Wrong Genre Savvy / Western Animation

• American Dad!: In one episode, Roger gets a job as a car salesman as part of a wager with Stan. He states that he believes this experience will be like a Work Com and begins comparing his co-workers to Sitcom archetypes. For instance, the man cracking jokes is the funny one. The hostile woman is his rival. And the seemingly nice man is his Side Kick. In the end, the latter employee not only betrays him but also turns out to be a Neo-Nazi.
• Amphibia:
  • Due to being a fan of fantasy tabletop games and JRPGs, Marcy sees Amphibia purely in terms of those tropes and views it as her own personal playground for endless adventure. She's taken aback when the situation gets serious and the man she thought was the The Good King archetype was really using her to restart his bid to control the multiverse as a cruel dictator, attempting to kill her friends and turning her into a vessel for the Greater-Scope Villain.
  • Anne herself is not immune to falling into this trope as she sometimes tends to make decisions based on movies but only for it to lead to Surprisingly Realistic Outcome afterwards. For example, in "Swamp and Sensibility", Anne thinks that Wally being honest with his family about his lifestyle back in Wartwood would be the best thing to do and that they'd instantly be accepting, because "It happened in a movie, and movies are never wrong," only for his family to be horrified when she blurts out the truth.
• The titular character of BoJack Horseman got his big break as the star of a 1990s sitcom (an expy of Full House), and has come to view real life in a similar manner, convinced that things will all work out in the end after some solemn speeches. The universe is all too happy to prove him wrong about this, time and time again. In the first season, BoJack apologizes to his old friend Herb for choosing the spot in the sitcom over his friendship with Herb years ago. Not only does Herb not forgive BoJack, he rips into BoJack with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
• Superman Substitute Homelander's Origins Episode in The Boys: Diabolical portrays him as a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds who genuinely wanted to be a hero, but his misconceptions about the type of superhero setting he was in ends up setting off a series of Disaster Dominoes. While trying to stop a group of domestic terrorists, he bends metal bars around one of them and crushes her ribs before superheating another's gun with his Eye Beams and causing it to explode, maiming him and killing a hostage.
• Craig of the Creek has one episode where the Stump Kids find a village that works like an RPG. Kelsey assumes that there will be money in the pottery and breaks a pot. However, it turns outs that that's one detail they didn't replicate in the village and the owner of the pot gets angry at her.
• Danny Phantom: The episode "Micro-Management" has Danny and Dash shrunken down and hiding in a mouse hole from Skulker. Dash questions the lack of a matchbox sofa and a coffee table made from a spool of thread. Danny tells him he watches too many cartoons.
• DC Super Hero Girls: In "#TheBirdAndTheBee", after learning about their Reincarnation Romance, Karen tries to help Carter hook up with Shiera by invoking various Romcom tropes, but this only serves to make Carter come off as a massive creep to Shiera. He only makes headway with Shiera once he simply talks it out with her. Furthermore, Carter and Shiera's romance is nothing like the romantic comedies Karen enjoys, but is instead a tragic case of Star-Crossed Lovers where the villainous Hath-Set is destined to kill them should they ever pair up.
• Detentionaire has Brad, whose father is a blockbuster action movie star. As a result, he seems to think his life is such a movie, with him, of course, as the star. There are moments when he does correctly predict what will happen, but there are even more times when he's wrong. He just doesn't realize that Lee is the main character, not him, and the story they're in is more mystery and conspiracies and fewer explosions and fight sequences.
• An In-Universe case happens in Drawn Together. Captain Hero spends much of the first episode thinking that the reality show he and the other housemates are on is one in which the contestants vote each other out and the last one standing receives a prize; as such, if Clara succeeds in ejecting Foxxy, he will be one step closer to victory. Foxxy tries, in vain, to convince him that it's not that kind of reality show.
• One gag in Family Guy has a segment parodying Star Trek, with Captain Kirk taking Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Ensign Ricky to explore an uncharted planet. Ricky immediately realizes he is a Red Shirt and his life expectancy can be measured in hours. When William Shatner is run over and killed later in the episode, a dumbfounded Ricky reappears and admits he Didn't See That Coming.
• In the episode of Futurama set aboard the Titanic, Fry thinks he's on an episode of Three's Company but he realizes that the other participants to the charade he's trying to pull off aren't that dumb.
• Garfield's Babes and Bullets: When he first meets Tanya, Sam thinks she's the typical Film Noir style Femme Fatale and posits several theories that she killed her husband and is hiring him to take the fall so she can get clean away. However, every time he asks her a question that would confirm one of said theories, it always ends up being wrong. This also occurs in his first meeting with O'Felix, positing a theory that O'Tabby was having an affair with a wealthy widow under the guise of visiting a university benefactress, but that proves wrong after he asks how old the benefactress was.
• Gravity Falls: In the episode "Sock Opera", Mabel thinks that the audience will believe her fighting the Bill-possessed Dipper and blowing the stage up was part of the show and applaud like in cartoons. The opposite happens.
• The Hollow
  • The kids, familiar with pop culture, make various theories about what's going on, from being experiments by a Mad Scientist or a secret government agency, to being superheroes, to being stuck in some parallel universe, to being stuck in purgatory or some weird afterlife. They're willing competitors in a televised game show and it's (supposed to be) harmless.
  • In Season 2, when they wake up to realize they're all still stuck in The Hollow, they immediately assume their consciousnesses are trapped in the game. Turns out that they're sentient AI based off the memories and personalities of last season's characters instead.
• Inside Job (2021): After joining Cognito, Inc., Brett assumes it operates exactly like Men in Black, which causes him to assume a tampon is a neuralizer and bring a fingerprint eraser to a gunfight. In reality, Cognito, Inc. is more like the SCP Foundation.
• In “Lost and Found”, Kiff and Barry find a diary of depressing secrets, and search around town to return to its owner. But as they kept searching, they end up revealing more of their secrets. So when they get to the third place, Kiff explains that most stories have three things, so the third guy they’re going into has to be the right person. But unfortunately, he wasn’t the owner.
• Megas XLR: Kiva seems to think she's in a serious, dark show about saving the human race from ruthless alien invaders, when she's actually in a goofy, over-the-top parody of super robot anime where things run on awesomeness and gag logic.
• The Owl House:
  • Luz spends most of the first season constantly trying to imitate things from the books she read or the movies she's seen, which never goes the way she expects. In particular, she often thinks that life in the Boiling Isles will be like a traditional High Fantasy adventure just like her favorite book series The Good Witch Azura — even as the Boiling Isles continuously proves to be both stranger and more mundane than those kinds of stories. Much of Luz's character arc revolves around her growing out of this mindset, especially in the second season.
  • Jacob Hopkins. He is correct in that witches and demons are real, but his ideas for their origins and motivations are incredibly off due to him being a Conspiracy Theorist that gets all his ideas from online message boards, and what little he does right is pure conincidence. He sees himself as the main character, serving as a hero defending Earth against demonic invasion, when he's actually little more than a one-off antagonist who (outside attempting a Van Helsing Hate Crime against Vee) is mostly harmless.
  • As revealed in "Hollow Mind", Belos also has this problem, as his plans to enact a Final Solution against the people of the Isles seems to be under the assumption that the people of the Isles are inherently wicked, and that he'll be "saving humanity from evil" by doing so, when the entire series has shown that the witches and demons are just as capable of choosing good or evil as mankind, and that if anything he's the evil one (not to mention how the people of the Isles have no idea how to access Earth save for the singular portal that he himself currently possesses). Basically, he seems to think that he's in a straight horror-based dark fantasy story with himself as the lead, fighting to keep humanity safe from supernatural monsters even if he has to become something other than human himself, while he's really the Big Bad Knight of Cerebus of Luz's more light-hearted horror-comedy fantasy story. Furthermore there are enough clues that suggest he's deliberately clinging to this fantasy in order to avoid owning up to killing his older brother for marrying a witch.
  • Belos is also a deconstruction of this trope. It's implied that on some level Belos is aware that his delusions aren't reflective of reality, so he does his best to force everyone to play along with his preconceptions. All of the pain and suffering he's caused is because Belos is a massive Control Freak trying to force everyone to go along with his childish fantasies of being a heroic, celebrated witch hunter, and he lashes out violently whenever anyone starts breaking out of the mold he's trying to force them to fit into.
• The Penguins of Madagascar: Recurring antagonist the Red Squirrel seems to think he's in a far more serious action thriller, but he exists in an illogical cartoon universe, and so everything he tries is doomed to failure because he approaches all his plans as if his enemies were from the same spy movie 'verse he thinks he's in, rendering his towering intellect effectively meaningless.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Homer Goes to College", Homer is convinced that college is nonstop Wacky Fratboy Hijinx a la Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, which includes believing Dean Peterson of Springfield University is a DeanBitterman type and spends most of the episode pulling ill-conceived pranks on him. This causes him to completely ignore the fact that the Dean is an almost comically good-natured and patient educator, his fellow students don't find his pranks amusing, and his reckless behavior results in serious injuries and failed courses.
  • In "Marge on the Lam", Homer is preparing to rush out of the house to help Marge, but Lisa points out that he's legally required to find a babysitter for herself and Bart first;
    Homer: Oh, Lisa. Haven't you seen Home Alone? If some burglars come, it'll be a very humorous and entertaining situation.
  • Bart has a similar experience in "The Town". When the family decides to move to Boston, Bart is ecstatic, convinced he'll soon be working up the ranks of The Irish Mob. Unfortunately, he soon finds out the city is actually a gentrified, intellectual paradise rather than the working class gangsterland it's depicted as in The Departed and The Town.
  • "Das Bus", when the entire class gets stranded on an island, Bart is convinced that this is a castaway story like The Swiss Family Robinson. Sadly for him, they're actually in Lord of the Flies which isn't like that.^note It really, really, isn't.
  • In "Little Big Mom", the ghost of Lucille Ball herself gives Lisa the idea of getting back at Homer and Bart by making they think they have leprosy, saying that she did it in an episode of I Love Lucy and it worked fine there. Unfortunately, Homer and Bart Simpson are as far from Ricky Ricardo as you can get and they decide to skedaddle and seek an alternative cure the very second Lisa leaves them alone.
• An episode of South Park has Butters see a bunch of kids who dress up as vampires and mistake them for the real thing and spend the rest of the episode under the belief that he is in a vampire story. He's never able to realize that there were never any vampires.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "Krab-Borg", SpongeBob becomes convinced that Mr. Krabs is a robot thanks to having seen a movie the previous night where robots take over the Earth (and some coincidentally odd behavior on Mr. Krabs' part). After he and Squidward have ruthlessly interrogated the "robot", Squidward thinks to ask SpongeBob how the movie ended, to which he replies that it turned out there weren't any robots after all; it was all a silly misunderstanding. Oops.
  • In "One Krabs Trash", Mr. Krabs is confronted by an army of zombies for trying to take a rare hat from a fish's grave and assumes they're going to act like the ones he's seen on a TV show:
    Mr. Krabs: Oh, no. I've seen this on the late show! You ghoulish fiends hold me down and take turns nibbling on my innards. Then you eat my brain and leave my body for the buzzards!
    Smitty: That's disgusting! We just want the hat back.
• In Trespass of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Pantoran Chairman Cho believes that, as the supreme ruler of his own people, he has the right and the authority to command Anakin Skywalker's clone troopers and declare war on the primitive Talz. Both assumptions couldn't be more wrong:
  • In the case of the clones, Cho may be in a position of authority, but he's not in the clones' chain of command, so they are under no obligation to follow his orders. Notably, they disregard his command to initiate violence against the Talz, and only open fire in self-defense. When Cho protests against their very justified decision to retreat from the Talz (who have them on the ropes), the clones soundly ignore him.
  • In the case of the Talz, Cho declaring war on them out of misplaced patriotism without any real provocation is actually against the literal law, because as Anakin points out preemptive attacks are illegal. Furthermore, despite being the overall ruler of Pantora, the chairman is implied to be an elected position with checks and balances in the form of the Pantoran Assembly. Thus, despite his assumptions, Cho does not have the right or the authority to declare war on another race without first consulting his board. Once the Assembly is informed of Cho's antics, they declare his actions out of order and remove him from power while authorising/ordering his successor to negotiate peace with the race Cho attacked, resulting in the Chairman dying a pointless death and ruining whatever legacy he had among his people despite his misplaced patriotism.
• In a few episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), Michelangelo loves monster movies and panics when he meets creatures from beneath the earth, body-snatching aliens, or eldritch horrors. Someone always dies horribly. Lucky for him, he's not in a monster movie — he's in a Saturday-Morning Cartoon.
• Thomas & Friends: In "Bill or Ben?", when the titular twins first meet Connor, an express engine from the Mainland, they are convinced that he is another pompous fast running engine who needs to be brought down to earth. As Thomas tries to point out, Connor is cocky, but not a Jerkass.
• Transformers: Prime episode "Thirst" has Starscream and Knockout confronted by a Terrorcon, and Knockout suggests shooting in the head based on seeing human horror films, citing tactics for killing zombies. Except this isn't a human horror film. And depiction-wise, the Terrorcons in this episode are more like vampires. Both of these lead to his plan failing.
• Wander over Yonder episode "The Hero" has Brad Starlight who claims to be the hero of a fairy tale and is out to save the princess from an evil dragon king and is destined to marry her. At the end of the episode, it turns out he's actually a friend-turned-Stalker with a Crush who can't accept no for an answer, and the "evil" dragon that's holding the princess hostage is actually her fiancé; when the group encounters the supposed Damsel in Distress, she tries to talk him down, then beats him up after he tries to kidnap her himself. Furthermore, throughout the episode, he treats Wander (the real hero) is his goofy sidekick and Sylvia (Wander's partner) as a dumb beast he uses as his steed.
• Wunschpunsch: In an attempt to prevent Bubonic and Tyrannia from casting the spell of the week in "Plant Panic", Maurizio places some banana peels to make them trip and believes the plan would work because he's seen it happening in cartoons. They simply walk normally and are oblivious to the banana peels despite having stepped on some. Maurizio later falls for his own trap. Just like it happens in some cartoons (and other media sometimes).

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