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  • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: Byakuya Togami's childhood involved him being constantly forced to compete against his half-siblings, so he easily accepts the premise of the Deadly Game and openly declares his desire to commit murder to escape, while the protagonists are the students who realize that the game is a farce meant to psychologically torture its participants, Monokuma is the true antagonist, and ultimately the only winning move is not to play and to instead take the fight to Monokuma directly. Byakuya eventually has a Heel–Face Turn after the chapter 4 case (which Byakuya, usually among the smarter students, got completely wrong because he assumed that everyone was thinking like him and that it would be completely understandable for someone to kill their supposed best friend in order to get revenge or to escape. The fact that the victim killed herself to save everyone catches him completely flatfooted) unites the students against Monokuma, which turns out for the best as the game and all of Monokuma's motives were based on false premises.
  • Kim Kitsuragi, your partner in Disco Elysium, consistently makes predictions about the case which assume you're in a very grounded and mundane sort of detective story. He's consistently wrong, because the story you're actually in is a gonzo magical realist mess where you can talk cargo containers open and a dead man can tell you how he died.
    • One especially notable example is that he insists that a pillar of magical silence is some kind of architectural quirk of the church you find it in.
  • While Monika in Doki Doki Literature Club! certainly understands Romance Game tropes are in play, she says some inappropriate things that backfire on her because she misses an important point about how the genre works. She actually knows it's a game, and she knows the other characters are therefore not real. As a result, Monika expects the player to laugh along with her when she jokes about the horrible things that happen to the other members of the literature club when Monika hacks the game to take control of it. The whole time, Monika doesn't realise that dating sims generally want you to empathize with the characters, instead of toying with them for your own amusement. Word of God is they intentionally wrote her in a way where the player should be horrified about what happened to the sweet and quirky members of the Literature Club, and hate Monika for forcing them through it. (This interpretation is affirmed here.)invoked
  • Dragon Age:
    • In Dragon Age: Origins, King Cailan establishes himself as a great admirer of the Grey Wardens, and expresses his eagerness to fight alongside them to defeat the darkspawn like in all the stories he has read. Unfortunately for Cailan, Dragon Age is not that kind of fantasy, and he's betrayed by his father's oldest friend, Loghain. Meanwhile, Loghain himself is under the impression that he's embroiled in a web of political intrigue, with the Grey Wardens colluding with the Orlesians to take over Ferelden. In reality, all of his efforts to protect his country from foreign influence just weaken it against the real threat of the Darkspawn.
      • It's also noted that part of Loghain's failings is that he forgot to apply the 'fantasy' part of dark fantasy and thought that the Darkspawn were basically another human nation he could defeat militarily, while this is not the case- they are very much a fantastic enemy that requires fantastic measures to defeat. Darkspawn are immune to most conventional military tactics; they don't require food or armaments so there's no supply lines to cut, they communicate in a telepathic Black Speech so you can't get any intelligence on them, they're practically endless so they can't be defeated by attrition, and the Archdemon leading them can't be killed except by a Grey Warden. He's so stuck in his political view of the world that he doesn't realize that all those heroic tales of Grey Wardens ending blights by defeating Archdemons in personal combat are absolutely true, and there are very good reasons things are that way.
    • In Dragon Age II, Knight Commander Meredith believes she's surrounded by abominations, doing everything she can to, in her eyes, protect the innocent from evil mages, while Anders sees himself as a revolutionary fighting for the rights of the oppressed, and Cassandra thinks Hawke is The Chessmaster who orchestrated the beginning of the mage rebellion. In reality, Hawke is an Action Survivor who, while extremely popular and influential in their own way, was basically along for the ride, Meredith is a literal Knight Templar who at the very least ignores the abuse of the mages under her care and overuses the Rite of Tranquility, and Anders is an abomination who Jumped Off The Slippery Slope and manipulated Hawke into helping him perform terrorist acts.
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening: When Lucina travels back in time to under her ruined future, the main antagonist Grima follows suit to thwart her under the assumption that her success would Ret-Gone him out of existence a la Back to the Future. However, that's not how time travel works in the Fire Emblem series, as instead these actions simply create an Alternate Universe rather than erase the old one. If he had simply let them go nothing would have happened to him either way, but since he did follow Lucina he was instead greatly weakened, allowed for Robin to glimpse the bad future and plan around it to prevent tragedy, opened himself up to be permanently killed due to Robin sharing their power, and left the old world he conquered completely free of his influence.
  • A semi-example in Grand Theft Auto V. Lamar Davis thinks he's the protagonist of a GTA game, when in reality he's the sidekick to Franklin, one of the actual protagonists; as such, he acts very impulsively and doesn't think his plans through, relying on violence, which repeatedly lands him in trouble and forces Franklin (and on occasion, Trevor and/or Michael) to bail him out of jams.
    • Another semi-example would be Stretch, a fellow hoodlum who thinks he controls Franklin and Lamar's lives. While he might qualify as Lamar's Big Bad (if only because Lamar's so dumb and therefore repeatedly falls for Stretch's attempts to get him killed), he's more a Big Bad Wannabe otherwise, as Franklin's got much bigger problems to deal with (corrupt businessmen, warring government agencies, and Chinese gangsters) and often forgets Stretch even exists; he's basically tossed in as an afterthought during the "Deathwish" ending after Trevor brings him up.
  • In middle school, some of your classmates in Growing Up compare high school to how it's usually portrayed in TV shows, and you can agree or disagree with them. When they actually enter high school, however, they realize that it's nothing like on TV as they face the harshness of reality. This is true for Alicia and Jake, since the former's forced to volunteer for part-time hospital work while the latter develops a drug addiction and gets hurt in gang fights.
  • Jurassic Park: The Game: Miles Chadwick tries to save himself from a pack of Dilophosaurs by throwing Nima to the ground and running like hell, under the impression that they'll go after the easier prey. He finds out the hard way (i.e., getting eaten alive) that real predatory animals tend to target fleeing prey that breaks from the pack, meaning that by fleeing for his life like a Dirty Coward, he just marked himself as the easy prey.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • In Spirit Tracks, Zelda assumes she's in a standard Fairy Tale and is going to play the typical Damsel in Distress role after her physical body is stolen, even lampshading how it's "something of a family tradition." This is one of the only games in the franchise where Zelda is playable. Needless to say, it isn't long before she finds out it's really a Coming of Age Story and she'll need to learn how to be an Action Girl if she wants to get her body back.
    • Everyone in Breath of the Wild, including Zelda herself, believes that meditation and prayer to Hylia will awaken her divine powers. However, after ten years of training, Zelda still hasn't summoned a flicker of power. Her father thinks that indulging in unrelated hobbies is keeping her from being truly devoted to her prayers, while Zelda herself hopes that her powers might come once she's finally old enough to visit the Spring of Wisdom. In the end, both of them are wrong. Zelda's powers awaken when she tries to perform a Heroic Sacrifice for Link, implying they're fueled by The Power of Love rather than piety — so everything she did in the last ten years wasn't actually helping to nurture her powers and may have even been holding her back.
    • Also in Breath of the Wild, Hyrule as a whole fell victim to this in the backstory. They believed they were in for a legendary battle that would end with good triumphing over evil and prepared accordingly. They found The Chosen One to wield the Master Sword, the princess began training from an early age to master her divine magic, and archaeologists unearthed an army of Guardians to fight with them. In reality, however, they were in the opening act of a tragedy; Ganon turned the army of Guardians against them and managed to mortally wound The Chosen One, while the princess's power awakened too late for anything but damage control, leading to the game's After the End setting.
  • Lost Judgment: Mami Koda joined the basketball club at Seiryo High School because of a basketball manga she used to read. Despite her inexperience in the sport, she hoped that her teammates would support her like how it happened in the manga. Unfortunately for her, her lack of experience only made her a target for bullying by her teammates that Mikoshiba himself encouraged through his intense drilling and his off-color remarks towards her.
  • Love & Pies: As she investigates the arson on her mother's café and interrogates the suspects, Amelia thinks that she's acting out her favorite episodes of The Mysteries of Miguel because she recognizes the plot beats, but sometimes, the endings don't turn out to be just like them.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda: Liam, being a movie buff, thinks Peebee's declaring Let's Split Up, Gang! might result in her death by spike pit (it doesn't), and more seriously during his Loyalty Mission, where he thinks that if you rush into a situation with no real plan, it's still "supposed" to work because they're the heroes. What happens is everything goes seriously screwy.
  • Early on in No More Heroes III, FU has the UAA establish the Galactic Superhero Rankings as a challenge to Earth. Travis Touchdown, who's become weary of the usual killing game routine at this point, reasons that he can prevent this from starting and get the invaders to leave if he kills FU right off the bat. Unfortunately for him, FU is still the game's Big Bad, and things go south quickly when he gives Travis and his friends a brutal beating.
  • In Ōkami, Issun initially believes in Beauty Equals Goodness in regards to women. He immediately trusts Rao because of her large chest and distrusts Queen Himiko who (initially) refuses to show her face. Rao has been Dead All Along and is impersonated by the evil Ninetails and Himiko is actually good, trying to save her city and people (and also happens to be quite beautiful).
  • Persona 4: Dojima is actually a fairly competent detective and manages to actually reach some of the same conclusions that the Investigation Team makes at around the same time. Unfortunately, he thinks he's in a mundane murder mystery, when there's actually Urban Fantasy mixed in, meaning that he doesn't have all the pieces since he refuses to consider the supernatural.
  • Dutch in Red Dead Redemption II thinks himself and his gang as Robin Hood and his Merry Men who are always able to stay one step ahead of the law and is seen as chivalrous bandits to those who are oppressed. Unfortunately, due to Dutch's leadership and his own destructive tendencies, the gang is constantly on the run from authorities who are able to easily track down the gang and cause them to be feared rather than adored by the people. Dutch also attempts to fight a military patrol, thinking it would be like fighting a rival gang, only for the gang to be almost overwhelmed and killed when the rear guard shows up.
  • Resident Evil 4 has a hilarious example where the evil mastermind Saddler mocks Leon's belief that he's going to rescue Ada and save the day like the cliché America Saves the Day ending of a cheesy Hollywood movie. From the moment Saddler makes this comment, the rest of the game plays out like a cheesy Hollywood movie: Saddler goes One-Winged Angel, Leon blows him up with a bazooka after a short fight, then Ada swoops in and nabs the sample off him but is kind enough to leave him the keys to a jetski as the island starts inexplicably blowing up, forcing Leon and Ashley to escape speeding down a tunnel away from a fiery death, and then it all ends with Ashley flirting with Leon as they go Riding into the Sunset.note 
  • In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Harry Flynn basically tells Elena that she is this. This ends badly for Elena.
    Flynn: Sorry love, but this isn't a movie. And you're not the plucky girl who reforms the villain and saves the day.
  • Until Dawn:
    • Once the main characters realize that there's a killer on the loose, Emily insists to Matt that they should not go back to the lodge, as that's what he'd be expecting them to do. Considering that the actual threat wasn't a slasher killer, but something far more supernatural and monstrous, the lodge was actually the safest place on the mountain.
    • After learning about the wendigoes, the main characters initially assume that they are like zombies — and that Emily, should she be bitten by a wendigo during her chase scene, is infected. They're wrong, but they only learn that after you're given the option to kill her. Sam is the only one willing to give Emily the benefit of the doubt and tries calming the others down, and needless to say, Emily is quite justifiably furious afterwards.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has a few cases where characters new to the supernatural side of things think the world they are in works by common horror tropes. Most notable would be one of the thin-bloods, who thinks a full blood transfusion or killing the head vampire can cure him from vampirism. The player can milk his gullibility for all it is worth.
    • Another example would be when you get a mission to keep the zombie population at a local graveyard under control for a bit.
      Romero: Whatever you do, don't let them bite you.
      Player: Why? Will I turn into a zombie then?
      Romero: Nope. It just hurts like a bitch.


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