Wrong Genre Savvy / Webcomics

---

• Red Mage from 8-Bit Theater believes he's in a world that follows the rules of a tabletop RPG, and that he can cheat at it on a meta level (like surviving damage by "forgetting" to record it on his character sheet, or redistributing skill points by changing the character sheet). This is a world where the actual success of any given plan is almost invariably inverse to the sense it makes, and the amount to which Red Mage is Wrong Genre Savvy relies less on how correct he is and more on how funny it would be.
• Bogleech Comics did a series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) in which fans of Romero-style zombie movies go up against monsters that are similar to zombies, but not identical to them. It isn't pretty.
• In Chainmail Bikini, a D&D webcomic, the players see the new players' character fighting undead. They stand around and watch, thinking it's the scene where she impresses them with her power and they ask her to join their team. When she turns out to be losing the fight, they figure out that they've "picked the wrong cliched introduction" and that this is actually the one where they save her life and ask her to join their team.
  Ramgar: Hold up. I think this is the cliché introduction where we see the new character kick so much butt we ask them to come with us. It's a classic of the medium. Let her have her moment of glory.
  Lucretia: Will you imbeciles get over here and help? I'm inundated with undead!
  Sapphire: Looks like this is the classic "we rescue someone and THEY ask to join US" intro.
  Ramgar: Sorry, I wasn't sure which cliché we are supposed to be doing!
  Lucretia: Expediency over verbosity, gentlemen!
• The rather odd Heroic Fantasy-High School RPG Class of Heroes has as part of its official website a brief webcomic about a rather unobservant teenaged boy who plays the game thinking it's a Dating Sim.
• Darths & Droids:
  • In the fourth arc, a new player named Corey was introduced in the role of Luke. He keeps treating the game as if it was a video game rather than a tabletop game. For example, when treated with exposition about the plotline thus far, he responds, "Can I replay this cutscene later?" He soon grows out of this.
  • Corey falls for a form of it when he reaches Dagobah in the The Empire Strikes Back arc. He goes in with no active sensors to avoid detection by the native population (for security reasons, assuming they're all Imperials). This leads to him faceplanting in a swamp because he couldn't tell what kind of planet he was actually landing on (he thought the fog was smog).
• In this Dinosaur Comics strip, T-Rex attempted to re-create a scenario that always happened in cartoons, too bad he is actually in a webcomic that likes to play with tropes. It was even lampshaded in the end.
• Tiffany Winters in Eerie Cuties and Magick Chicks is a hereditary monster slayer and an obvious expy of Buffy Summers. Loves cardboard speeches. Her repeated attempts to stake the vampire co-protagonist Layla DeLaCroix invariably end with no staking and a lot of blushing. Layla doesn't even seem to notice that the girl who works in the clothes shop she visits and quickly becomes her best friend knows she's a vampire, let alone tried to attack her.
• Ensign Sue from Ensign Sue Must Die is quite firmly convinced that she is the Purity Sue protagonist of a Star Trek suefic. Unfortunately for her, she's actually the Parody Sue antagonist of a comic about how annoying such a character would realistically be. Her Wrong Genre Savvy about this often reaches I Reject Your Reality levels. She gets forcibly dragged back to reality in the sequel.
• Chris, a minor character in Errant Story, believes he's the hero of a Shōnen fight manga. He's wrong on both counts. Amazingly, he survives.
• The unfortunate torturee in this Exterminatus Now strip gets it half right. He's spot-on regarding the comic's goofy sense of humor, but makes the mistake of assuming that that implies an aversion to violence. Either that or he thought the Mobian Inquisition operated like a certain other Inquisition.
• In Freefall, Winston manages to invert this after Florence — a Bowman's Wolf — startles him when he opens the door to a knock during a hurricane... while he's watching a werewolf-movie marathon. Fortunately, while he realizes he just made the classic mistake of the horror-movie protagonist, he survives because he's in a science-fiction webcomic.
• In Girl Genius, when Gil shows Tarvek off Castle Wulfenbach while staying himself, Tarvek accuses him of having been inspired by a penny dreadful.
• Tucker of Girls with Slingshots learned from romance comedies that stalking and persistence were the best ways to get girls. Clarice tried to set him straight by assigning him stories with more stable romances, but couldn't think of any.
• At one point in Goblins, Minmax and his party encounter a rival party of zombie adventurers, and Minmax lists a number of common zombie tropes, including the fact that they shouldn't be able to move faster than a slow shamble. When the zombies subvert this trope by charging towards him at running speed, he accuses them of being "cheater zombies".
• In Grrl Power, normally Genre Savvy Sydney doesn't know where the fourth wall is.
• Manly Guys Doing Manly Things: After all the manly guys are infected with Nomura syndrome, Commander Badass decides to chase after GACKT and defeat him in hand-to-hand combat in order to reverse the virus, since as an Action Hero guy, that sort of response should fix his problem. As it turns out, Gackt's death doesn't magically get rid of the virus. The Commander admits in hindsight how dumb he was to assume it would.
• The title character of Mechagical Girl Lisa ANT sees the events of her story as following the tropes of magical girls anime... including when they don't.
• MegaTokyo:
  • Poor Piro thinks romance works like either a Japanese Dating Sim or a Shoujo manga, and constantly beats himself up for not being able to live up to the kind of situations he figures romance should entail. It's hard not to laugh when he whines about how he should be an "expert" at the subject considering all the games and manga he's played and read, totally without irony.
  • Largo on the other hand defines himself by Action/Adventure Tropes, playing the hotblooded action hero in totally inappropriate situations. Ironically, his girlfriend actually finds herself oddly attracted to this, despite or possibly due to her own deep-seated cynicism.
  • When Yuki is awakened as a Magical Girl, she instinctively reacts by seeking out cute, impractical uniforms and acting as if she were the main character in a series of that genre. She gets this drummed out of her when the "impractical" part makes itself apparent.
  • Thankfully, the second thing she does is meet Largo, who immediately dresses her in something resembling tactical gear. Also a wonderful example of how Largo is both Genre Savvy and Wrong Genre Savvy at the same time.
  • The setting in MegaTokyo runs in multiple, overlapping genres at a time, and most characters have a Weirdness Censor for genres that don't overlap with their own. (Piro/Largo is only the most flagrant divide.) Most moments of Wrong Genre Savvy happen when a character wanders into an element of someone else's story or when the fantastic fails and Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs.
• Modest Medusa: Marah, based on her experience with videogame and RPG depictions of vaguely medieval fantasy kingdoms, assumes that copper coins are the currency of Yeld. So she brings a bag of pennies, and is surprised when no one will accept them as payment.
• The Non-Adventures of Wonderella: Wonderella after finding a Djinn, here.
• Eri-Chan from Okashina Okashi. She views her group and every world they end up in through Shojo-colored glasses.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Tsukiko thinks she's theinvoked Mary Sue heroine of a Twilight-style supernatural romance, while the comic is a D&D-inspired high fantasy that loves subverting the tropes of the genre. She believes that the dead are better than the living because she thinks the living are all bastards and the dead are their exact opposites. She thinks that Xykon is an Edward Cullen-style paranormal romantic hero just waiting for the perfect girl (i.e. her) to "heal" him and she thinks that Redcloak is an ineffective spineless wimp who is just going to passively let her get away with absolutely everything including outright informing Xykon of Redcloak's treachery. Redcloak brutally proves her wrong and Xykon doesn't really give a damn about her — he can't even remember her name.
  • Tarquin knows perfectly well what genre he's in — high fantasy — and at first glance seems to be even more Genre Savvy than Elan. But as the story goes on, it becomes clear that he has one major flaw: His ego is such that he believes the story is all about him. He believes that he's the Big Bad and his son Elan is the hero destined to overthrow him. In reality, he's just an Arc Villain, and Elan is the Plucky Comic Relief of his party. Elan eventually shows him Cruel Mercy by denying him the climactic confrontation he was hoping for, instead letting him fall off the airship and be stranded in the desert. The book commentary also points out another flaw of his: He's too dedicated to the Strictly Formula he's used to (for example, he assumes that being his son and the only white male human of the group makes Elan the leader), and hasn't caught on that the comic, and the genre of high fantasy itself, has evolved and can be quite subversive in its adherence to old tropes on occasion.
    Tarquin: Elan! This arc isn't over yet! Where's the growth? You didn't lose anything! Nothing has changed! YOU GET BACK HERE AND GIVE THIS PLOTLINE A SATISFYING RESOLUTION THIS INSTANT!! ELAN! ELAN, THERE'S NO SENSE OF CLOSURE! I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT! THIS IS A TERRIBLE ENDING!!!
• Mrs. Blake of Penny Blackfeather persistently tries to set Penny up with a man Penny unambiguously hates.
  Mrs. Blake: If novels have taught me anything it is that couples that argue will eventually fall head over heels in love and have dozens of babies. La!
• In Platinum Grit, Jack Leaderboard was a private eye who thought and acted like the protagonist in a hardboiled detective story, going undercover as a removalist to crack a case. He thought he was uncovering a sordid tale of black magic and human sacrifice featuring Nils as seductive Femme Fatale and Jeremy as a cold-blooded murderer with a perfect poker face. Nobody else even noticed his existence.
• The webcomic Sire has a force of fate known as The Binding which forces characters to stick to the narratives and morals of their Sire/Dame's story. The only way to survive is to learn lessons and not get caught in the same traps of their forbears. However, those who learn the wrong lessons or ignore them completely? They receive a tragic ending.
• Sluggy Freelance has exaggerated this, with characters thinking and arguing as if highly unrealistic conventions of various genres should apply to their situation:
  • In "The Storm Breaker Saga", Torg tries to command a medieval army based on his experience of computer wargames:
    Torg: All right, we'll need some of the townsfolk to chop down trees, mine for gold, and set up solar collectors in case we need to build more troops. Do we have any dragons yet?
  • In the chapter "Paradise", story "Displacement", Torg becomes convinced he's inside a Video Game. In all fairness, he did have a mild concussion at the time.
  • In this strip from "Sluggy of the Living Freelance", Zoe gives General Mayhem a What the Hell, Hero? speech for wanting to use the undead as soldiers, unaware of what kind of movie the arc is parodying, and thus having a more idealistic view of the military.
    Zoe: I can't believe you hired scientists to raise the dead to be soldiers! I thought the military was made up of brave people. Where is your honor?
    General Mayhem: Sorry, miss. You have to understand, there are basically two divisions in the collective we call "the military." There is the heroic military, as represented in most of your early war movies, and the conspiratorial military (filled with subterfuge and deception) as represented in bad sci-fi films and The X-Files.
• An odd example that may be both a subversion and a straight example occurs here. Lucy believes that she and the rest of the group are in a horror movie plot, which the current arc certainly resembles. This worries her because, due to the tropes associated with horror movies, none of them will survive. However, she isn't in a horror movie; she's in a webcomic. Given that the webcomic is Something*Positive, her chances of survival might be even worse.
  • Shortly afterward Wil Wheaton gets his arm cut off because one of the survivors is acting like it's a zombie movie, and thinks a bite means infection... the catgirls don't work like that. Given the way the guy cuddles and licks the severed arm at the end of the storyline, it's likely he was just making up an excuse.
• Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki: "Repeat after me: Despite what magical girl anime has taught me, the monster does not go down with the first strike."
• In Storm, Arche interprets the world in terms of the romantic adventures she's read. She thinks Eolill is a Knight in Shining Armor and wants to go on quests. Unfortunately, it's not that kind of world.
• Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic: Princess Goldie thinks she's in a fairy tale styled like a classic Disney movie, rather than a high fantasy setting based on Dungeons & Dragons. As such, she comes to believe that the castle she wandered into was cursed by a witch, that the handsome castle lord was turned into an ogre and his servants into goblins, and that the curse will be broken if she teaches him true love. Nope, the ogre and goblins are genuine, and they're planning to eat her.

---