Genre Savvy/Real Life


 * Roger Ebert did TV Tropes before TV Tropes.
 * Well, you've survived this long, implying that you have at least some amount of genre savviness... Or you've just had the dumb luck not to walk into anything requiring said savviness.
 * Anyone who's been on this site long enough has learned what to expect from Spoilers based on the sentence and Spoiler length. Sadly, this starts making spoilers quite useless. Plus, the site tends to make them notice recurring themes in general. Whether this is a bad thing or not may vary.
 * Many people who have been voracious readers for a long time will tell you that stories are often predictable, particularly to someone who's read a great deal or devoted to a specific genre -- a sort of Only Six Plots. As these people age (or the more they read), the less they tend to read for the story, and the more they read for how the story is told. Most of these people, though, will also tell you that Genre Savviness Is Not Bad.
 * Occurs more quickly to actual writers, and not exclusive on a medium basis to text. Watching a lot of movies, for example, will still help you predict what will happen in the book and often the other way around. Most studies of story characters & their plots will boil down the character archetypes to less than 10. For example, The Seven Basic Plots.
 * Character based approaches like to build page count by separating archetypes into what boils down to male and female takes on a single character...
 * Can anyone say the Evil Overlord List?
 * To some extent, the "nicer form" (so to speak) of counterinsurgency can be said to require this to some extent, at least to avoid a Zero Percent Approval Rating.
 * Ever since Alexander the Great, there have been stories of great commanders who ate hardtack, showed off their scars and exchanged very dirty jokes with their men. Because it's a great way to remake oneself into a legendart Magnetic Hero- and this worked for Alexander back then!
 * Murphy's Law, Finagle's Law, Sturgeon's Law and their many variants are all intended to be this, whether you agree depends on where you stand on the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism.
 * Everyone at this wiki may as well count. The idea on its own. But especially in the Wild Mass Guessing page sometimes. It's possible to become so savvy about the genre and the creator's themes and habits that you can predict certain revelations and plot points way before they happen. To the point that some viewer ideas are better than what the writers had planned and become a case of Ascended Fanon.
 * Most gamers usually become Genre Savvy, especially those who specialize in playing a couple of computer or board games. This also makes some things easier for them -- such as when people learn common tricks and obstacles, or variations of them. For example, players of RPGs shall be aware of Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards and may roll out a mage on their first quest. Players of Shmups would know common tactics that can make even new games much less frustrating. And players of FPSes will know how weapons work and what the best situation is to use them. This, coupled with age and experience, causes many gamers to cry "It's Easy, So It Sucks".
 * People who watch plenty of movies can't help but notice certain casting patterns: if it's Sean Bean - he probably won't survive, Denzel Washington's character gonna be real rough, and so on. While most of the time it's no big revelation, this can blow surprises when you notice that out of X characters, only 1 is played by famous actor - you naturally expect that character to turn out the most relevant. This in turn is sometimes played with by authors, when the real surprise is always intended for said recognized-face character to not have a secret or relevance in the end.
 * A few people in reality TV shows were often Genre Savvy -- Todd of Survivor fame, Kevin in the American Big Brother, and the list goes on.
 * Hank Earl Carr accidentally shot his girlfriend's son with a rifle, then was arrested. Unfortunately, he was a repeat offender, and Genre Savvy enough to keep a handcuff key on him at all times. He managed to free himself and acquire the driver's weapon, killing both detectives, and later a state trooper, before taking a gas station clerk hostage and then killing himself.
 * If you go out to eat with someone who has worked in a restaurant or another sort of commercial-scale kitchen, odds are there will be a few menu items they will vehemently tell you to avoid; they know, or at least have an idea of, the dark secrets that go into the making of these items.
 * One killer on The First 48 has apparently murdered his boyfriend, but had an extremely high IQ and never admitted a thing about the crime, though he did cry at one point. The detectives then had to charge him without a body, only the third time it had been done in that state. They noted how unsatisfying it was not to have proper closure.
 * Handcuffs built by the British police use a bar between the cuffs rather than a chain. This is specifically to make it impossible for the wearer to choke someone else in the unlikely event that they manage to get the handcuffs in front of their body and around someone's neck.
 * Since some tabletop RPGs rely on movies as the inspiration, a very easy way to tick off the DM is to be Genre Savvy, and trying to justify the character being so, while they're trying to assert that your characters have a case of Genre Blindness.
 * A depressing case of Genre Savvy happened at the recent hostage taking in the Philippines. In the said case, the gunman used the television inside the tourist bus to watch the movements of the police, thus nullifying their actions in the first place.
 * Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, otherwise known as King Bomba, was listening to his ministers argue what color uniform his soldiers should wear. Perhaps in recognition of the combat value of his mooks, he said "Dress them in red, blue or green, they'll run away just the same."
 * This guy does what any good hero should do at the beginning of a monster movie.
 * I'm sensing a theme here.
 * James Lind, the man who started noticing that citrus fruits prevented scurvy, carried out experiments to make sure of his idea, then published it in A Treatise of the Scurvy. It was ignored. So he wised up and specifically targeted the Royal Navy as his audience by republishing his ideas under Essay on the most effectual means of preserving the health of seamen. He definitely got noticed that time, and citrus would start being carried around by the navy as a result (though not as actual rations until much later).
 * This is why smart cops keep a surrendering suspect covered by at least one, preferably more, officers until he is fully secured. I Surrender, Suckers is real.
 * Medical professionals have heard any story you might come up with already. It's OK. You're not going to freak them out, or get judged, or anything else because, simply, no matter what kind of Noodle Incident you have gotten yourself involved in, someone else has done it before, and they probably had to at the very least study that sort of thing in school, assuming they themselves did not actually deal with a similar case the weekend before. So go ahead and tell them about how that cat got stuck.
 * Subverted by Roman dictator Fabius Maximus. In order to defeat Hannibal, Fabius set up a Xanatos Gambit; Hannibal was raiding an enclosed valley at the time, and the only way out was through one of several mountain passes. Fabius put an army at each one of these passes. If Hannibal attacked any of them, the other armies would be able to converge on that area and destroy him, but if he stayed put, his army would starve. Hannibal, being the Magnificent Bastard that he was, took a Crazy Awesome third option: tying dry wood to the horns of oxen, then lighting the wood on fire and setting the oxen on the Roman positions in the middle of the night. The Romans had no idea what was going on, so they panicked and attacked Hannibal. Fabius, suspecting that this was bait for an ambush, did nothing. He was sort of right; it was an ambush, but only for the army defending the mountain pass. Hannibal was counting on Fabius recognizing an ambush, so he simply destroyed the enemy in front of him and escaped.
 * The Israeli Army issues two pairs of dog tags, one around the neck and the other worn in a pocket in the boot-just in case a soldier has his head blown off. it's mentioned at the beginning of Battle Los Angeles, though with US troops.
 * Amber Benson, of Buffy fame, refused to return to the show once her character was killed off. Her reasoning was she knew that Joss Whedon would have done something horrible to Tara, or used her as part of a Plan to kill Willow.
 * The Amish may abstain from most technological conveniences, but they're hardly ignorant of the world at large. They're quite Genre Savvy about the world they live in.
 * You know those warning labels on everything? In many cases, they actually have a lawsuit behind it. Companies learn fast, and don't forget.
 * The point of science is to get Genre Savvy about how the universe works. With the proper understanding of the electricity and maths tropes, we invented computers, the internet, and TV Tropes.
 * Half of taking an exam is knowing the answers, and half is knowing how they'll ask the questions. For example, with questions like "Here are 3 statements: explain whether they are true or false," 2 will be true and the other will be false. This gives a good shortcut to getting the right answers.