martell, who is sent by his father on a mission to find Daenerys Targaryen and convince her to marry him in order to forge an alliance between their houses. Quentyn doesn't really want to go, but feels duty-bound, explicitly comparing the mission with stories of heroes. He does manage to make it to Daenerys, and is granted an audience, but the alliance doesn't suit her needs, and his nervous attempts to make his case don't convince her, meaning that his journey ends with a pitying rejection. He remains convinced that his mission has to have a heroic end, and so comes up with a plot to steal one of her dragons for his house. He's burned to death off-screen, and the other characters wonder what possessed him to try something so stupid.
• The Shadow Project: Sir Roland, Carradine, the kids, and other agents serving them think they are in a straightforward The War on Terror Spy Fiction story with Science Fiction elements that they can plan for accordingly, when really they are in an Urban Fantasy Divine Conflict story.
• The Sun Eater: Over 15,000 years in The Future, protagonist Hadrian Marlowe thought himself to be essentially an "enlightenment" hero in a galactic neo-Victorian empire that's just suffering from the ills of ignorance, bigotry and class elitism. With a bit of pluck, some compassion and empathy to aliens conquered by the Sollan Empire, Hadrian'll usher in a utopian world. And to be fair he has a few successes as many of the aliens in the empire are Innocent Aliens who were too primitive to resist human invasion. Unhappily, Hadrian learns he's actually in a Lovecraft Lite, sci-fi version of Dark Fantasy universe that's not too different from Warhammer 40,000, so his hope for a benevolent cosmos is doomed.
• In Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, it's a matter of mild comic embarrassment — and sometimes a matter of life or death — to be wrong about which 'plot' you're on. Worse still is to forget the Tradition entirely, which usually does mean that fairytale plots stop happening in your area, but if a dragon does suddenly appear, you won't have a clue how to make it go away.
• Sooni from Tales of MU lives in a Dungeon Punk world that draws heavily on Dungeons & Dragons in particular, yet seems to consider herself an Anime heroine. Among other things, she strongly believes that Defeat Means Friendship.
• Tea with the Black Dragon has a minor example, since it only lasts a moment and never affects the character's actions, but still striking: When Fred first notices Mr. Long's Mark of the Supernatural, he briefly wonders if Mr. Long is an alien detective who has taken human form to track down alien criminals, before accepting the more prosaic truth that the malefactors Mr. Long is after are ordinary human criminals in an ordinary crime drama plot. (He wasn't entirely wrong about Mr. Long being something in human form, but he still had the genre wrong: Mr. Long is a dragon.)
• Viceroy's Pride: Played with; Henry Ibis literally and explicitly thinks he's in a story, and though he bounces around on exactly who he sees in what role, it's clear that this story is not the cookie-cutter isekai Unwanted Harem story he thinks it is. The twist is that he's rich and powerful enough that he can force things to confirm to his ideal story, at least to an extent. Ultimately, he doesn't notice that he's turning into the villain of the story—and not even the final villain, as he accidentally kills himself just as he's basically conquered the world.
• Whateley Universe: it should come as no surprise that a series so heavy on Deconstruction would have a number of these.
  • Don Sebastiano thinks that he's in a standard Sky High (2005)-esque superhero story, he's the Big Bad and that he and Hekate can do anything they want. Problem is, they're actually in an X-Men-esque superhero story. He's more the Disc-One Final Boss, Hekate is his dragon, and he's underestimated the value of politics — without them, he'd be dead or maimed, because he's playing in the same league as a bunch of people who could kill him without any effort and have already gone up against bigger enemies. (Seriously, the Don or Hekate — or both of them — versus Tennyo? No contest.)
  • Fellow Whateley student Josie Gilman is Wrong Genre Savvy played for laughs. She really does think she's in an X-men (or at least New Mutants) story when she's actually the Butt-Monkey in a Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror story. In her case being wrong genre savvy is probably the only thing keeping her sane.
  • Wannabe Hunter of Monsters Nightbane is obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and sees herself as their world's equivalent, to the point that when she decapitated the Nigh-Invulnerable Humanoid Abomination Carmilla (who was meditating at the time, and didn't even notice until she found her old head, still alive, a few days later), she was surprised that Sara didn't turn into a pile of dust.
    “Aren’t you, like, supposed to disintegrate or something?”
• Pedron Niall from The Wheel of Time is a renowned general and experienced politician, who thinks that he lives in the Low Fantasy, where there is absolutely no place for chosen ones, prophecies or apocalyptic battles between good and evil. As such, he assumes that even known Darkfriends are fighting for power and land, all real danger can stem only from political opponents, and there is nothing that military force and realpolitik can’t solve. He is killed off way before he can realize that he wasn’t Westlands political mastermind, but rather an unassuming pawn of Forsaken.
• In the Wild Cards novel Card Sharks, Harvey Melmouth, an Ace known as The Librarian, viewed his participation in the Iranian hostage crisis rescue mission as bad adventure fiction, and was thus certain that he wouldn't die. Unfortunately, he turned out to be part of a gritty spy thriller. On the positive side, his failure to take things seriously led him to cross a street standing straight rather than hunched over like his fellow team member, Jay Ackroyd. As a result, he was the taller target and was thus the guy who got shot in an ambush, ensuring that the mission critical teleporter wasn't taken out and thereby saving most of the remaining team when things went completely FUBAR.
• You (Kepnes): Joe thinks he is a Dogged Nice Guy and is the hero in a Romantic Comedy. He is in fact an extremely obsessive Stalker with a Crush and eventual Serial Killer who responds to any attempt to stop him living out his rom-com dreams with lethal force, and the villain in a dark psychological thriller.

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