Wrong Genre Savvy/Literature

Examples of characters in  include:


 * Older Than Steam: Don Quixote's madness is a version of this.
 * Sansa Stark begins A Song of Ice and Fire 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 weren't pretty.
 * Quentyn Martell similarly believes that he's in a straight Heroic Fantasy story, with the added bonus that he thinks he's The Protagonist as well..
 * Eddard Stark  due to this.
 * Catherine Morland from Jane Austen's novel 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.
 * Henry Crawford of Austen's Mansfield Park honestly seems to believe he's the Prince Charming character who will marry the Cinderella-esque heroine and rescue her from her depressing life with her neglectful family. Thus, he feels completely confident after she rejects his proposal that they'll still inevitably be married, and both he and his sister still consider the marriage a sure thing. Unfortunately, he's actually the Handsome Lech character who only passes himself off as Prince Charming to seduce women for fun, which he can't give up even after supposedly falling in love with Fanny Price. He came so close to being the romantic hero he wanted to be... and he blew it.
 * Illuminatus! has 00005, a Captain Ersatz for James Bond who's highly genre-savvy for a spy novel, except that he's not in a spy novel but a Cosmic Horror Story instead. And yet somehow manages to be one of the few (only?) characters to have things mostly figured out by the end.
 * Abby Normal in Christopher Moore's You Suck appears to be thoroughly aware that she's in a vampire novel. The problem is that she appears to believe that the aforementioned vampire novel is Twilight.
 * "Abby Normal? Eye-Gor, are you telling me you brought me an abnormal vampire brain?"
 * Being a science fiction author, the protagonist of Inferno 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, which is where he really is.
 * Sir Apropos of Nothing (from the book of the same name by Peter David) is convinced that he is in a heroic tale, and works to seize the protagonistship by sheer force of will. The very idea of an Anti-Hero, and that he's been the protagonist all along, would come as a shock to him. However, the instant he realizes it's his place in life to be the useless sidekick to the local hero-to-be who is fated to receive all good things, he proceeds to heft a rock at the proto-hero's head and take his place.
 * That's the first book. In the second book, he's destined for the role of Evil Overlord to a hero. This time he doesn't realize until near the end of the book that he's in a hero's story again (because the evil overlord doesn't care about the hero or regard him as a threat!) and he plays his role as if he's Contractually Genre Blind until he finally does meet the hero. That leads him to recognize his own role, and everything changes.
 * Christopher in Everworld initially seems to believe that not just the fantasy world the heroes have landed in but the real world as well works according to the rules of action movies, and spends a lot of time calculating whether a given person will survive the current crisis. The others all consider him a bit nuts, and he learns better pretty soon.
 * Sybil in The Picture of Dorian Gray believes in the tropes she's learned from Theater, and thinks she is a peasant girl of a fairy tale who gets swept off her feet by Prince Charming and lives Happily Ever After. Unfortunately for her, she's actually the lower class character who gets seduced and abandoned by the evil lord of the manor.
 * 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.
 * The villain of the Lord Peter Wimsey novel Whose Body? has a similar goal of perfect murder and gets the benefit of dumb police. However, as is lampshaded by the incompetent Inspector Lestrade at the end, brilliant murderers still invariably end up getting caught in mystery novels.
 * Gustave Flaubert's Emma Bovary expects her life to conform to the romance stories she's read. Unfortunately for her, the novel she's in is realistic and rather cynical.
 * Frederick Moreau had the same problem in Sentimental Education.
 * In The Turn of the Screw, A. N. Wilson's A Jealous Ghost features an American Ph.D. candidate who decides to pick up some extra cash by working as a wealthy lawyer's nanny. She convinces herself that she's in James' story, which leads to unfortunate results.
 * The Hoard of the Gibbelins by Lord Dunsany, is noteworthy for being a partial case—for instance, the main character manages to convince a dragon to surrender by asking it if it's ever heard of a dragon that won a battle against a hero. When he errs is when, realizing that everyone who's tried a logical plan for robbing the Gibbelins has been defeated, he tries to make a plan that's Crazy Enough to Work, instead getting one that's simply crazy. Final line: "This is one of those stories that do not have a happy ending."
 * Some modern stories, like Dealing With Dragons, Lampshade this by introducing dragons who also only remember their own heroic victories over knights, losses conveniently forgotten.
 * Princess Vivenna of Warbreaker thinks she's The Hero who has to rescue her younger sister Siri from an arranged marriage to an Evil Overlord in a world with Black and White Morality. In fact, she's one major character in what is largely a political intrigue story where Rousseau Is Right but not almost everyone has a hidden agenda of some sort.
 * Featured a number of times in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. The Disc literally runs on stories (and an element called "Narrativium"), and a few characters are at least dimly aware of this, but it's also shown that some types of stories can be hard to tell apart, and even the most deeply-entrenched stories can be warped, twisted, and changed.
 * Twoflower, as first seen in The Colour of Magic, thinks he is in a conventional heroic fantasy setting, which Discworld, um... is not. Luckily for him, everyone around him is more Genre Savvy.
 * It worked out well for him in Interesting Times. At least, if your definition of "well" is Kicked Upstairs and never heard from again.
 * The Palace Guards in Guards! Guards! also believe they're in a conventional heroic fantasy—two of them refuse to attack Captain Vimes on the grounds that they outnumber him and he's unarmed, both indications that he's likely to do something heroic.
 * The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents features Malicia, who is convinced she is the heroine of a children's adventure story, and packs accordingly. She's wrong about being the heroine, but everything she packs turns out to be useful, if not as intended.
 * In Unseen Academicals, Glenda objects to her friend Juliet going out with Trev Likely because he's not Prince Charming. When she gets involved in a romance of her own, she wises up; while she thinks that these events don't happen in romances, she doesn't act as if it ought to be one.
 * Miles Vorkosigan falls into this in the novel A Civil Campaign. Throughout the series, he's a masterful Guile Hero who always succeeds through is cleverness, but then he attempts to apply his military strategy to wooing his love interest, despite all of his family and friends trying to warn him that this is a terrible idea. Sure enough, when he proposes, she feels emotionally manipulated and walks out on him.
 * The entire cast of The Westing Game seems to think they're in a murder mystery story with a fabulous inheritance as the prize to the winner.  To be fair to them, they're actively misled about which genre they're operating in in-story.
 * This is actually the basis of the plot in Charles Stross's The Jennifer Morgue, where the Dangerously Genre Savvy villain actually has a magical device that forces the events of his plot to conform to the literary conventions of an Ian Fleming novel.
 * Furthermore,
 * 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 lead 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.
 * Centerburg Tales: More Adventures of 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.
 * In John Hemry's A Just Determination, Jen warns Paul against this, because he's obviously read too many books about a Knight in Shining Armor.
 * In Dorothy L. Sayers's Have His Carcase, Harriet notes that in all the detective novels, the villain tells the victim to bring the letter with him, to ensure (from the villain's POV) that it's destroyed, and (from the author's POV) that it's not completely destroyed and right there for the hero to find. They conclude that the murderers must have said that because the books do — and it serves the same purpose, because they didn't realize why the authors did it.
 * The root of Sophie's major problems in Howl's Moving Castle is that she thinks she is genre savvy enough to know that being the eldest of three children she will be doomed to a boring life without glamour or success. As such she completely fails to see that she is an extremely potent witch with the ability to ensure a happy ending for herself as well as everyone around her.
 * 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.
 * Done hilariously in a short story from The Dresden Files. Harry is trying to deal with a great deal of hilarity which is in the process of ensuing when a group of teenagers show up at his house in goth clothes and Slytherin scarves. Their leader informs Harry that he, Harry Dresden, has earned their wrath for removing a curse they put on some old lady and to prepare himself to suffer the consequences. Harry informs them he didn't even notice the curse and just did the exorcism to make her feel better, then pulls a gun on them.
 * Arguably, in a story in Side Jobs, Billy the Werewolf thought he was the protagonist in a 'werewolf action story' in dealing with John Marcone, only to discover he was in fact a Worf. Marcone was unimpressed by his werewolf powers and made it clear that he would either sit down and shut up, or die. He wasn't bluffing.
 * Arguably, in the early The Dresden Files stories, Karrin Murphy thought she was the star of a police procedural that happened to include magical phenomena, when she was in fact the Wizards's Plucky Sidekick.
 * Harry's eventual apprentice seems to think she's the plucky young heroine who can get away with anything on her wit and natural talents. Harry has to forcibly remind her on several occasions that she's in an Anyone Can Die horror series, and he is not the kindly, easily-forgiving mentor she thinks he is before she gets the picture. She also thinks that she's in a Rescue Romance. Harry pours some cold water on that idea. Literally.
 * In Proven Guilty, Harry meets a vampire, and they immediately start trading veiled threats. At one point, Harry threatens to expose the vampire, who laughs in his face. He assumes that he's in a typical Urban Fantasy where The Masquerade must be upheld at all costs, and Harry wouldn't dare telling "vanilla" mortals about vampires. He is rather deflated when Harry points out that he's listed in the Yellow Pages under "Wizards."
 * In the Agatha Christie novel Easy to Kill, one of the female characters, Brigit, wanders off on her own. When Luke, the main character, finds her, he warns her to be more careful because he doesn't want her to get killed. Brigit says that it's okay, because the heroine is never killed in these types of stories. Luke objects, not because This Is Reality, but because he doesn't believe that Brigit is the heroine. . A similar example occurs in another Christie mystery, , where a young girl tries to fake a near death experience   When one of the other characters says that she could have easily been killed for real, the detective points out that it probably didn't occur to her because she thought she was the heroine, and the heroine never dies.
 * Another Agatha Christie novel 'The ABC Murders' features characters who fail to solve the mystery because they believe they're in a serial killer novel.
 * A Ruth Rendell short story featured an old woman who thought she was in a Little Old Lady Investigates story. She was right in that she was in a crime story, wrong in that Ruth Rendell does not write that sort of crime story.
 * In Three Bags Full, a detective story which features a flock of anthropomorphic Irish sheep out to solve the murder of their shepherd, Heidi and other sheep are convicted that they are in a romance novel. Of course, the only thing they know about humans is the novels that their shepherd used to read them, so it's not quite surprising from them.
 * The Witcher Saga is full of people who think the world works like in more conventional fantasy or fairy tale—and they are proven to be very wrong. Some of the early stories for example featured a party gathered to hunt a dragon, which included a Knight in Shining Armor acting pretty much as though he were in classic fairy tales where pure heart and honor always prevail and the world is defined by Black and White morality but people like wizards and witches can always abandon their vile ways, a wizard who wanted to protect monsters because they are rare, dying species and a shoemaker who thought this is classic Polish fairy tale of shoemaker killing a dragon with poisoned stuffed lamb, and he is the main character. The story ended badly or at least humiliating for all of them. One of later novels has a young, idealistic boy who enlists because he believed in propaganda proclaiming upcoming war to be "Great War to End All Wars" (compare with Real Life example about World War I below). Before he even started to learn that War Is Hell, he got mocked pretty hard by everybody. Someone even showed him a fat prostitute and said that yes, this is a whore, and yes, she is big, maybe even great, but she certainly is not Great Whore to End All Whores.
 * Dandelion. In one story he summoned a Genie in a Bottle and immediately started saying his wishes, only to find out that he does not meet the requirements necessary to have a genie grant you a wish, and that genies hate to be bossed around and try to kill anybody who tries to make a wish, even if he cannot force them to grant it. In another he heard about a prince and mermaid who had fallen in love and expected things to turn out like in a poem he wanted to write, that was exactly like Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. When the mermaid in question objected upon being turned into a human because if prince really loved her then why he won't change into a triton, Dandelion decided to ignore this and write that his version happened and when she changed her mind and turned into human a her first words were to call Dandelion an idiot for thinking she lost her voice.
 * Geralt himself has his moments. In the first novel he is advocating keeping True Neutral stance in a conflict between humans and elves only to get shown how wrong he is and admitting it himself. In fact, this is how he bonded his destiny with Ciri's - he helped a cursed knight to undo his curse and marry the princess he was promised to on the basis of a fairy tale-like deal with her father. Geral joked that in return he demands from knight something he already has but don't know about it. Then they both found out that princess carry the knight's child, which is now promised to Geralt. And when he decided to break the deal and not take the kid, things went down pretty badly.
 * In Avalon High, Ellie thinks she's The Lady of Shalott (since the kid's names seemed to mirror their Arthurian counterparts), but she's actually the Lady of the Lake.
 * In the Light Novel My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, the protagonist awakens to discover that she died and has reincarnated in the world of the last Romance Game she played... as Katarina, the villain of said game. And a nasty villain that has very grisly endings, at that! So, to avoid those terrible fates, our protagonist decide that, since she awakened some years before the canonical beginning to the plot, she has to prepare herself by learning several things that counter those endings (like learning farming, for the ending where she is exiled, and magic and sword-fighting, for the ones she was killed) and, more importantly, by befriending every named character of the game. The problem is that she keeps thinking of herself as the antagonist of the game all the way, not realizing that, unlike the original Katarina, who was a petty Rich Bitch who deserved what came to her, she as Katarina is more of a Blithe Spirit that has captured the hearts of every love interest of the game, of several of the game rivals, and even the one of the original protagonist, while being completely oblivious of her own harem all the way and who frustrates her suitors with her mastery of the Mixed Message and her Cloudcuckoolandery, and totally unaware that she has hijacked the plot to be about herself.
 * Similarly, in the Chinese danmei web novel "The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System", Caustic Critic Shen Yuan reincarnates as Shen Quinquiu, the villain of the awesomely terrible stallion novel he read before his death (a villain that received a Cruel and Unusual Death on the hands of said novel protagonist due to being a Evil Mentor ￼—to put it mildly￼— that literally pushed him into his Start of Darkness) with the mission of filling the Plot Holes and de-stupidize the story. On one hand, Shen Yuan is Genre Savvy enough to weaponize the protagonist's Plot Armor and use the lore so save his own skin several times, and his plan of avoiding his/Shen Quinquiu death by stopping being an asshole to the protagonist and earning his good graces did work in the sense that the protagonist doesn't want to kill him anymore despite having pushed him to his doom, indirectly solving a lot of the plot holes from the original story as a bonus. On the other side, Shen Yuan as Shen Quinquiu severely underestimates his own impact on the plot, not realizing until too late that he completely send the whole thing Off the Rails and inadvertently changed the genre of the novel from "Harem" to "Boys Love" (with himself as the love interest!) due to the extremely heterosexual glasses he interpreted everything the protagonist did from day one and his belief that because the story was going through the same beats of the original despite the changes he made it mean that the story and the characters' motivations remained the same.