Wrong Genre Savvy/Literature: Difference between revisions

* 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, 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}}

* ''[[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 [[Animal Wrongs Group|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]] belowin the respective subpage). 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.

* 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, and 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]] —to—to put it mildly—mildly— that literally pushed him into his [[Start of Darkness]]) with the mission of filling the [[Plot Hole]]s and de-stupidize the story. On one hand, Shen Yuan is [[Genre Savvy]] enough to weaponize the protagonist's [[Plot Armor]] and use the novel's 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, his actions 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 sendsent the whole thing [[Off the Rails]] and inadvertently changed the genre of the novel from "Harem" to "[[Boys Love Genre|Boys Love]]" (with himself as the love interest!) due to the [[Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?|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.