Narm Charm / Literature

• In Phenomena; Ilke's adoration of mothers falls into this by being a huge Les Yay and implying that she Likes Older Women. It is understandable that she's desperate for a mother, growing up without any females to look up to for 10 years, but her line of 'Do all mothers smell this good?' is still pretty narmy, yet strangely adorable.
• X-Wing Series: Certainly the newbie Tatooine pilot Gavin Darklighter's response to seeing Coruscant for the first time was narmy, but it helps illustrate just how young the kid is.
  "It's just a city, the whole thing, one big, huge, really big city. It's all city."
• The Han Solo Adventures: Han accidentally starts a Cargo Cult while running a movie theater showing ocean worlds on a desert planet in the prologue of Han Solo's Revenge. It may be a lighthearted, comical interlude, but it still manages to provide a genuinely tense action scene when the locals riot when Han stops playing the movie, as well as perhaps a bit of pathos with the realization of how unhappy they are with their planet's environment.
• New Jedi Order: Gilad Pellaeon's Badass Boast to Yuuzhan Vong Brrith Vorrik, after he defeats him at the Battle of Efsandia:
  You may win the occasional battle against us, Vorrik, but the Empire will always strike back.
• Frank Peretti, a Christian horror writer, is very adept at the use of Narm Charm. Apparently, he realizes that his plots are extremely outlandish, and in order to avoid Narm he cranks up the absurdity of his situations up to eleven and lets you know it's okay to laugh through witty prose, thereby leading to situations — such as a town erupting into terrifying/hilarious chaos around a false Messiah — that are bizarre, hilarious, and somehow, really, really terrifying. Unfortunately, this does not translate well into the film versions of his work.
• Little Women plots a course through saccharine characters, wildly extravagant and sentimental prose, Aesops (some of them rather questionable) in nearly every chapter... and comes out as a gripping romantic drama with a deserved place in the highest pantheon of American literature.
• Discussed with an internal example in Star Trek: Klingon Empire. The old animated show "Battlecruiser Vengeance" is this for many Klingons (and it's a nice wink to actual fans of Original Series Star Trek too). One particular episode presents the Klingon hero repelling a Federation boarding party. The episode was produced during the height of tensions between the empire and the Federation, and the party consists of ridiculous, inaccurate computer-generated images of Federation member races. Specifically, the Andorian is more green than blue and has overlong antennae, the Vulcan's ears are too pointed, the Tellarite looks more like an actual boar, the Betazoid has fully blacked-out eyes instead of simple dark irises, the Human has eyes too large and a mouth too small, the Trill has spots covering her entire body, and the Denobulan has misplaced ridges. In the minds of many "modern" fans, the inaccuracy just adds to the joy of it.
• Harry Potter: This trope can definitely apply to the ending of the 7th book; after all the crap that The Trio has been through, you can't help but feel happy that everything turned out okay (for the most part) in the end... unless you're a fanatic Shipper and the ending defied your OTP; in that case, the ending of the series was your worst nightmare come true.
  • "I'll join you when hell freezes over!" is one of the cheesiest cliches out there. But considering that this is Neville Longbottom saying it to Voldemort's face, and suddenly you don't feel like laughing anymore.
  • And the ever-famous, ever-badass, "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!" courtesy of Molly Weasley.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four. This conversation was used in the climax of the story. At first it seems to be a trivial discussion about counting fingers, but it's actually about a man being tortured into changing his perspective in order to see things that aren't there. Some might say it's worse than Room 101 itself.
  O'Brien: How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
  Winston: Four! Five! Four! Anything you like.
  • Room 101 itself works as an example. We've seen how lesser works have made the "your worst nightmare come to life" less scary than it should. Indeed, at first glance, the idea that, after months of the most devious psychological and physical torture known to man, the thing that breaks Winston is "give up your love, or get your face eaten by rats", still kinda sounds like something out of a Saw movie. But when you read it... it works, dammit.
• Thud! somehow manages to make the line "THAT! IS! NOT! MY! COW!" bad-ass.
• From Lord of the Flies, the line "Roger sharpened a stick at both ends" should, by all rights, be laughable (what, is he going to trip and fall on it or something?) In context, however, it's the sign of the boys' complete degeneration into unbridled savagery.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians practically ran on this. It's a modern reimagination of Classical Mythology where scenarios like Zeus wearing a suit, Poseidon preferring khaki shorts or Apollo driving a sun bus while making haikus are all real. And fans love it.
• Bluestar's encroaching mental illness in Warrior Cats. On the one hand, she's a fictional feral cat, so it's hard to cry for her. But on the other, she's an incredible leader and beloved friend who didn't deserve to live like that, dammit!
• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley's writing style can come across as pretty hackey and/or lazy, but it's kind of endearing. It works well to bring the reader into a world that is (especially for the time of writing) quite difficult to buy into.
• Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: When on paper, "The Dead Man's Brain" is a list of instructions for a simple game. But in the audiobook version, George S. Irving really hams it up by chuckling while listing what's needed for the game. Special mention goes to him flat-out giggling when listing spaghetti noodles for the worms in the game.
• The Irregular at Magic High School ends with a slapfight between grown men, and then the Official Couple run happily through a rain of cherry blossoms. However, this came after 32 books of angst, politicking, and clone slavery, so it sort of felt earned. Some fans argue that it was intentionally cheesy, the point of Tatsuya's Character Development being that he is Not So Above It All and almost as prone to being silly as any human being.