NaNo 4328 / 50,000
I'd agree that's the Genre Savvy trope. The character is mistaking her role in the genre, not the genre itself. Isn't there a trope for villains who think they're the hero of the tale when they're not?
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
Please check the warning on that trope.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
So not that, then.
On WrongGenreSavvy.Fan Works, troper Marcus S Lazarus added a lengthy example that fails to meet the requirement that a Wrong Genre Savvy character must get their genre knowledge from In-Universe fiction; otherwise it's too easily misused for "character is wrong about anything."
I deleted it on these grounds, and the troper restored it without alteration and with an edit reason that does not address the problem.
Cross-posting on ATT
to report the Edit War and P Ming the troper.
This was deleted from Community S 5 E 05 Geothermal Escapism in 2016:
- Genre Blindness:
- For whatever reason, Britta is at disbelief that the students are taking the game so seriously for the first half of the episode. Even though the school has done this several times in the past. She waved off Jeff's suspicions about Chang's trap, believing nobody would care that much about the game. Although to be fair to Britta, everyone else does seem to be taking the fantasy to levels they've never quite gone to even in previous examples of Greendale taking children's games to Serious Business levels:
Chang: You're in no position to make threats, Floorstridernote ! Our truce ended when you banished us from the payphone bench!
Troy: You used that bench to upset The Balance. By the vapours of Magmorath, we will restore it.
Britta: You have gods?!- The other study group members display a bit of this themselves, sneering at Britta's concerns that the Serious Business levels of the game might reflect Abed's fragile mental state at the prospect of Troy leaving as reflective of her poor psychology skills — conveniently forgetting the many other times that Abed's psyche has fractured due to a big change, often involving Troy.
It feels like a valid example of this trope, since Community is a show where things are generally taken to Serious Business levels. Specific examples would be paintball, as in Community S1 E23: Modern Warfare, Community S2 E23: A Fistful of Paintballs, Community S2 E24: For a Few Paintballs More, or a Pillow fight war such as in Community S 3 E 14 Pillows And Blankets.
Can I add it back?
You can only write so much in your forum signature. It's not fair that I want to write a piece of writing yet it will cut me off in the mid
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
That example appears to say that characters haven't learned from experience, and says nothing about works of fiction.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.
Tropes Are Flexible. The first paragraph of Genre Blind states: "condition afflicting many fictional characters, seen when one demonstrates by their behavior that they have never in their life ever seen the kind of story they're in", the type of story in Community is one where people take trivial things to Serious Business levels.
You can only write so much in your forum signature. It's not fair that I want to write a piece of writing yet it will cut me off in the mid
I don't think it fits. Genre Blindness is along the lines of a character being confronted with a vampire and not even considering the traditional weaknesses— sunlight, holy symbols, etc.— as if vampire fiction simply doesn't exist in their universe. In Real Life, the fact that vampires are weak to sunlight is common knowledge, but vampires themselves are fictional. In a work with Genre Blindness about vampires, vampires might be real, but the fact that they're weak to sunlight is, for whatever reason, unknown.
In Real Life, it's not common knowledge that people in fictional community college take games of The Floor Is Lava way too seriously. There's no fictional genre where that's a common convention.
Edited by HighCrate on Apr 4th 2020 at 5:20:53 AM
NaNo 4328 / 50,000
- That's not a "type of story"
- The example doesn't reference that "type of story", and you only posted evidence based on the fact that the series has done that similar plots before, which is prior experience, not fictional works.
Troper ~bibliophile20 added this entry to WrongGenreSavvy.Fan Works:
- In A Thing of Vikings, King Mac Bethad (the historical inspiration for the Shakespearean play of Macbeth) of Alba and his court essentially think and act as if they're in a Game of Thrones-style grimdark setting of musical backstabbing and Disproportionate Retribution, which is justifiable, given their history with Vikings; their previous immediate experience with Norse kings going conquering would have been King Cnut... who had his brother-in-law assassinated. In Church. At Christmas morning Mass. For not being sufficiently deferential. And many of the Norse sagas also contain detailed accounts of Norse lords brutally feuding with one another. So it's entirely understandable that they don't realize that Hiccup and Berk are much more idealistic than that.
We've already gone back-and-forth once with me hiding it as not meeting the requirements for Genre Savvy (Wrong or otherwise), and them making alterations and unhiding it, so it seems like the best way to proceed is to bring it here for discussion.
Going through it line-by-line,
- think and act as if they're in a Game of Thrones-style grimdark setting of musical backstabbing and Disproportionate Retribution
This makes me suspicious. Have they read Game of Thrones? If not, why are we talking about it?
- which is justifiable, given their history with Vikings
This is making me think that this is misuse and not merely a lack of context; if they're acting from personal experience as opposed to knowledge of fictional tropes, that's not Genre Savvy.
- And many of the Norse sagas also contain detailed accounts of Norse lords brutally feuding with one another.
This was added in the second revision, and it's the only thing that makes me think there might be a valid example here. Have the characters read the Norse sagas? Are they basing their actions on genre conventions they've observed in those works of fiction?
Edited by HighCrate on Jul 31st 2020 at 1:23:10 AM
~High Crate, Just forget it. Consider it gone.
Edited by bibliophile20 on Jul 31st 2020 at 3:23:09 AM
This is from Carrie:
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Billy's inner thoughts in the book make it clear he seems to think he's some sort of Greaser Delinquent hero like Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause. This is made clear at the end when he seems to think he's just going to ride off into the night to California and start over again, just like what usually happens to such characters when things get dicey for them. Unfortunately for him, he's in a horror novel and happens to be the instigator of one very pissed-off telekinetic who just had her mind completely snap from the prank he helped pull on her...
The way it's written, it isn't clear if he's getting this from the movies mentioned. I haven't read the book. Is Billy a fan of those movies?
Yeah, that's definitely a wordy ZCE (or a partial-context one at best). It's either shoehorning to make it look like an example when it isn't, or it needs to be rewritten to make it clear that he's using his knowledge of works in-universe. I don't remember the work (I read it as a kid, but would have to re-read it from scratch as I remember very little), so I don't know what the answer is, but if no-one knows the work, I support pulling the example anyway. If it turns out that it does count, then someone can do the work to make it a proper example and re-add it; until that happens, it's just a very wordy partial-context example.
Edited by Wyldchyld on May 15th 2022 at 3:18:27 AM
If my post doesn't mention a giant flying sperm whale with oversized teeth and lionfish fins for flippers, it just isn't worth reading.
There's no mention of those works in the book, so it doesn't count. Could it count under Genre Blind instead?
Edited by Javertshark13 on May 17th 2022 at 5:57:37 AM
This post was deleted from the Wrong Genre Savvy page of Fan Fic, so I refined/clarified where the character gets their knowledge of tropes from in the hope of having the example re-added.
Edited by KingLyger on Jul 1st 2018 at 9:52:07 AM
The fantasy RPG videos that play in my head are amazing.