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{{trope}}
* [[Older Than Steam]]: [[Don Quixote]]'s madness is a version of this. Because of his insanity, Don Quixote believes that he is a [[Knight Errant|errant knight]] and that the tropes of [[Chivalric Romance]] and [[Courtly Love]] apply to him and his environment. Unfortunately for him, he lives in early XVII Century countryside Spain, a place and time that, if thinking on terms of genres, worked more on the side of [[Picaresque]]. So, hilarity (and, at times, heartbreaking drama) ensues due to the clash.
* Sansa Stark begins ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'' thinking of heroic ballads as the way of the world in a [[World Half Empty|world where it's a wonder they came up with a concept of heroism to write the ballads about]]. Yeah, [[Break the Cutie|the results weren't pretty]].
** [[I Just Want to Be Special|Quentyn]] [[The Everyman|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. {{spoiler|Viserion and Rhaegal disabuse him of the notion when he tries to heroically tame them and gets burned to death for his trouble}}.
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* 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 Was Right|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 [[Playing with a Trope|be warped, twisted, and changed]].
** Twoflower, as first seen in ''[[
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* [[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. {{spoiler|Only Turtle ever realizes they're ''not''.<ref>What they are in is somewhat unclear, although a [[The Con|con]] is close</ref>}} To be fair to them, they're actively misled about which genre they're operating in in-story.
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* 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 (novel)|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 [[Farm Boy|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 [[Eccentric Mentor|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 [[Hilarity Ensues|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 [[Oh Crap|pulls a gun on them]].
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* 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. {{spoiler|She is. Luke is the one who was Wrong Genre Savvy.}}.
** A similar example occurs in another Christie mystery, {{spoiler|''Crooked House''}}, where a young girl tries to fake a near death experience {{spoiler|by setting up a statue to fall on her head when she walked through a certain door.}} 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, [[Plot Armor|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. {{spoiler|They're not. The killer is a regular killer who killed his brother for the inheritance... and then killed a few more people to make it look like a serial killer.}}
* 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.
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* 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 [[Devoted to You|captured the hearts of every love interest of the game]], [[Even the Girls Want Her|of several of the game rivals]], and even [[Beyond the Impossible|the one of the original protagonist]], while being completely [[Oblivious to Love|oblivious of her own harem all the way]] and who frustrates her suitors with [[Master of the Mixed Message|her mastery of the Mixed Message]] and her [[Cloudcuckoolander]]y, totally unaware that she has hijacked the plot to be about herself.
* Similarly, in the Chinese ''[[Yaoi|danmei]]'' web novel ''The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System'', [[Caustic Critic]] Shen Yuan reincarnates as Shen Quinquiu, the villain of the [[Bile Fascination|awesomely terrible]] [[Harem Genre|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]]
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