What even is "Functional Genre Savvy"?

Functional Genre Savvy isn't a trope I realized existed until recently while writing the new work page for Final Girl (2019), and I was checking to see if it would perhaps fit (the manga is a slasher parody where the protagonist uses their awareness of slasher tropes to avoid death)... and the trope description is really confusing.

Laconic description is "Knowing just enough about what type of a story you're in to actually advance the plot," but I'm not sure if that's actually what the main trope page is getting at. The Example as a Thesis is really vague as to what exactly it's trying to demonstrate — I'm assuming it's presenting potential narrative branches for a story to take from a universal origin point, but then what exactly does that demonstrate about the "functional" part of "Functional Genre Savvy"? Is the ability to assume a story development based on surrounding genre context simply not just plain old Genre Savvy?

The rest of the page then gets more confusing in explaining a "variant" called "cover copy savvy" and then explains what reviewer coined the term rather than actually going in depth of what that means. Is it supposed to be like a character breaking the fourth wall and reading a description of the actual work they're in? Then there's listings of "aversions" (which already seems like bad praxis) and the description describes those cases as happening in works "that start realistically where the characters act as though they're in Real Life." What does that even have to do with anything?

Also, on the Genre Savvy page itself, it describes Functional Genre Savvy as "When characters are not consciously Genre Savvy but regularly act within the limitations of the genre they're in anyway," which not only sounds like an entirely different thing, it actually sounds like the complete opposite (a character who isn't aware of the story they're in and just acts normally within its confines?)

For some reason there are no examples on the page to provide better context, so I'm kinda stumped as to what exactly this is trying to be. Does this sound like it should go through the TRS process, or is there just something I'm not getting?

Edited by number9robotic on Mar 25th 2024 at 12:04:10 PM

Genre Savvy says the difference is that Genre Savvy characters explicitly state they know what kind of work they're in, while Functional Genre Savvy characters don't but act according to the conventions anyway. Or maybe the intention is that Functional Genre Savvy is Genre Savvy but without a character directly saying so. This post in a TRS thread for a now-cut Genre Savvy + villain trope states that Functional Genre Savvy is a supertrope of Genre Savvy.

It does look like a TRS candidate. "Genre Savvy but ambiguous" is not tropable IMO.

The page for Functional Genre Savvy talks about the character advancing the plot. So maybe the idea is that a Functional Genre Savvy character is aware of their role in the story and plays along with it.

The whole line of meta tropes have some ambiguation to them. From what I'm reading is that Genre Savvy is basically displaying any familiarity with the story conventions they are caught up in, while Functional Genre Savvy seems to be a working knowledge of how the story usually goes and is able to anticipate the turns ahead of time.

Slightly simpler:

• Genre Savvy: Comments on the cliches being used.
  • Wrong Genre Savvy: Thinks they are in a different type of story.
• Functional Genre Savvy: Plays into an archetype for their own advantage.
• Meta Guy: Seems to be aware they are fictional characters in a pre-determined work.

Oldest Internet Archive copy. Original YKTTW that had to be fished out from the discussion page on said Archive.

This would be Contractual Genre Blindness, no?

If there is anything meta in Functional Genre Savvy then it went over my head. From the description I just get "characters stick to the tropes of their genre".

Functional Genre Savvy is exampleless because it's the default. It is sort of meta, but only in the fact that we describe it.

This isn't about the author trying to be meta, or even about making the characters seem smart. It's just that, for example, characters in a supernatural detective story act differently than characters in a mundane detective story. If they hear rumors about a vampire, they will react very differently depending on which story they're in, and the narrative will treat one option as smart and one option as stupid, depending on what story they're in.

Going off the vampire example, everyone's reactions if they are genuinely in a supernatural detective series:

• Genre Savvy: "It's never the vampire in this sort of story! Oh, it might look like it's a vampire, and they're definitely up to something, but they're not going to be behind this."
• Genre Blind: "Let's meet the vampires down this blind alley without telling anyone where we're going."
• Wrong Genre Savvy: "It's probably aliens."
• Meta Guy: "Let's save meeting the vampires for next chapter."
• Functional Genre Savvy: "I haven't met a vampire before, but I'm not surprised."

Idk if that holds up. Plenty of supernatural detective stories don't involve the characters believing in or accepting the supernatural. It feels like a bit of a stretch to say that the characters reactions will always (or even often) match their genre.

Heck, the page even goes on to say that this is a type of aversion, likely because FGS isn't super common (at least not as much as claimed).

Edited by WarJay77 on Mar 29th 2024 at 10:52:33 AM

The trope feels a little bit of an idea in search of examples, but iconic examples (in the sense of this is a baseline to compare all other examples) are not readily apparent. I'm feeling it's something along the lines of Competence Porn or Badass Bystander relative to the genre they are a part of. One possible example would be from Titan A.E. where the main characters attempt to bypass a guard station by pretending they have a prisoner, but the guard catches every little mistake made and they have to just physically subdue him. The guard simply saw through a common hero trick, but didn't frame it as part of a movie he saw once.

The idea, at least originally, seems to have been "characters act as though they know the genre of the story they're in even though they have no reason to think that, no in-universe reason to discard alternative explanations, no other reason to act that way, and may otherwise be characterized in a way inconsistent with acting that way". That's how I interpret it at least.

Edited by MorganWick on Mar 30th 2024 at 2:45:57 AM