Age of Fire: Auron doesn't have a good grasp of hominid wordplay, and jokes and metaphors tend to go over his head. One incident in Dragon Champion has the human Naf lament that dragons seem to lack a sense of humor; Auron mistakes this for a comment on his physical senses and testily replies that all of a dragon's senses are sharp.
"No, no insult intended. I don't know dragons, but it's sad to learn they have no sense of humor." "All of a dragon's senses are sharp. Sight, hearing—"
This leads to the Bittersweet Ending of Andy Bucket's Robots. To elaborate, Andy has returned from a desert island with the help of robots he built. They are in a rowboat when Andy sees people, tells Supercan (who's rowing) "Wait a minute," gets out of the boat, gives a speech, and discovers Supercan waited sixty seconds and continued rowing.
In The Hork-Bajir Chronicles, Dak Hamee (whose species is significantly less intelligent than humans, though he isn't) draws a picture of his friend Jagil, and tries to explain how it looks like him. Jagil merely gets confused that Dak is saying the picture is him: "That is not me. I am me."
Ax had this from time to time, mostly because he didn't understand human humor. Towards the end of the series, several of the Animorphs start to suspect that Ax has caught on and is now just doing it to troll the kids. A Running Gag of the series was Two of Your Earth Minutes dialog he would engage in, followed by the response "They're everyone's minutes". In one instance, Ax gives a distance in "Two of your miles" and when he gets the expected response, promptly points out that a lot of people on Earth use Kilometers.
Amelia Bedelia: The protagonist and title character is the patron saint of this trope and the former namer. It's her entire shtick and the entirety of the plot: her employers give her a list of instructions and then leave, and by the time they're back she's dusted the furniture (with dusting powder), dressed the chicken (in lederhosen), and drawn the curtains (quite a decent likeness)... Fortunately for her continued employment prospects, she's a very good cook. Except for that one time that she made a date cake by cutting dates out of a calendar. And a sponge cake with an actual cut-up sponge. On the other hand, her "tea cake" (a cake made with brewed tea mixed into the batter) turned out to be quite a success at her boss lady's luncheon.note This is not surprising: bara brith, or tea bread, is cooked exactly this way in North Wales and is a local delicacy. Think of a sweet fruit-laden bread made with stewed tea. Delicious. In the prequel series featuring her adventures as a schoolgirl her literal-mindedness has some charming results, such as the time when she wanted to earn enough money for a bike and took a series of odd jobs, resulting in fiascoes such as when a customer at a restaurant told her that he wanted her to get a pie "and step on it!"
Little Lost Robot: When an exasperated engineer tells a potentially-dangerous experimental robot, "Go lose yourself!", the robot immediately hides among a consignment of identical-looking, but harmless, robots that are due to be shipped elsewhere. Not normally given to mistaking metaphor for literal commands, this robot was resentful of the insults from the "inferior" engineer and wanted to prove its superiority. This superiority complex causes the robot to go insane.
"Risk": A robot pilot is set to test a hyperspace drive and is given instructions to "Pull [the control] toward you firmly. Firmly!" until the drive engages. However, the drive doesn't engage, so the robot is stuck in that position and its human operators have to try to get it to stop but it just won't stop pulling because the drive hasn't engaged because the robot pulled back "firmly" with its full strength, damaging the control.
The Caves of Steel. Elijah Baley has just been told that the Spacers intend to shut down the murder investigation that day. Having just had a "Eureka!" Moment about the case, Elijah desperately tries to convince his robot partner R. Daneel Olivaw to continue the investigation but fails. However, he realises that as an android Daneel is literal-minded, so he points out that the 'day' has only ended When the Clock Strikes Twelve. This gives him two-and-a-quarter hours to wrap up the case, which he does right on the stroke of midnight.
The Naked Sun: When having trouble getting out of a chair, Elijah asks Daneel to "give me a hand". Daneel looks at his own hand (which isn't detachable) in confusion, and Elijah has to explain what he meant. However, this then gives him the "Eureka!" Moment he needs to solve the case.
Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg's The Positronic Man: During his first decade of service, Andrew runs into trouble with idiomatic language, such as "You've got a look on your face" because, as a robot, his face cannot change expression. After stumbling several times with linguistic drift, he decides that he needs to go to the library and learn about language so that he isn't confused by idioms anymore (at least, no more than another human would be when encountering an unfamiliar one).
Even after all this time, it was still difficult sometimes for Andrew to keep pace with humans when they struck out along linguistic pathways that were something other than the most direct ones.
Bearhead: Bearhead always follows orders exactly, which proves to be a big disadvantage to Madame Hexaba, who keeps giving ones he can misinterpret (e.g., to watch a lock rather than to watch the treasure house it's securing).
In Double Down, Greg thinks his parents saying "maybe we should go away for the weekend and recharge our batteries" means that his parents could be robots.
In The Meltdown, Greg plays "The Floor is Lava" with Manny. Before he can explain the rules, Manny screams and refuses to touch the floor at all, thinking it really is lava.
Discworld: The tendency for people to take metaphors literally is a common humorous element in the series. One of the early novels actually justifies it in that the Discworld's de facto instability of reality and a history of high-powered Reality Warpers duking it out have actually severely bred out the capacity for imagination.
Dwarfs, and by extension Dwarf-by-adoption Carrot Ironfoundersson, manifest this on a racial level. In one case this proves fatal; fortunately, the victim deserved it. Though Carrot hadn't yet developed the Obfuscating Stupidity that defines him in later books, it's possible he purposely misinterpreted Vimes's order for the good of the city. It's equally possible Vimes purposely gave him orders that Carrot would likely misunderstand.
Similarly, never tell Cohen the Barbarian that you would "rather die than betray my emperor". He will be all too happy to oblige. At one point, Cohen and his (similarly uncomplicated) Silver Horde run into a guard named One Big River. When they ask him if he'd rather die than betray his emperor, he can't grasp the metaphor and says "I tink I rather live". The Horde bring him along because a man too stupid to think the way the Empire wants its people to think could come in handy.
The Ridcully brothers (implied to be twins), Hughnon and Mustrum, are respectively the High Priest of Blind Io (and therefore de facto leader of the Ankh-Morpork religious community) and Archchancellor of the Unseen University, and both notoriously prone to this. Both of them have minds like locomotives (very powerful, but very direct, and very hard to steer). However, it's also a very effective derailing tactic, which is why it eventually becomes clear that at least in Mustrum's case it's actually on purpose, and one of the many hints that he's much smarter than he pretends to be. As early as Lords and Ladies, he appears to completely fail to understand Stibbons' multiverse theory ("The Trousers of Time"), before later concisely explaining it to Granny Weatherwax (although he's still a bit hung up on the fact the other Ridcullys never invited him to their weddings). It's unclear if his brother works the same way, since he's never a protagonist.
Ankh-Morpork citizens are known for a certain amount of literal-mindedness, if not so much as the dwarfish race in general is. The Light Fantastic mentions former Patrician of Ankh-Morpork Olaf Quimby II, who tried to legally enforce accuracy in idioms, like figuring out how bad a poke in the eye with a blunt stick could be, or establishing a standard recipe for the pie to which something "as nice as pie" is compared. He was killed in a duel with a disgruntled poet while testing "The pen is mightier than the sword".
Current Patrician Havelock Vetinari is endeavoring to put a crimp on clichés and idioms. Current Ankh-Morpork law states that any form of expression must have some basis in reality. If a face "launched a thousand ships", he'll expect the appropriate manifests, for example. But, this being the Discworld, things have a way of resolving themselves (like the Pork Futures Warehouse seen in Men at Arms, which stores semi-existent pork that will become real later).
Golems tend to follow all instructions literally. In some cases, it's because they don't think the way living people do (they're typically portrayed like computers or robots — one in particular becomes a Watchman and starts using lines out of RoboCop). In other cases, it might be their way of rebelling against their owners.
Death and the Auditors are frequently prone to this trope, having only a limited grasp of human quirks and psychology. Weaponized against the latter in Thief of Time. Or as Death himself puts it in Hogfather:
I am nothing if not literal minded. Trickery with words is where humans live.
Stanley Howler from Going Postal is highly susceptible to this trope, particularly when following official Post Office procedures. While trapped in a burning building, he took the safety-manual instruction to "Remain calm" literally and hence, wasn't frightened.
The trope is used for (very) Black Comedy in Carpe Jugulum when the de Magpyrs claim there's no way that their ancestress could have bathed in the blood of 200 virgins — because, as they've tested, the bath starts overflowing after 80 virgins have been bled dry into it.
The Discworld Roleplaying Game explains the dwarven part of this from the dwarves' point of view, to help players with dwarf PCs. Dwarves find the human tendency to speak in metaphor to be both confusing and annoying. You ask a human how long until the explosion, and instead of a useful answer you get a little meditation about the beauty of flames and the fragility of life. Precise language is a useful survival trait in as dangerous a profession as mining. The game also provides a "Literal-Minded" disadvantage as an option when creating characters, dwarf or otherwise.
Evidence of Things Not Seen: When Rachel asked Tommy what he was doing, he would often answer, "Talking to you." She would have to ask more specific questions, like "Where are you going?" or "What are you going to do?"
In the Father Brown story "The Honour of Israel Gow", the title character's literal-mindedness inadvertently creates a number of enigmatic and sinister situations that lead to his dead employer's natural death being suspected to be murder. (His employer promised him that when he died Gow would inherit "all his gold", which Gow interpreted as "every single crumb of gold in the house and absolutely nothing else").
The Four Horsemen Universe: One of the two defining traits of Tortantula psychology (the other being Blood Knight) is that they don't understand metaphorical speech. As such, they're annoyed by human humor and Cannot Tell a Lie nor when another being is lying to them; part of the job of a Tortantula's Flatar partner is helping them in social interactions with other aliens. This makes for a Running Gag in Winged Hussars with recurring Tortantula Space Marine Oort, as well as leading to a Tortantula not finishing off a Catholic chaplain in a Short Story when the chaplain starts reciting the Lord's Prayer (reasoning he'd rather die praying than begging for mercy).
The title character of Franny K. Stein, owing to being a child who is more interested in mad science than mundane subjects, often misinterprets idioms and figures of speech. It most notably occurs in The Fran That Time Forgot, where her mother tells her that she can't have her cake and eat it too, which motivates her to invent a Time Warp Dessert Plate just to prove that it is possible to physically have a piece of cake after she's already eaten it.
In John C. Wright's The Golden Transcendence, a character coming to with amnesia is told he consented to forget what, exactly, he had consented to. He asks how he can know this is true, and the computer answers that in fact, he doesn't know it.
In the Hans Christian Andersen story "How to Cook Soup Upon a Sausage Pin," the mice think the human expression — which actually means "to make a lot out of nothing" — refers to an actual soup that they've never seen or tried before, and the mouse king declares an Engagement Challenge for them to find the best recipe.
In the Junie B. Jones books, Junie B. can be this sometimes, such as in That Meanie Jim's Birthday, when Grandma Helen Miller tells her that Jim is trying to "get her goat."
The Last Human (2019): Robots have a tendency to take everything they hear at face value, so most of them don't understand things like puns and slang. Ceeron is a rare exception because he has a fascination with them. This allows him to serve as a translator for such things to XR_935 and SkD.
Mary Ingalls from the Little House books isn't incapable of understanding similes and metaphors, but she dislikes them. After she went blind, Pa Ingalls told her younger sister and book protagonist Laura to be her eyes, and she often 'corrects' Laura's 'queer notions' when Laura gets too evocative or poetic in her descriptions. At one point, Laura says "Sheep sorrel tastes like springtime," and Mary tells her that it really tastes a little like lemon flavoring. Later in the book, they're taking a walk at sunset, and Laura is struck with the metaphor of it being like a king drawing bedcurtains around himself but doesn't tell it to Mary, because Mary is 'displeased' by such fancies. Instead, she describes a huge, pulsing red ball sinking below the horizon. Even so, Mary later tells her that she never 'sees' things so well with anyone else, and it's implied that having to describe everything out loud for her sister is one of the reasons Laura took up writing.
Laura: The air is savage, somehow. Mary: The air is just air. You mean it is cold.
In the story "April Showers" from the picture book Max and Maggie in Spring, Max tells Maggie that he took an extra-long shower because he had heard that "April showers bring May flowers" and today's the last day of April, so he bets that now they'll get a lot of flowers. She explains that it's just a saying.
In Medusa's Web, Madeline has trouble processing or even recognizing figures of speech and literary quotations. For instance, at one point a character uses the expression "the emperor had no clothes" in the middle of a story and then has to put the story on hold for several minutes while Madeline demands to know who this emperor is, where he came from, why he has no clothes, and what he has to do with the rest of the story.
The main character in the More Than Human series was prone to this, being an android designed to look like a teenager. When a classmate commented that a particular teacher would be giving them a ton of homework, he asked if she'd deliver it in a truck.
Jace once told Clary; "If there were such a thing as terminal literalism, you would have died at birth."
Alec has a tendency to misinterpret sarcasm.
Shows up several times in The Phantom Tollbooth. When Officer Shrift (who is also the judge and the jailer of Dictionopolis) is asked if he can give Milo a short sentence for causing a mess in the Word Market, Shrift replies "How about 'I am'? That's the shortest sentence I know."
Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: In Princesses Don't Do Summer School, when Selvi criticizes the less physically enduring members of her party, Cassie takes one of her jibes about toes falling off their feet literally, and checks her toes immediately.
Roys Bedoys: Justified in "That Website's Not Safe, Roys Bedoys!", when Loys (who is only about two) asks if the computer can get sick when Mrs. Bedoys mentions the computer possibly getting a "virus".
Torvig Bu-kar-nguv from Star Trek: Titan. His experiments to determine the truth about "gut feelings" in one of the novels consisted of introducing nanites into his crewmates' food, so as to monitor their intestines.
In the Star Trek: Voyager Relaunch, Dr. Sharak is sometimes like this. Interestingly enough, the problem results from the comparative lack of literal reference in his own language. Because his native tongue is constructed around metaphor, he's had to adapt to the direct references of Federation Standard and so takes idiomatic expressions at face value. It seems he's learned too well how to think and express himself in a non-Tamarian manner.
The Stormlight Archive: Jasnah says that Cryptics should be called "Liespren" but they don't like the term. Pattern, Shallan's Cryptic, considers anything spoken that's not literal truth (exaggeration, euphemisms and figures of speech, humor, sarcasm, etc) to be "a lie," and is fascinated by how many different kinds of lies humans have come up with.
Wit (basically a Jester) invokes this intentionally to mock those he's speaking to.
Dalinar: I wouldn’t see you dead by their knives; I see a fine man within you Wit: Yes, He tasted quite delicious.
Seven Years Awesome Luck: Trick's years as a cat have left him with no understanding of figurative speech. When asked by a schoolyard bully what he sees in Denneka, for example, he truthfully replies that she lets him sleep with her — because he's literally slept in her bed (as a cat, and then as a boy who identifies as a cat and whom she isn't sure what to do with). Naturally, this results in rumours spreading like wildfire until a teacher questions Trick further and demonstrates to the class just how literal-minded he is.
Thursday Next: The generics have no personality, and hence no grasp of anything other than perfectly formal, literal language. Even just saying "sorry" when not apologizing confuses them.
In Translation State, Translator Dlar attempts to discredit Qven by claiming Qven has killed "countless" other juveniles. As the other characters continue to argue over this assertion, Qven is quietly counting in the background, until...
Qven: Thirty-four. Though I might have missed a few from when I was a Tiny. I don't remember that time very well. But I didn't have many teeth then.
Sphene: That's not even close to countless. I've killed more humans than that in a single day.
Trueman Bradley has Asperger syndrome, so although he knows most common expressions, he has a hard time recognizing and understanding them in context.
An Unkindness of Ghosts: Aster has an extremely fact-focused mind and struggles to parse any sort of figurative language. When Theo asks, "What have I done but keep you safe?" she says, bewildered, "Do the meals you take keep me safe? Your baths? The books you read? I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't understand."
Vintage Stuff: When told to descend by flying fox and then come straight back to the top of the cliff, the schoolboy protagonist descends on the flying fox and then climbs back up along the cable.
In Violet Evergarden, Violet is baffled when Claudia tells her she is "on fire", not understanding his metaphor. In general, due to Violet's No Social Skills, she has trouble in her early attempts at writing letters because she often interprets a client's words in the most straightforward way possible, so that even something that should be sentimental and familiar ends up sounding like a formal report.
Warbreaker: Susebron, the God King, was raised in a manner that was deliberately intended to hamper his ability to communicate with others. As a result, he gets confused by things such as sarcasm and flirtatiousness, and has to have the concepts explained to him. He attempts to imitate sarcasm at times with varying degrees of success, but ultimately finds non-literal speech to be extremely frustrating to navigate, as his difficulty in understanding speech patterns that most people pick up intuitively makes him feel like a fool.
In Warrior Cats, the ditzy kittypet Fuzz, who appeared in a short story in Secrets of the Clans. He asks Barley's name, and Barley, taken by surprise, responds, "Er... Barley." Then when he calls him "Erbarley", Barley says "No. Just Barley." So Fuzz proceeds to call him "Justbarley" for the rest of the story.
Everything in Winnie the Pooh, being based on children's logic. For example, the idea that Pooh living "under the name of Sanders" means that he has the word written above his door.
